I joined students from South London schools including The Holy Cross School, New Malden, and Radnor School, Twickenham, on a 2,000 mile day trip to the place where, more than 70 years ago, 1.2 million people were murdered.

That figure, even as you stand under the same gates the men, women and children passed through more than 70 years ago, feels impossible for one person to absorb.

What really brings the individual horror into focus are the essential items you see inside the death camp, everyday things that were once tidily packed in a suitcase before being swiftly removed and never used again.

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There is a room full of these discarded suitcases, reminders of one of the many lies prisoners were told as they entered hell on Earth, along with the infamous words above the entrance gates – “Arbeit Mach Frei” – Work Sets You Free.

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Most of these suitcases are labelled with the name and address of its owner – there is an L. Weinberg, an A. Winter, a Paul Golokpof - all of whom packed their cases with their treasured possessions before making the doomed trip.

There is a room full of shoes and a cabinet of brushes, even a collection of artificial limbs; objects that were once so innocuous, now stark reminders of the millions of ordinary people who were taken from their homes and families, robbed of their identities. Murdered.

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“The cabinet containing the tiny pair of children’s shoes, it really got to me,” I was told later by Rosa Heaton, a student at Norwood School.

“How could anyone so innocent, who could never have done anything to anyone, be treated like this?”

In the next room, an enormous cabinet of human hair, most of it shaved from the camp’s female prisoners.

“There was just so much of it. What struck me straight away, as a girl, was that taking away something so important to you and your identity as your hair is just so dehumanising,” said Kasia Walls, 17, from St Catherine’s School in Twickenham.

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We found out in the next room the hair was used to make textiles for the Germans.

We next passed through a corridor of faces – hundreds of photographs of the dead with their names, occupations and the dates they arrived and died.

The staggering statistics start to take a more horrifying meaning as I looked into the eyes of the doomed prisoners.

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Most, robbed of their hair, possessions and identity, look lost and uncertain, but among the despair there is the odd scornful smile of defiance.

Next, the gas chamber and crematorium. Prisoners were told to remove their clothes before their “shower”, and even to remember which pegs they had left their possessions on, another perverse lie designed to keep order among the inmates.

Slave labour was used to empty the chambers once all life had been snuffed out.

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Inside the gas chamber

None of us lingered in this airless bunker, where human beings had been exterminated as if they were nothing more than germs.

As William Brown, of Orleans Park School in Twickenham said: “We get to leave the cold and darkness behind us and go back to our normal lives, but it was the last place so many people ever saw.”

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The empty tins of Zyklon B, used to poison the prisoners​

We travelled next to Birkenau, which is enormous in size, with row after row of the barracks in which hundreds were crammed in squalid conditions. There the average life span of prisoners was three months.

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The depot at Birkenau

We were told of small acts of defiance from the prisoners, and the way they maintained their humanity in this hellish place that tried to rob them of everything else.

Some prisoners would take pride in keeping themselves as clean as possible, using valuable time and energy to keep their dignity in a place where inhumanity reigned.

Our group was told by Rabbi Andrew Shaw that some of the camp’s Jews had managed to procure tefillin, the black leather boxes used during morning prayer.

A large group of the prisoners would wake up early, eating into the three or four hours sleep they were permitted, to go and pray in one of the barracks.

Rabbi Shaw said: “They would not be defeated. To hear about the strength of human character and the strength of Jewish character in a place like this is unbelievable.”

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Visitors to the camp lit candles and lay them on the tracks

For more information about the Holocaust Educational Trust, which organises the Lessons From Auschwitz Project, visit het.org.uk.

The Nazi death machine:

The “Final solution to the Jewish Question” was laid out at the Wannsee Conference in January 1942.

At the largest death camp, Auschwitz, 1.2 million people are thought to have died, 1.1 million of whom were Jewish.

The prisoners included Hungarians, Polish, French, Greeks, Belgians, Soviets and Italians.

The 7,000 prisoners remaining at Auschwitz were liberated by the Red Army on January 27, 1945.

FROM JANUARY: Auschwitz survivor Martin Bennett, who educated children during Holocaust Memorial Week, dies aged 90​