3 of our Year 12 students visited Auschwitz-Birkenau last week.  You can read about the visit from one of our students below:

The trip to Auschwitz was a very eye-opening experience. Although we only went for a day, with no chance to rest, it was a very heavy-hearted experience. When we arrived at the airport in Poland, we went to the first Auschwitz camp, which consisted of buildings where the prisoners had lived. The buildings all looked identical. Inside these buildings, a range of things was displayed. When you enter one of the rooms, you see that, as it is now a museum, all the items are preserved. There was one room full of hair. When the victims arrived at the camp, their hair was shaved off, initially the men, and then the women too. The amount of hair there was truly shocking. There were also many pots and pans belonging to the victims kept in these buildings. This showed how the victims brought personal items with them, not knowing what was waiting for them. There were more sections containing items such as bags, clothes and shoes. They also showed us the uniform everyone had to wear. In Auschwitz, all victims’ names were replaced with numbers, which completely dehumanised them. The Nazis’ aim was to make these victims unidentifiable and identical, so every single person faced the same awful fate in that concentration camp.

In the second Auschwitz camp, we were shown the toilets. They had rows of bowl-shaped holes in the floor inside a barn-like building. This meant everyone had to relieve themselves in the same place, with no privacy at all. It was really shocking to see. What also struck us was how extremely cold the place was. Even with our layers on and knowing we had a warm place to return to after the visit, we could not imagine how it must have been for the prisoners. With only one thin layer of clothing in autumn, it is impossible to imagine how much worse it would have been in winter, with even colder weather.

Overall, this was a completely eye-opening experience. Seeing it in real life cannot compare to how we are taught about it in class. The severity of what the victims went through is truly shocking. There are absolutely no words to describe how terrible it was, especially when I have never experienced anything like it. We can only imagine how they must have felt and what they endured.