When we got off the plane in Poland we got onto a coach to travel to the town of Oświęcim (Auschwitz eventually took its name from this original Polish town name) which was a popular market town in the 1930s. On the coach journey they told us how this area would have been industrially advanced during the war as the Nazis needed it to have a strong transport system to transport all of the prisoners and supplies. Hence the good railway connections to the rest of Poland but also all around Europe.

In the town of Oświęcim we first went to a market place which before the 1930s would have had a strong Jewish presence. This put into context the fact that before the Nazis the Jewish population within Poland would have lived in peace with the rest of the nation. There was even a Great Synagogue in the centre of the town, it had been destroyed during the war but is now a memorial.

The first death camp we went to was Auschwitz 1, before the war this was an army barracks so all of the buildings were very close and quite high quality made, this would vastly differ to Auschwitz 2. In this camp we saw the exhibitions, so we went in a replica of the gas chamber used there but also saw the hair and possessions of the prisoners that the Nazis kept once they confiscated them. We also saw the ‘Book of Names’ that contains the names of 4.2 million Jews who died during the Holocaust.

After we went to Auschwitz 2, also known as Birkenau. This camp wasn’t there before the war and was made by the prisoners at Auschwitz 1. Here we saw replicas of what the living conditions would have been like and we heard stories of people who worked in the camp, cleaning the make-do toilets, but also stories of how people coped being inside the camp. Birkenau was a lot more desolate than Auschwitz because once the camps were liberated the Red Army took the wood which made most of the buildings in Birkenau, so there was a lot less to see.

The trip was extremely educational and we were lucky to hear from a Polish tour guide, our trip leader and a Rabbi, which meant we heard lots of different perspectives and learnt lots of different information about everyone who entered the camp. We had a memorial with the Rabbi at the end of the day which helped us reflect on everything we had experienced.

-Written by Mr Cunningham