LAST month, a group of Rochdale sixth form students were taken on a one-day trip to Auschwitz Birkenau in Poland, the Nazi concentration and death camp where more than one million Jews were murdered during the Holocaust, and thousands of other minorities were persecuted.

The trip was co-ordinated by the Holocaust Educational Trust, which was set up in the late 1980s to educate young people about the Holocaust, and the lessons which can be learned from it.

Their Lessons From Auschwitz project was launched ten years ago, and now has the backing of government funding.

Observer reporter Helen Johnson was invited to join the students on their trip. Here she shares her experience of Auschwitz Birkenau, the purpose-built death camp where more than one million Jews were put to death in just a few short years ...

IN THE early hours of the morning, a mother puts pen to paper and attempts to explain in a letter to her only child why, in just two hours time, she is giving her up.

Very soon, she will do the unthinkable and hand her baby daughter over to strangers, who will sedate her, before slipping off quietly out of the country.

For this mother, the decision to hand her baby away to child rescuers was born out of utter desperation.

It is the final act of love by two parents who know that later that day, they are to be rounded up and sent away to die at the hands of the Nazis.

They know that if their baby stays with them, she will suffer the same fate, and be dead within a month.

The letter is the only chance this mother has of making sure her child grows up knowing just how much she was loved, so as she puts it, she ‘tries to stuff a lifetime of love into one letter’.

She explains to her daughter, named Mirele, about her first two years of life. The hot cereal she likes to eat in the morning, the way she likes to be rocked to sleep in the sunlight and the way she was loved by her parents more than anything in the world. She also has one request of her daughter.

Miraculously, the letter stayed with Mirele, who more than 40 years later decided to translate it from Yiddish and publish it, to fulfil her mother's request that the world should never forget the impact the Nazi genocide had on millions of families just like theirs.

It is this same motivation that drives the work of the Holocaust Educational Trust.

Their goal is not just to remind us all of the unfathomable scale of the Holocaust, in which six million Jews were murdered, with more than a million of these deaths at Auschwitz alone. It is to remind us of the people behind the statistics. These acts were perpetrated against individuals. Human beings with lives and families, just like Mirele's.

At Auschwitz 1 we were reminded of everything the Nazis did to dehumanise the Jews. We saw the piles of human hair which were collected after the prisoner's heads were shaved on their arrival at the camp, along with the cherished personal possessions which they brought with them, after they were deceived into thinking they were being uprooted from their homes in towns across Europe, to start a new life.

Now at Auschwitz Birkenau, the purpose-built death camp just a few short miles from Auschwitz 1, the Trust, along with Rabbi Barry Marcus, will attempt to remind us of the human stories behind the statistics.

We start by going to the top of the camp’s iconic watch tower, and looking out over the massive expanse of the camp, which stretches further than the eye can see.

In front of us are the railway tracks that brought more than a million Jews to their death. And the spot where, as soon as the railway carriages pulled in, the Nazi officers would decide who would be sent to die and who would be imprisoned and forced into hard labour.

We see the huts where those prisoners were forced to live, cramped on top of each other in unimaginably difficult conditions.

And the toilet blocks. The concrete holes which pass for toilets, which the prisoners would be permitted to use for just ten seconds at a time, once in the morning and once at night.

We are then confronted with the remains of the now demolished gas chambers, which were built to facilitate the extermination of human beings on an industrial scale.

The Nazis were so intent to keep up a pretence that the people going to die in the chambers were simply going for a shower, that they numbered the pegs where the prisoners would leave their tattered striped uniforms before being herded into the gas chambers to die.

The crematoria too are in ruins, demolished by the Nazis shortly before the Red Army arrived to liberate the 7,000 prisoners left at Birkenau in January 1945.

It is impossible not to be struck by how incredibly bleak this place is.

As we wonder around the camp, we are pelted with relentless snow. It serves to remind us the discomfort we are suffering now is nothing compared to what they would have gone through, forced to work in all weathers, often barefoot, at all times of the year.

Since I returned from Auschwitz, the one question I have been asked by numerous different people is always the same: Is it true that birds don't fly over Auschwitz?

I don't recall seeing any wildlife whatsoever at Birkenau. Odd for such a green place, surrounded by trees.

We get to see hundreds of family photographs, which were snatched from the Jews when they arrived at the camp and have since been put on display inside the ‘sauna’ at Birkenau. Again, to remind us of the faces behind the numbers.

Before we leave, we attend a memorial service, led by Rabbi Marcus, where we take a moment to think about the people we have seen in those pictures, which are not unlike the ones we all have of our own family and friends back home.

Rabbi Marcus somehow manages to succinctly articulate what we are feeling, while at Auschwitz 1, you are affected by what you see, at Auschwitz Birkenau, you are affected by what you don't see.

On the coach home, one of the students comments that the visit has not had the impact on him he assumed it would. It's a sentiment I must agree with.

It's not until I get home at 11.30pm that night, and for the first time have chance to sit down and think about what I've seen, that the true enormity of day sinks in.

For me, the trip has provoked a range of emotions; from disbelief that this was allowed to happen, to horror that it did. And little more than 60 years ago at that.

But my overriding sense is one of responsibility. An obligation to those who died in Auschwitz not to let their loss be in vain, but to spread the message about what happened here, in that hope that it is never allowed to happen again.

Not long from now, the eye witnesses of the Holocaust will be gone, and it willl be up to us to make sure that the lessons of Auschwitz are not forgotten.

And it’s thanks to the work the Trust does with young people, that this message continues to be perpetuated to new generations.

SEVERAL readers have got in touch to share memories of their own visit to the death camp.

Reader Tony Sheldon reflects on his visit to Auschwitz in April: "Every individual reacts differently to seeing Auschwitz. I was really more prepared than most as I had previously visited Teresienstadt (Terezin) concentration camp in the Czech Republic, but the scale of Auschwitz Birkenau was ten-fold.

"I have many Jewish friends who just cannot face such a trip, as many have memories of friends, relatives and friends of friends.

"Auschwitz really has to be seen to be believed. Only the hardest hearted could fail to be moved by the reality of what took place there.

"When we returned to the airport, it was with a coach full of sombre young people, most of whom will never forget how racial hatred destroys the soul, and vowed to fight the inhumanity of people all over the world."

Sacred Heart Church also visited the camp during a pilgrimage to Poland late last year.

Parishioner and photographer Derek Parsons put together a powerful slide show of photographs which capture the visit, set to music.

He is regularly invited to present this slideshow, and talk about the visit, at meetings held by local community groups.

Anyone who would like to invite Derek to speak at their group's meting can contact him via the Observer, on 0161 211 2814.

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