As part of our commitment to mark Holocaust Memorial Day, a member of the SEJ team accompanied a school group on a trip to Auschwitz in 2011.
Featured below is a first-hand account of his experience and the history of the Holocaust.
To help prepare pupils for what they will experience, the Holocaust Educational Trust runs an extensive preparation programme ahead of each visit.
So it was that a very well prepared group – of Holocaust Educational Trust staff and volunteer educators, pupils, teachers and invited guests – mostly journalists – gathered at Edinburgh Airport in the very early hours of a late autumn morning.
Auschwitz I was the first camp to open in 1940, and was primarily a concentration camp.
We visit the hospital block, where the now infamous camp Doctor, Joseph Mengele, carried out horrific medical experiments on camp inmates.
We pass into one of the former blocks that was used to house inmates.
We enter one of the large buildings that now hosts some of the main exhibits that detail both the inhuman scale and the very human victims of the Holocaust.
The extermination camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau was created as a means to deliver the Nazis’ desired ‘final solution to the Jewish question’.
Our Polish guide leads us off the platform, and we walk along a narrow channel surrounded on both sides by high barbed-wire fences that separate different sections of the camp.
Our guide now leads us into one of the few areas in the Holocaust Musuem where photography is not permitted.
