The Prince of Wales has spoken movingly about the role his grandmother played in saving the lives of a Jewish family as he met Holocaust survivors in Austria.

The last day of Charles and Camilla’s European tour has been overshadowed by claims the Prince’s use of the official Government plane for his trip forced the Prime Minister to take a costly charter flight for a Middle East visit this week.

Charles meets a Holocaust survivor
The Prince of Wales speaks to holocaust survivor Viktor Klein (Arthur Edwards/PA)

Clarence House has defended the use of the plane, stressing that the heir to the throne’s nine-day tour was booked in advance of Theresa May’s trip.

Charles and Camilla spent the final day of the tour in Vienna and met British and Austrian survivors of Nazi persecution when they toured the city’s Jewish Museum.

The royal couple sat down with a group of very elderly men and women who shared their harrowing stories with them.

During the Second World War, Princess Alice, the Duke of Edinburgh’s mother and Charles’s grandmother, sheltered a number of Jewish people when Greece was occupied.

Charles meets refugees
The Prince of Wales meets refugees during his visit to The Jewish Museum in Vienna, (Arthur Edwards/PA)

Alice – who is buried in Israel – was recognised by Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial as a Righteous Among the Nations, and was posthumously awarded the British Government’s Hero of the Holocaust medal.

The Prince told the group: “My father’s mother took in a Jewish family during the war and hid them – she was amazing, my grandmother.

“She took them in during the Nazi occupation. She never told anybody, she didn’t tell her family for many years.

Camilla meets a Holocaust survivor
Auschwitz holocaust survivor Freddie Knoller speaks to the Duchess of Cornwall (Arthur Edwards/PA)

“She’s buried in Jerusalem.

“In September last year I went to the funeral of President (Shimon) Peres and finally got to see her grave.”

Holocaust survivor Gerda Frei, 80, said: “It is wonderful that the Prince and Duchess came here.

“The Prince was very well informed about the holocaust and it is very important that they came here,” she said after chatting to Charles at the Jewish Museum in Vienna.

Mrs Frei escaped Vienna with her mother and father to Hungary in 1938 and the group were hidden from the Nazis by a family in Budapest.

Later, Camilla was treated to a special performance by Vienna’s celebrated Spanish Riding School.

The duchess, a keen fan of equestrian sports, was shown around by Elisabeth Gurtler, the school’s director, and toured the stables before watching a special performance in her honour in the Winter Riding School.

The horses and riders put on a display of classical riding which left Camilla praising the performance.