‘For ever let this place be a cry of despair and a warning to humanity," begins the inscription on a plaque at Auschwitz, the site of murder on an almost unimaginable scale. Yet it's the sound of silence that penetrates the soul while standing at the end of the train tracks at Auschwitz-Birkenau, where thousands of people disembarked from long journeys across Europe, only to be walked to the gas chambers.
It's a strange sensation, to be where a million and a half people lost their lives, and it's one I shared with 200 London sixth-formers and their teachers on a day-trip to Poland organised by the Holocaust Educational Trust (HET). The HET has been taking students to Auschwitz for nine years now and recently received an extra £1.5 million in government funding to enable them to take two students from every school in the country to the infamous concentration camp.
One of the Trust's earliest achievements was to get the Holocaust on to the national curriculum for history but no amount of "secondary source" evidence, GCSE exam papers or re-screenings of Schindler's List can prepare you for walking into Auschwitz and seeing it for yourself.
Students attend an orientation seminar a week before the visit where they hear first-hand from a Holocaust survivor and get a taste of what to expect on arrival at Auschwitz. After a very early flight from Luton, we divide into groups to travel to the Polish town of Osweicim, or Auschwitz in German.
Before the war, 58 per cent of the town's population was Jewish, and the community was thriving. An important part of the Trust's work is turning the focus away from Jewish victimhood, and onto the ordinary pre-war life that was so utterly devastated by the Nazis. Poland alone was home to 3.5 million Jews before the war. There are now barely 6,000 and the last Jewish man in the town of Osweicim died in 2000.
From there we make the short trip to Auschwitz I, the first camp built by the Nazis, and originally home to Polish prisoners of war. I'm glad to see there aren't any souvenir shops but there are coach loads of tourists and Polish schoolchildren, making their way quietly along the empty streets that run between the red brick former Polish army barracks. The authorities have resisted the urge to create a Holocaust theme park, and the small exhibits that make up the museum were created by survivors themselves shortly after the war.
Our Polish guide reminds us to be respectful as we make our way into the first block where students are confronted by more than 2,000 kg of dusty human hair collected from victims of the gas chambers. A horrifying exhibit nearby shows yards of cloth made from the hair by German factories to support the war effort.
One of the strengths of the Trust's approach is the use of trained guides, mainly British teachers, to accompany the groups and instead of dates and statistics, we are read letters and poems from Holocaust survivors, some of quite extraordinary power.
In huge chests
Clouds of dry hair
Of those suffocated
And a faded plait
A pigtail with a ribbon
Pulled at schools
By naughty boys.
Everyone reacts differently when confronted by what they see here and as Rabbi Barry Marcus, who accompanies us, rightly says, there is no prescribed way. As we are led through rooms piled high with broken spectacles, suitcases, shoes, and perhaps most poignantly of all, artificial limbs and crutches, some students begin to weep, others are stunned into silence, and still others are content to make chit-chat as if this school trip were no different from any other.
We learn that 20 per cent of the victims were children, some 232,000 in total, but the trip is not designed simply to shock, and there is plenty of time for silent reflection as we move between the exhibits. The emphasis is on a very personal idea of "witness", and the responsibility of each generation to bear witness to past suffering. As the years go by - it was 60 years ago this summer that Auschwitz was first opened to the public - the number of survivors dwindles and it is left to a smaller and smaller group to give their testimony.
On their return to England, the students who have been given this chance will prepare presentations and assemblies for the other year groups, in order to convey what they have seen.
We stop outside Block 11, the "death block", used by the Nazis for punishments and torture, and preserved in its original state. Descending into the basement, we are shown the tiny windowless cells where prisoners were starved and tortured to death and "standing" cells the size of telephone boxes where up to four prisoners were forced to sleep upright for weeks at a time.
In cell 18 there is a single candle and flowers marking the spot where the Franciscan Polish priest St Maximilian Kolbe died. When one prisoner escaped in July 1941, 10 men were chosen for death by starvation. One of the men cried out for his wife and children. Fr Kolbe volunteered to die in his place. After 16 days of starvation and dehydration, during which time he led his fellow prisoners in songs and prayers, Fr Kolbe clung to life. He was executed by an injection of carbolic acid. Fr Kolbe was canonised by Pope John Paul II in 1982, at a ceremony attended by the man he had saved, Franciszek Gajownicek.
The assault on the emotions continues as we enter a gas chamber and crematoria. A sign at the entrance reads simply: "You are in a building where the SS murdered thousands of people. Please maintain silence here, remember their suffering and show respect for their memory."
Leaving Auschwitz I, on one level still a fairly smart but sparse former army barracks, and entering Auschwitz II-Birkenau three kilometres away, is very different experience. For one thing, Birkenau is 10 times the size, a purpose-built death camp stretching into the distance, and framed by an imposing red brick gateway familiar from photographs I had seen.
As Rabbi Marcus says: "At Auschwitz I, the impact is what you see, at Birkenau, it's what you don't see".
Much of the camp was burnt by Nazis in 1945 in an attempt to destroy evidence of their crimes but a few wooden stables used for housing prisoners remain, as do the teetering remains of crematoria chimneys and the ruins of the underground gas chambers. A train track runs through the camp to a platform where prisoners were separated into men and women, those deemed able to work and those who proceeded straight to their deaths. Around 80 per cent of victims were murdered immediately after arrival.
RE and history A-level student Daniel Coyne, from St James Catholic High School in Colindale, said: "The main thing you pick up while you're here is the details, like how the bunk beds were slanted so as to cram more people in."
The wooden buildings at Birkenau were built to a design for German army stables. Intended to house 52 horses, at the death camp they held up to 700 people at a time. We "walk in their steps" as one student put in, to an undressing room, where prisoners were stripped, shaved, scalded in very hot showers and otherwise dehumanised. At the end of the corridor is a room full of family photographs recovered from victims, and later identified as being Jewish families from two nearby Polish villages, their humanity belatedly restored.
Two A-level history students, Seamus McGowan and Jordan Cadore, from St Gregory's RC High School in Harrow, north-west London, won an essay-writing competition to get on the trip to Auschwitz.
Jordan acknowledged that there was a risk of becoming desensitised to images of the Holocaust and that the personalisation of history offered the best chance of making it meaningful.
Seamus told me: "Looking at the photos (these were recovered from victims and stashed in a suitcase discovered after the war) you see real stories, and whole families that were wiped out. You can imagine the people coming here and trying to look strong - that means much more than figures like ‘six million killed'."
For Clare Holman, head of history at St James Catholic High School, this connection on a personal level is vital, as is the presentation of the Holocaust as a not uniquely Jewish history.
"A lot of them have a very generalised knowledge of the Holocaust, they know what it was, they know lots of people were killed, they know about the gas chambers, and they have seen films like Schindler's List, but it's on a very different level, it's something that happened a long time ago," she says.
"We have lots of Polish students now, being a Catholic school, and they know a lot more because their country was occupied by the Nazis, their grandparents will have told them what happened, and it has effected them."
The Holocaust, compulsory up to Key Stage 3 (11- to 14-year-olds), is taught in the context of other genocides and many schools link it to events in Rwanda in the 1990s.
As the skies darken overhead, we gather one last time, weary and emotionally drained, for a ceremony of remembrance at the end of the train tracks at Birkenau on the spot where Pope Benedict XVI, on his visit in 2006, said: "In a place like this, words fail."
Rabbi Barry Marcus leads the group in a reading Psalm 23, "The Lord is my shepherd", and in that valley of the shadow of death, sings a haunting Hebrew prayer for the Jewish martyrs of the Holocaust. It's an exquisitely poignant and painful moment, and all the faces around me are fixed, staring into the middle distance, lost in their own thoughts.
You may not be able fully to appreciate what you have seen here today, he tells us, maybe not tomorrow, or next week or even next year, but one day you will. Today, he continues, racism and xenophobia are like a virus that mutates every generation, that is why we must never forget the lessons of history.
"Whatever reason has brought you here today my friends, let us walk out of here in gratitude, let us leave with a sense of humility and respect and let us hopefully never see another human being feel the pain of being alone, or abandoned, let us undertake as we stand here, not to be fearful of those who may look different or think differently, or worship differently, because otherwise we will have sadly failed as human beings."
As each of us walk away from this place, we pick up and light a candle and place it on the railway tracks, creating a pathway of light leading out into the darkness.