THIS year is the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Second World War concentration camp, Auschwitz. Reporter Brendan McFadden joined pupils from Malmesbury School on a visit to the place where the Nazis murdered more than a million people.

In 1940, as the Nazis rampaged across Europe, they established a concentration camp in Oswiecim – or as the Germans called it, Auschwitz – in German-occupied Poland, to imprison natives arrested after the invasion of 1939.

Soon the camp was extended and used to murder an estimated 1.1 million people, made up of Jews and anyone that did not fit into Adolf Hitler’s idea of a perfect race.

It was not until January 27, 1945 that the mass extermination stopped at Auschwitz, as the Allies descended on the camp, overthrew the Nazis and freed the prisoners.

Shauna Hart and Kieran Tillotson, two Year 12 history students at Malmesbury School, were chosen to attend a visit to Auschwitz organised by the Holocaust Educational Trust, and I joined them to share the experience of seeing the most notorious death camp first-hand.

Our first stop of the day was the Jewish cemetery, where hundreds who were murdered during the war are buried, and then it was on to the original Auschwitz camp.

Standing at the entrance, I couldn’t help but notice what a beautiful day it was, with the sun beating down and a crystal blue sky, and it felt absurd to enjoy the weather knowing what atrocities had been committed in this place.

During the tour we explored barracks which have now been transformed into a museum which is truly chilling.

There are glass cases full of tons of hair and personal objects taken from the murdered prisoners, and you are able to walk into a gas chamber and imagine what it must have felt like to be moments away from death.

This leaves you in shock, unable to fathom how so many people could murder so many others.

Later we visited Auschwitz II, also known as Birkenau, where the majority of the prisoners at the camp were murdered.

Here we we shown inside dilapidated barracks and a watchtower used by the German guards. We also followed the steps their victims took as they got off the train and walked into the camp, which start at a ramp and end at a gas chamber.

After these harrowing sights, we attended a candlelit remembrance ceremony where teenagers read poems written by prisoners of the camp and a rabbi spoke to the youngsters about the difference they can make by spreading the word about the Holocaust so that something so terrible never happens again.

After we left the camp, Kieran and Shauna, who live on the same street in Hullavington, told me just how much of an imprint Auschwitz had left on them.

Kieran, 18, said: “You think you know how hard-hitting it is going to be but when you get there it is incomprehensible. It is one of the toughest things I have done, mentally.”

The teenagers will now become ambassadors for the Trust, which will involve them raising awareness of the Holocaust, and both said their experience at Auschwitz had left them determined to spread the word.

Shauna, 16, said: “Some of the buildings have fallen apart which makes me think about the importance of going now and learning all we can, to stop this becoming just another part of history that is forgotten. No matter what you learn at GCSE and A Level it is nothing like being there yourself.” For Kieran and Shauna, the experience is one which will stay with them forever – both as a haunting memory and an inspiration to prevent such a travesty happening again.

See het.org.uk for more.