Reporter Tom Davis joined two students from Kinver High School and Sixth Form on a visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau.

NOTHING quite prepares you for the horrors you are about to see.

The death.

The brutality.

A place of extreme evil.

Six million Jews died in the Holocaust. More than one million of those were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau – the Nazi killing centre that has left a scar on humanity.

Words, perhaps, cannot do it justice, which is why the 2,000-mile journey made by 200 students from the West Midlands last week was an important one to make.

The visit, as part of the Holocaust Educational Trust’s (HET) ‘Lessons from Auschwitz’ project, is set on the missive ‘hearing is not like seeing’.

Our first sight is the entrance sign ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ – ‘work makes you free’. A chilling lie. Free, they were not.

Our guide takes us through the cell blocks. In one, a room full of belongings: suitcases, glasses, pots, clothes, and shoes. Like ghostly exhibitions.

In another, shaved human hair, sold for 50 pfennigs to make textiles. Students fall silent.

Then there is the corridor of faces. Photographs with names, profession, date of birth, date of entry – and date of death. Konrad Brichta, a teacher, was murdered after five days.

“Find a name you can remember,” we are told by Rabbi Andrew Shaw, as we reach the 14-metre long ‘Book of Names’, listing 4.2m identified as Holocaust victims.

There was simply not enough time to find Konrad.

Auschwitz I ends with the gas chamber, opposite the house of commander Rudolf Hoess, described by a survivor as the “saliva-spitting red-faced SS monster”.

Scratches remain on the walls inside.

“The gas chamber is something I will always remember,” said 16-year-old Ellie Smith, a Year 12 Kinver High School and Sixth Form pupil.

“It was cold, the atmosphere was cold as soon as you walked in.

“It was upsetting but something I had to see.”

Classmate Imogen Beddow, 17, added: “It has been really eye-opening. I think the hair brought it home for me. It made it so real.”

But Auschwitz I is only the beginning. 3km away is Birkenau. Housing 300 barracks of up to 700 prisoners, it is 20 times bigger than Auschwitz I and spans further than the eye can see.

People here lived an average of three months.

We stood in minus five degrees, the air sharp and piercing. Snow layered the ground and a thick fog clung to the perimeters of barbed-wire fencing. How could anybody ‘live’ here?

Our day ended in a building of photographs – of family occasions, smiles and laughter.

A life that was snatched away from them.

Rabbi Andrew Shaw delivered a poignant speech. Students were already welling up, then he told us how his own grandfather was murdered in the genocide. Tears began to flow.

“A little light can dispel an awful lot of darkness,” he said, quoting survivor Gena Turgel.

And so we each went outside to light a candle along the rail tracks as a symbol of hope.

Ellie and Imogen are now HET ambassadors. They will pass their experience to others so that lessons can be learned about what can happen when prejudice is left to fester.

This has been one school lesson they will certainly never forget.