THE Lessons From Auschwitz programme is responsible for sending thousands of British school pupils to the Auschwitz death camps every year, so they can experience the horrors of the Holocaust first-hand.

The scheme, funded by the Department for Education, is run by the Holocaust Educational Trust (HET), who charter flights for the day trips.

This year they once again invited pupils from Cirencester College and extended the invite to us at the Standard.

Reporter Callum Chaplin reflected on the day.

“THERE is no correct way to react to what you’re going to see today.”

Those were the words of Tom Jackson, an education officer from the Lessons from Auschwitz programme, shortly before we touched down on a grey and rainy day in Krakow, the dark skies providing a fitting backdrop.

We boarded our buses and headed first to Oświęcim, the town which sits in the unfortunate shadow of the death camps. The HET ‘educators’, who organised our day, took us to a wet, muddy, featureless patch of grass near a large church in the town centre. The unassuming site was where the Oświęcim’s great Synagogue once stood. We were shown pictures of crowds attending prayer at that very site before the Nazis invaded, providing us with an important context to the day.

“You cannot appreciate the deaths until you are aware of the lives lived before,” our educator said.

“Most visitors to Auschwitz don’t come here before viewing the death camps, but I think it is important to get an idea of the lives once lived.”

Our next coach trip was short and we soon got our first sight of one of the infamous concentration camp appeared between some trees.

Auschwitz is the collective name for three sites of the Holocaust, all a few miles of each other. Auschwitz I, the concentration camp part of the three, was our first stop.

Our guide was a small Polish lady, with an infinite knowledge of the camps. Before starting the tour, she warned us of bumpy ground, saying it has been left uneven and untouched since the Nazis were forced out of the site towards the end of the war.

It took some time to fully appreciate that you were walking on the very ground where the atrocities you’d learned about in school took place. There was a cold, ruthless order to the layout of the place. Blocks were spaced evenly, and inside each of them, a different part of the story of the Holocaust lay waiting for us. Our guide whispered into a lapel microphone, linked to headsets we were given, which kept a deathly calm around the camp, unspoiled by loud voices. She took us between each block, telling us about the horrific lives the prisoners led.

We were met in one courtyard by a large concrete block against a brick perimeter wall, the site where some prisoners had been lined up and shot for disobedience. The holes in the concrete providing a stinging reminder of where we were.

The facts of what went on in the camp, which felt so distant when taught from a textbook, were driven home as we took in each of the carefully designed displays in each block. Our guide made an effort to tell the personal stories of those who had suffered there.

One display that drove home the message, better than perhaps any other, was set in the only room at the camp where photographs were not allowed. As we turned the corner, intrigued to know what could illicit such a ban, we were met with an impossibly large pile of human hair. Being able to see part of the remains of the people we had been hearing about took the whole experience into another context. The children walked around the room, moved with an air of disbelieve, as the power of the display was etched on their faces.

Having toured the first Auschwitz camp, we moved to Auschwitz II, known as Birkenau, the extermination camp. This, much larger complex, is the site of the famous railway track running under the ominous gateway.

Rain was driving down by this point in the day, which added to the grimness of our surroundings. The size of this second camp was what stuck with me. It was killing on an industrial scale. Many of the blocks had been destroyed, leaving a grid of building outlines that offered a shocking perspective of the scale of Birkenau.

As we walked around, we were shown pictures by our guide of moments that had taken place and where. We stood in the spot families had been bungled of crammed train carriages before facing the ‘selection’ process. This was where they would be met by a guard who make a two-second decision of whether they were fit enough to work as a prisoner, or whether they would be killed. For women, children and old men, this was the end of the line. Standing at the site where millions of fates had been decided was a humbling experience.

To conclude the day we gathered in a building where new arrivals at the camp were registered, stripped and washed. Pupils read accounts of the Holocaust from survivors and a Rabbi, who had joined us and spoken throughout the day, gave a traditional Jewish service and prayer. The moving commemoration of the lives lost had a backdrop of photos of Holocaust victims, taken before their imprisonment, reminding us of the lives once lived. The hundred or so children who had been up since 5am and soaked through, sat respectfully and hang off his every word.

Rabbi Garson’s conclusion stuck with me.

“When you get home, you will tell your parents that you went to Auschwitz,” he said.

“But you didn’t.

“You went to Auschwitz in 2017. None of us can ever know what even one second was like in this place.”

We all returned to our coaches, I believe, fundamentally changed. Everyone knows how horrific the Holocaust was, but it had felt incredibly distant until the visit. The HET team of educators have to be praised for bringing to life the darkest part of human history. They are passionate immensely proud of what they do. They feel they are not only educating children about the Holocaust, but more importantly they are educating them about what lessons can be learned from it, and how to be a better person as a result. By encouraging discussion throughout the day, the HET forced children to challenge their own preconceptions of what racism was and how it can be turned into something as disturbing as the Holocaust, with relative ease.

Their work is invaluable, now more than ever.