In the week that Holocaust controversy hit the headlines at Oxford University, Trinity Mirror accompanied sixth formers from the county on a visit to the Nazi death camps at Auschwitz.
REBECCA EDWARDS reports on the hope that education will prevent another holocaust, as the students reflect on the experience in their own words.
One by one, British teenagers placed memorial candles along the railway track at Birkenau death camp - yards from the gas chambers where over one million people perished at the hands of the Nazis.
The silent tribute to holocaust victims was paid by students from Queens Park High School, Chester Catholic High School, The Hammond School, Neston High School and Bishops Bluecoat School, who joined schools across the North West on the Lessons From Auschwitz project last week.
The Holocaust Educational Trust has been running the project for seven years to give thousands of students first-hand experience of Holocaust history and encourage them to reflect on what can be done to prevent further genocide and prejudice.
Students attend seminars, meet a holocaust survivor and spend a day visiting the camps at Auschwitz-Birkenau, before producing presentations and reports for their peers back at school. The whistlestop one-day visit to Poland is emotionally and physically draining but has allowed more than 700 students to take part this year alone.
While in Poland the Cheshire students braved freezing November conditions to visit Auschwitz 1 - a pre-war army camp that became a labour camp for deported Jews from across Europe in 1940.
They toured exhibits that are housed in the camp buildings, accompanied by a trained tour guide and a Holocaust Educational Trust educator, who helped students put the enormous victim statistics into context.
Faced with exhibits of tonnes of hair, tens of thousands of shoes, false limbs and suitcases confiscated from thousands of deportees on arrival at the camp, educator Tom Jackson told his group: "Don't look at the pile, look at the individual shoes and think about who wore them and why they wore them to come here.
"The women wore their best shoes, brightly coloured with heels and good leather - you start to see individuals who weren't necessarily prepared for slave labour or walking long distances. They brought shoe polish, hair brushes, clothes brushes and razors - they were expecting a future where they would carry on doing those normal, everyday things."
Students also visited the neighbouring Birkenau death camp, which was built in 1941 as a purpose-built extermination centre.
There they saw the flimsy wooden sheds that each housed 1,000 inmates, and stood on the selection platform, where old, sick and infant deportees were separated from those able to work, then marched to death in the gas chambers.
Finally students assembled at the end of the Birkenau railway line, specifically built to transport Jews and Roma gypsies closer to their deaths in gas chambers thinly disguised as shower rooms.
In a poignant memorial service, project founder Rabbi Barry Marcus of London's Central Synagogue told the students: "If we were to stand in silence for one minute for every victim that died at Auschwitz-Birkenau, we would have to stand in silence for four years.
"This is equivalent to a 9/11 atrocity happening every day for a period of two years, or a 7/7 happening every hour for four years."
Sixth formers visit the Nazi death camps at Auschwitz as part of an holocaust education programme
Suffering and death are on television every day. As a whole we write off scenes of violence as non-reality, it is often so hard to comprehend and feel the effects of what they portray. At the ruins of Auschwitz you cannot escape them.
Walking through the death camp we were witness to the desolation and the bitter cold of a single bleak winter day. What really hit me was the emptiness. It's not what you see in Auschwitz Birkenau, it's what you don't see.
At the end of the visit we placed our candles on the railway track and walked along it to leave. In the dark and mist the tracks seemed to go on for ever.
Something you never forget in Auschwitz is the number of people murdered there - thought to be a million - and it hit me that if I was there 60 years ago, I would probably not have got out.
John Hatton - Bishop's Blue Coat CofE High School
Nothing can prepare you for walking onto sites such as those of Auschwitz 1 and Auschwitz-Birkenau.
In classrooms and textbooks, vast numbers of Holocaust victims are taught to students without them realising the scale of destruction the Nazis caused.
I knew that an estimated six million European Jews were exterminated throughout the Second World War, not to mention other victims such as Romanies, homosexuals and Soviet POWs. Being on a course such as The Lessons from Auschwitz Project and having seen victims' hair, shoes and suitcases in various exhibitions, it has enabled me to fully understand the large- scale attack on these peoples.
I found the day challenging, thought-provoking and harrowing. Fundamental questions such as "Who is actually to blame for the brutalities which occurred in the concentration camps?" were discussed and they clouded what I thought was a straightforward answer.
Perhaps the most shocking aspect of the Holocaust which became clear on the day, was the efficiency and calmness the Nazis conducted whilst selecting inmates to work or to be sent straight to the gas chambers.
With various readings throughout the trip and the memorial service by the crematoria, it was a highly moving day, highlighting many atrocities, which have completely changed my outlook on many issues.
Emily Collin - Queen's Park High School
The exhaustion from the early morning disappeared as the icy cold air numbed our bodies.
But we wore several layers, wrapped up like a fragile parcel, unlike the Auschwitz prisoners who would have only had one layer of clothing and a pair of leather shoes. The bitter cold, snow and thick fog made my experience all the more haunting, as if I was a prisoner trudging through the camp.
The darkness was engulfing, surrounding the group and blocking the magnitude of the camp from our sight.
Standing at the separation post, listening to a reading from our leader, the words 'men to the right, women to the left' pierced my mind. I could easily imagine the distressing events at this location; being separated from family and friends by soldiers and a final glimpse as they were marched into the fog.
Another poignant memory is of staring in horror at mountains of human hair. The pile did not seem believable until I noticed a long wavy lock of ginger hair, standing out from the giant heap. The lock seemed so perfect and quite neat, as if recently trimmed from a girl's beautiful head of hair.
An immense mound of prosthetic limbs occupied another room and at the bottom of the pile lay a hand. This single hand reduced me to tears yet again, as I imagined a young couple walking hand in hand.
Walking into the gas chamber, where thousands of prisoners had lost their lives, the ghostly atmosphere was so different to any other place in the camp. The air felt deathly and heavy with sorrow, not empty as I had expected, and I knew I was entering a place of suffering and death.
The room beside was where the many bodies were shoved into ovens and burnt to ashes. Looking into the oven, I could feel the pain the other prisoners would have felt at shovelling their own to be reduced to dirt.
It was at this point that the questions I needed answering were screaming:
How did they justify this? How could people do this and still live with themselves? How was this doing any good?
I cannot answer these questions and I know it is not possible to.
Since Tuesday, many people have asked: "Was it good?".
"No," I have replied, it was haunting, macabre, distressing, enraging and harrowing. It was not good.
