Pupils from across the Thames Valley and the Chilterns witnessed the horrors of the past at Nazi concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz-Birkenau

We’re inundated with information throughout our education about the Holocaust, the atrocities that are beyond our comprehension, history text books littered with horrendous images we’d like to erase from our memories, documentaries designed to leave a long-lasting impression on our consciousness, yet none of this prepares you for the horrors that await you at Auschwitz.

It almost sounds insincere to say, but it makes you realise how palpable our own mortality is. With the flippant point of a finger, innocent women and children stepping off the train at Birkenau were sent to their deaths, a half-hearted gesture void of emotion that with it decided another human being’s fate, all in the name of a distorted warped view of ‘purity’, costing six million Jews their lives.

Innocent victims wrenched from their homes, their families, their lives, stripped of any sense of normality. Dehumanised so that they no longer resembled their former selves, stripped on arrival, their clothes searched for valuables, their items ransacked, every hair on their body shaved and shipped to Germany to be used as fabric, branded by the Nazis with numbers stamped on to their skin like cattle.

The death toll at Nazi concentration and death camp Auschwitz is unfathomable.

An estimated one million Jews were murdered, alongside around 70,000 Poles, 21,000 Sinti and Roma, 15,000 Soviet POWs and 12,000 victims of other ethnic groups.

A staggering six million Jews – men, women and children – perished during the Holocaust, the first and only time so far in history that a race has been systemically wiped out. It is a number that beggars belief, a number that the mind just can’t digest.

There were six death camps in total, all of them on German-occupied Polish territory. The main purpose of four of these camps, Chelmno, Treblinka, Sobibór and Belzec was murder and few survived. The two other death camps, Auschwitz-Birkenau and Majdanek also functioned as work camps – the Nazis routinely selecting those they could exploit physically and eradicating the weak.

Arriving at the main camp Auschwitz I, my eyes were instantly drawn to the image perhaps most synonymous with the Holocaust – the words ‘Arbeit macht frei’, which translates as 'Work sets you free', emblazoned over the camp’s entrance, hanging over us in the same way the feeling of death lingers in the air.

Arbeit macht frei, was a falsehood the Nazis fabricated to deceive their prisoners.

The entrance to concentration camp Auschwitz 1.

Walking round in subdued silence, the buildings’ neat uniformity, evenly laid out and perfectly parallel to one another, hid a shuddering reality. Despite the relatively mild temperature, I found myself shivering.

Nothing quite prepares you for what lies behind those walls. Bursting full at the seams with the belongings of those innocent victims who trustingly thought they were coming to a better life; pots and pans, a never-ending pile of rusty glasses, combs, hair brushes, endless creams and grooming tools and a room heaving with 80,000 shoes – only a small fraction obtained throughout the Nazis’ persecution, which hammers home the enormity of the massacre.

A total of 80,000 shoes on display at Auschwitz 1.

What’s touching is among all these remnants is a common theme, these people seeking prosperity, affluence and happiness who were cruelly tricked and betrayed, were just the same as us, their possessions clearly their best, a telltale sign that they, like us, took pride in their appearance.

The victims' smiling photographs adorn a huge wall in the central sauna at Birkenau – where the inmates were stripped naked and their clothes disinfected in steam chambers.

Elsewhere at the camp, poisonous gas Zyklon B – a cyanide-based pesticide was used effectively to murder millions in gas chambers.

Surprisingly and unnervingly, Oświęcim, the small town, named Auschwitz by the Nazis, around which the camps are situated, is still habited, the scars of the Holocaust still running deep. 

But what stayed with me the most was the defiance in the face of such atrocity.

The tales we were told throughout the day by Rabbi Barry Marcus and our educators, who led the trip organised by the Holocaust Education Trust, they reminded us of many Jews’ unwavering devotion to their faith, those who refused to give in.

An old man from Oświęcim, who returned to his hometown after the Second World War alongside his brother and sister, who eventually fled and moved elsewhere while he remained until his death, a mute, unable to communicate with the villagers because of the trauma he had experienced. 

Every morning and night, he would routinely open and close the doors of the synagogue, despite there not being a single Jew left and his neighbours would leave him bowls of food and water outside like an animal. 

The women who painted pictures on the walls at Birkenau of children with toys and a schoolmaster. The Jews beaten to death for refusing to give up their tallit, a traditional Jewish prayer shawl. 

Before the outbreak of the Second World War there were more than three million Jews living in Poland.

Now there are less than 5,000.

To pay tribute to each individual who perished at Auschwitz-Birkenau – an estimated one million of them – with a minute’s silence, our 200-strong group would have had to have been silent for two years.

And that doesn’t even cover the other five million. 

The trip, organised by the Holocaust Education Trust, was led by Rabbi Barry Marcus and a team of educators.

After he sung the traditional Jewish funeral prayer El malei rachamim, he said: "Man has conquered every distance imaginable.

"We’ve been to the moon, yet the one distance we still haven’t conquered, is the distance between ourselves."

Rabbi Barry Marcus playing the shofar, a traditional Jewish horn, at the end of a prayer ceremony.

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Educator Sam Hunt, who is also deputy head teacher at Sandhurst School, spoke of her experiences of Auschwitz.

I have been volunteering as an educator on the Holocaust Educational Trust’s Lessons from Auschwitz course for many years and it is a privilege to be involved in this vital project. Even though I have visited Auschwitz Birkenau many times, the emotional impact of this horrendous place never diminishes. Visiting Auschwitz challenges my beliefs about what it means to be human.  It has made me realise that it is just not acceptable for me and every citizen to remain a bystander when confronted with the oppression and suffering of our fellow human beings. Auschwitz challenges me, and every visitor to this place, to be an active upstander and do whatever is in my power to fight for the human rights of those who do not enjoy the freedoms and safety we enjoy. Auschwitz has taught me that I must be the change that I want to see in the world.

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Our Auschwitz Trip, by JJ Hine and Daniella Charles, sixth form pupils at Denefield School in Tilehurst.

Before going to Auschwitz as cliché as it sounds we didn’t know what to expect. Even though we had researched beforehand, we still emotionally could not prepare ourselves for what we were going to experience and see. Undoubtedly, the most shocking thing that we saw the entire trip was the wall of human hair displayed in Auschwitz I. It really brought home the fact that these were real human beings and everyone had a unique story. Auschwitz-Birkenau is exactly what we envisaged a concentration camp to be like; unnerving, eerie and uncomfortable. The sheer scale of it was difficult to comprehend as this was made with the purpose to purely murder human beings.

"It really put life into perspective and made me realise everything I take for granted. How one man could cause such social destruction was and still is implausible." – JJ Hine.

"The trip was life-changing, and made me appreciate the small things so much more. It is still impossible to imagine the sheer scale of the massacre, and the fact that humans were harming humans." – Daniella Charles.

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