If one wants to generate antisemitism in England, a cowardly attack on the Royal Family is not a bad idea...

RINCESS Margaret strode out of the theater. She had barely managed to sit through the opening scenes of Schindler's List. She began squirming as soon as she saw the Jewish prayer candles burn down, leaving only wisps of smoke to evoke the ashes that would follow. She crinkled her nose at the sight of the captive Jewish jeweler being tossed a handful of human teeth to mine for fillings. As the nightmare unfolded, she stiffened in her seat.

On screen, the streets filled with screaming Jewish prisoners, brutal Nazi soldiers, and snarling police dogs quickly emptied, except for the scattered suitcases of those Jews who had just been hauled off to the death camps. At that point the Princess bolted out of her seat.

"I'm leaving," she said. "I refuse to sit here another minute." Her friends were aghast but immediately deferred to her displeasure. They left their seats and accompanied Her Royal Highness back to her servants in Kensington Palace.

"I don't want to hear another word about Jews or the Holocaust," said the Queen's sister. "Not one more word. I heard enough during the war. I never want to hear about it again. Ever."

Margaret's friends later wondered why, feeling as she did, she had suggested going to the movie in the first place. She had to know that Schindler's List would depict the horrors of genocide. What they didn't understand was that the Princess had read reviews of the movie and been taken with the portrait of the good German, Oskar Schindler, who had come to reap the spoils of war and ended up as a selfless hero who saved countless lives. That was the story she wanted to see enacted on screen.

For more than sixty years Margaret Rose had been a princess of the royal House of Windsor, reared to renounce her German roots, to deny the mix of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha blood that coursed through her veins, to repudiate the lineage of Wurttemburgs [sic] and Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glucksburgs that haunted her ancestors.

She was not disturbed by searing childhood memories of Britain during the Blitz. When war broke out in 1939, she was nine years old. At sixty-four the Princess rarely reflected on the shattering bombs, the blackouts, or the deprivation that she felt she and her older sister, the Queen, endured to serve as public examples for others who were suffering much more. She no longer complained as much as she once did about being deprived of a normal childhood.

During those years, her royal image had inspired a thirteen-year-old Jewish girl in Amsterdam who was hiding from the Nazis. To remind herself of a better world, Anne Frank had pasted pictures of Princess Margaret Rose, and her sister, Princess Elizabeth, on the wall of the attic where she hid with her family for two years. But then the family was betrayed to the Gestapo and herded off in windowless boxcars on the train bound for the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Anne died there one month before Europe was liberated. When the Anne Frank House was opened to the public after the war, the pictures of Britain's little Princesses, yellowed with age, still smiled from the wall.

Princess Margaret was proud of her performance during the war and that of her earnest sister and her gallant parents, who had made sure that they presented the world with an image of royalty at its finest.

What Princess Margaret resented about Schindler's List and "those other tiresome movies about the Holocaust" was the lingering stench of Germany that continued to hang over her family. Their secrets of alcoholism, drug addiction, epilepsy, insanity, homosexuality, bisexuality, adultery, infidelity, and illegitimacy paled alongside their relationship with the Third Reich. Those secrets, documented by captured German war records and family diaries, letters, photographs, and memoranda, lay buried in the locked vaults of the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle, safe from the prying eyes of scholars and historians. Few people remembered that Margaret's mother and father had been disinclined to oppose Hitler and preferred Chamberlain over Churchill as Prime Minister. Most people bad forgotten that the Princess's favorite uncle had embraced Nazi Germany as Europe's savior and her princeling cousin had run a concentration camp, for which he later stood trial as a war criminal. Margaret Rose remembered but knew that these facts--some secret, some sinister--were best left buried.

Yet the Princess was not averse to expressing her opinions, which sounded astoundingly ignorant coming from a woman who professed to read as much as she did. Despite her public participation in the arts and her devotion to ballet and theater, Margaret Rose remained closed-minded to the world beyond her privileged view. She made no apologies for her prejudices. In a discussion of India she said she hated "those little brown people." Shortly after the IRA assassination of her cousin Lord Louis Mountbatten, she denounced the Irish. "They're pigs--all pigs," she told the Irish American mayor of Chicago while visiting the city. When the Princess was introduced to the respected columnist Ann Landers, Margaret looked at her closely. "Are you a Jew?" she asked. "Are you a Jew?" The columnist said she was, and the Princess, no longer interested, moved on. She dismissed Dr. Cheddi Jagan, the President of Guyana, as loathsome. "He's everything I despise," she said. "He's black; he's married to a Jew; and furthermore, she's American."

After walking out of Schindler's List , which she described as a tedious film about Jews," she advised her butler not to waste his money on the Academy Award-winning film.

"A movie like Schindler's List just incites morbid curiosity," the Princess said when her butler served her breakfast the next morning. "I couldn't stand it. It was so thoroughly unpleasant and disgusting that I had to get up and leave."

The butler listened patiently, as always. Then he bowed his head and returned to the pantry. Later he repeated the conversation to an American, who asked if he were not offended by Princess Margaret's remarks. He seemed puzzled by the American's question.

"Oh my, no. You don't understand. The Princess is royalty. Royalty," he said, pronouncing the word with reverence. "The Princess belongs to the House of Windsor--the most important royal house in the world. She's the daughter of a king and the sister of a queen. That's as exalted as you can possibly be on this earth."

"Do you mean to suggest that royalty, especially British royalty, can do no wrong? That just because she's a princess, she's immune to criticism?"

"She is royalty," repeated the butler.

"And therefore above reproach?"

"Royalty is royalty," he said. "Never to be questioned."