Israel honours Bonham Carter's grandfather

Israel’s Holocaust memorial has posthumously recognised a prominent Spanish diplomat – who was the grandfather of the Oscar-nominated British actress Helena Bonham Carter – for his role in saving hundreds of Jews during the Second World War.

In a ceremony today, Yad Vashem has named Eduardo Propper de Callejon a “Righteous Among the Nations,” the highest honour granted to non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust.

As German troops marched into France in the summer of 1940, Mr Propper de Callejon, then first secretary in the Spanish embassy in Paris, stamped and signed passports almost non-stop for four days to allow refugees to escape to Spain, and from there to the relative safety of Portugal.

:: A handful of Holocaust survivors – including some saved by German industrialist Oskar Schindler – will mark the 65th anniversary of the Nazi’s destruction of the Jewish ghetto in Krakow, Poland.

Some 16,000 Jews were forcibly removed from the city in 1943, with most taken to labour and concentration camps. Another 2,000 were killed.

Schindler, the subject of a 1993 Oscar-winning film by Steven Spielberg, saved about 1,000 of them.

Sixty of those people are still alive and organisers said that about a dozen plan to attend a remembrance ceremony this weekend.