Death and Burial
Despite suggestions of senility in later life, Princess Andrew remained lucid but physically frail. She died at Buckingham Palace on 5 December 1969. She left no possessions, having given everything away. Initially her remains were placed in the Royal Crypt in St George's Chapel at Windsor Castle, but before she died she had expressed her wish to be buried at the Convent of Saint Mary Magdalene in Gethsemane on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem (near to her aunt Grand Duchess Elizabeth Fyodorovna, a Russian Orthodox saint). When her daughter, Princess George of Hanover, complained that it would be too far away for them to visit her grave, Princess Andrew jested, "Nonsense, there's a perfectly good bus service!" Her wish was realized on 3 August 1988 when her remains were transferred to her final resting place in a crypt below the church.
On 31 October 1994, Princess Andrew's two surviving children, the Duke of Edinburgh and Princess George of Hanover, went to Yad Vashem (the Holocaust Memorial) in Jerusalem to witness a ceremony honouring her as "Righteous among the Nations" for having hidden the Cohens in her house in Athens during the Second World War. Prince Philip said of his mother's sheltering of persecuted Jews, "I suspect that it never occurred to her that her action was in any way special. She was a person with a deep religious faith, and she would have considered it to be a perfectly natural human reaction to fellow beings in distress." In 2010, the Princess was posthumously named a Hero of the Holocaust by the British Government.
Read more about this topic: Princess Alice Of Battenberg
Famous quotes containing the words death and/or burial:
“Death does determine life.... Once life is finished it acquires a sense; up to that point it has not got a sense; its sense is suspended and therefore ambiguous. However, to be sincere I must add that for me death is important only if it is not justified and rationalized by reason. For me death is the maximum of epicness and death.”
—Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922–1975)
“I heard the bell tolled on thy burial day,
I saw the hearse that bore thee slow away,
And, turning from my nursery window, drew
A long, long sigh, and wept a last adieu!”
—William Cowper (1731–1800)