Students from The Whitby High School, Neston High School and the University of Chester CE Academy took part in a one-day visit to the Auschwitz camps in Poland. Pioneer reporter Laurie Stocks-Moore joined them

Some people deny the Holocaust ever happened, that it is a fable designed to justify the creation of a Jewish state.

But, however incomprehensible, the Holocaust did happen, and the industrial-scale factory of death at Auschwitz-Birkenau serves as a spine-chilling reminder.

Deliberately chosen by the Nazis for its remoteness as well as its transport links to major towns, the camps in southern Poland were made the most efficient instrument of Hitler’s Final Solution: to rid Europe of all Jews.

From early 1942 until late 1944 transport trains delivered Jews to the camps’ gas chambers from across Nazi-occupied Europe. Some were sent directly to their deaths, and others to labour camps to live and work in primitive conditions where many died of illness and hunger.

The estimated numbers are almost impossible to take in: 1.1million Jews, 140,000 Poles, 20,000 Gypsies and 10,000 Soviet prisoners of war murdered.

So the visit on Thursday, organised by the Holocaust Educational Trust, was aimed at giving every victim the human face no textbook could convey.

A week before the trip students had heard the harrowing testimony of Kitty Hart-Moxon, a Polish Jew who was sent to Birkenau aged 15. She spent her last eight months there working next to the gas chamber and crematorium sorting through the possessions of the victims.

Kitty described being able to smell burning flesh and watching the SS drop gas canisters through the skylights where hundreds had gathered. A month before her 18th birthday Kitty and 100 others escaped.

I joined 200 bleary-eyed students, Chester MP Stephen Mosley, Crewe and Nantwich MP Edward Timpson and others for a specially chartered flight that left Manchester Airport at 7am.

After landing in Krakow, Poland, we boarded a coach for Oswiecim. Locals stroll past walking their dogs, pushing prams and stopping for a chat. A mild, sunny day for November, this could be any small town in the western world.

But just 60 years ago it was chosen by the Nazis as the scene for their most horrific acts. Just two miles away, thousands upon thousands of people were gassed. Many families were torn apart, others were wiped out.

The first stop is an old Jewish cemetery. Normally locked, it has been opened especially for our trip.

Before the war 12,000 people lived in Oswiecim, 8,000 of them Jews. But now there are no Jews, and no-one local to visit the graves. The headstones carry their own stories. During the Nazi occupation they were taken away to pave roads, only to be found after liberation and returned, with no way of knowing whether they lay above the person whose name was inscribed.

We find out why the cemetery is now locked: twice in the last decade the graves have been desecrated. In 2003 a total of 16 were smashed and daubed with swastikas. It is a stark reminder to the pupils that anti-Semitism is not a force of evil shamed into submission by the sins of the past.

Later we cross a river. Bathed in sunlight with a gentle current, it makes a beautiful scene. But the point of the trip is brought sharply back into focus when we are told it is here the SS would dispose of the ashes of thousands of human beings.

Next stop is Auschwitz, Originally an army barracks, it was first used by the Nazi occupiers to house and murder Polish prisoners. But, as the Third Reich set out on its grisly mission to exterminate the Jews of Europe, tests of the insecticide Zyklon B were carried out on humans there. The objective was to find a quicker, cheaper method of killing.

Our guide, Beatrice, led us under the ‘Arbeit macht frei’ sign, giving the prisoners the chilling false promise that work would give them freedom.

Led past a series of exhibits that each packed their own emotional punch, it was an exhausting trip around mankind’s darkest moment.

Every Jew who arrived at the camp was told they were allowed one bag of luggage, which they crammed with their most prized possessions. The suitcases were confiscated on arrival and a mountain of them – representing a tiny fraction of the total haul – are poignantly displayed, with the names of their owners inscribed on each.

Behind another screen is a huge mound of hair, cut from the prisoners to further strip them of their identity. Some strands were even used to fashion uniforms for German officers.

Elsewhere, collections of shoes, cosmetics and spectacles drive home the fact the people who died there were ordinary people with real lives.

Beatrice shows us a starvation cell, a shooting wall and a gallows. The instruments of death were various but all brutal.

None more so than the gas chamber. Our final stop at Auschwitz I, the sign on the door informs us thousands had died in the room. As we solemnly file in, everyone is stunned into silence and a ghostly chill fills the air.

Next door, a pair of incinerators need little explanation.

We board the coach for the short trip to Auschwitz II.

A purpose-built facility, the Nazis moved there when their desire to rid the continent of its Jewish population outgrew the original encampment.

When they realised the game was up two weeks before the camp was liberated, the Germans torched many of the buildings in an attempt to wipe their mass slaughter from the history books.

But some remain, and others have been reconstructed so the atrocities carried out there can show future generations where xenophobia can lead.

The scale of the operation is what strikes us all about Auschwitz II. There are dormitory buildings as far as the eye can see, and the train track that brought Jews to their fate remains.

The cramped living conditions, and humiliating toilet facilities show the extent to which inmates lost any individuality or dignity.

But they are just a sickening prelude to the gas chambers that lie ahead. The students hear that fellow prisoners were forced to go into the chambers after the mass executions had taken place to clear the bodies, strip them of any gold teeth and jewellery. They are told people were asked to remember the number above the peg they had hung their clothes on, engineered to avoid panic, that they were merely going to be cleaned.

A rabbi gives a stirring speech at the visit’s ceremonial end, and the students are left in reflective mood.

Whitby High School students Jordan Hall and Alex Craig, both 17, of Great Sutton, are studying A-level history.

Jordan said: “Walking through the gates had the biggest impact on me, and seeing the ‘work sets you free’ sign. Reading a sign that said ‘thousands of people had died in this room’ as we entered the gas chamber really made you realise what happened here.

“Auschwitz I was a nice place, they made it look nice so that prisoners wouldn’t suspect what was going to happen to them.”

Alex added: “The shooting wall really affected me.”

On the plane home, I spoke to University Church of England Academy students Jonathan Scott and Lewis Dodgson, both 17, about the trip.

Jonathan said: “Auschwitz is a place with undeniable beauty which has a terrible underlying secret within its walls.

“The fact it was so organised, it was so efficient, was chilling.”

Lewis said: “Seeing the shoes hit me because they represented a life, and each strand of hair represented a life.”

The pair will present what they saw to fellow pupils and have vowed to relate the information to family and friends.

Lewis added: “People in the past know about it but trips like this are good because they educate the future. We are responsible – we need to ensure we educate the next generations and that this doesn’t happen again.”