To ensure that what happened is never forgotten and to learn from what it taught us, the Holocaust Educational Trust launched a Lessons from Auschwitz project, which takes students on a day trip to Poland to see the former Nazi concentration camps themselves.

Derbyshire Times reporter Helen Beighton accompanied students from north Derbyshire on a day trip to Auschwitz-Birkenau and, here, recounts her experience...


As we passed through the infamous gates at the entrance of the Auschwitz I concentration camp and gazed up at the camp's motto 'Arbeit Macht Frei' – Work Makes You Free – our Polish tour guide, Halina, explained that every square-metre of the museum we were entering was a cemetery.

It was at this point I realised that, although I thought I knew about the Holocaust, I had not really understood its true horror.

Of course, the statistics spoke for themselves – between 1940 and 1945 between 1.1m and 1.5m people were killed at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the majority of them Jews.

But visiting the actual site of the atrocities somehow made it more real – suddenly the numbers became more meaningful as the real people and real stories of human suffering emerge.

Walking round the camp's ordered brick barracks there were several images that are now forever ingrained on my mind and which will flash before me whenever anybody again speaks to me about Auschwitz.

The rows and rows of photographs of the faces of prisoners on the walls; the huge piles of men's, women's and children's shoes removed by the prisoners before they were led to the gas chambers; the stacks of suitcases that held the treasured possessions of people arriving at the camps and the mountain of human hair shaved from the heads of actual people, were among the images that will always haunt me.

The effect on the whole group of the unbelievable cruelty of life in the camp was marked.

If school trips are usually characterised by over-excited chattering and exuberant behaviour, the atmosphere among the young people on this visit was unprecedented as we all followed the guide – solemnly, deep in thought and in almost complete silence.

From the concentration camp we made the 3km journey to the Birkenau death camp, also known as Auschwitz II.

The camp, which stretched almost as far as I could see, was bordered by imposing barbed wire fences on all sides, punctuated by spiky wooden watch towers, while down the middle lay the one-way railway track that brought prisoners to the camp.

Our guide told us that by the end of the war the camp could hold approximately 100,000 prisoners who were kept in conditions so bad you could hardly imagine them.

We were taken round some of the wooden quarantine huts which were originally built as stables for 52 horses but were crammed with around 400 prisoners who slept several men to a bunk. Disease and lice were rife.

And as if conditions weren't bad enough, the washrooms were even worse.
Up to 2,000 prisoners shared a toilet shed which had "facilities" – which amounted to just holes – to be used by 120 people at a time.

Living in the modern world, obsessed with health and hygiene, the stench and conditions that this would have created are unimaginable.

And although the cold March winds and snow showers that were blowing outside hinted at the harsh conditions the prisoners were forced to work in, I could barely believe that emptying the troughs which collected the excrement was considered a 'desirable' job amongst prisoners because it meant that they were inside, away from the elements.

One of the most disturbing things that I learnt on the visit was the cold, mechanised way that the Nazis decided the fates of the Jews and the total lack of humanity they showed.

As I stood on the very spot where the prisoners would have alighted from the overcrowded cattle carts in which they were transported to Auschwitz, I tried to imagine how they must have felt.

Families were forever separated at the side of these railway tracks as SS doctors, without so much as a flicker of emotion, divided the prisoners into those fit for labour, those selected for medical experimentation and those who would be put to immediate death in the gas chambers.

Up to 75 per cent of prisoners were executed upon arrival, with each gas chamber built to kill 2,000 people in half an hour.

I have no idea how people must have felt when they finally realised that they were never going to start the new life promised to them by the Nazis and that the shower rooms they were sent to under the pretext of being cleaned were, instead, death factories, pumping out poisonous gas that would kill them all in a matter of minutes.

My visit to Auschwitz, though brief, will have long-lasting effects for me and for each of the students whom I accompanied.

I spoke to two Chesterfield College students about how they felt about the experience once we had returned to the warmth of the airport, ready to fly home.

Ben Mapletoft (16) said that the part that he would remember most was the dehumanising process the prisoners went through as they were cleaned in the sauna in preparation for hard labour.

"Going round the site was more like looking at a real life photograph," he said. "It's good to see the specific details and it has given me a better understanding of how things went on there from start to finish."

Classmate Kelly Wallhead (16), who had relatives who were sent to Auschwitz, said the whole experience was quite emotional.

"I found it very interesting," she said. "The atmosphere of the place, how quiet it was and to see how big it was.

"It felt quite personal with the pictures and it surprised me how some of the prisoners had a positive view of things to get them through it."