'Pain in the pit of my stomach': Black Country students numbed by the horror of Auschwitz

"Eight words spoken quietly, indifferently, without emotion. Eight short simple words. Yet that was the moment I was parted from my mother... For a part of a second I glimpsed my mother and my sister moving to the right.

"Tzipora held mother's hand. I saw them disappear into the distance; my mother was stroking my sister's fair hair as though to protect her, while I walked on with my father and the other men. And I did not know that at that place, at that moment, I was parting from my mother and Tzipora forever."

The educator cried, the children's heads dropped and it was as this passage was read out the whole magnitude of what had come before was slowly becoming more real.

Auschwitz aged 15

This was the testimony of Elie Wiesel, who was transported to Auschwitz when he was just 15 along with his mother, father and three sisters.

I was standing there at the exact place where Elie saw his mother and youngest sister for the last time.

The point where Elie, his family and hundreds of other Romanian Jews stuffed into a train carriage were introduced to Auschwitz Birkenau for the first time.

The point where thousands of innocent men, women and children were selected to work or die.

The air got slightly colder as I began to walk down the iconic Birkenau railway line.

Then there it stood, right at the end of the disused line.

It was nearly reduced to rubble now, only the bottom bricks of the structure still in place. But it was still so recognisable decades on.

This gas chamber was just one of many used at Birkenau and other camps across Eastern Europe for the Nazis' evil.

Elie survived the holocaust with his two older sisters Hilda and Beatrice. Their younger sister didn't, neither did their parents, neither did 11 million others.

I was looking forward to this trip as much as one can knowing they are visiting the biggest known graveyard in the world.

What to expect?

The children from schools all across the Black Country and Staffordshire were excited as well. What are you expecting from today, how are you feeling? I asked a couple of Walsall sixth-formers on the coach. 'Nervous', 'excited' they shot back. Then the crucial answer, 'I don't really know what to expect'.

The Holocaust Education Trust had put the trip on, looking to educate the future about the past.

There was plenty they wanted the children to learn but they had one clear objective, to humanise it all.

This was genocide on an incomprehensible scale. But 11 million is not just a number. These were real people.

Our first stop in Oswiecim was the town's Jewish cemetery. It was a fleeting visit, an attempt by the HET to get us to start humanising the victims. The cemetery itself was not a graveyard for those who died in the holocaust but walking round and reading the gravestones, as well as being told of the persecution that the town's Jews suffered, helped the children realise that this wasn't just any trip away.

We hopped back on the coach and were told it was 10 minutes to Auschwitz 1 on the outskirts of Oswiecim.

You're aware of the time and that any minute now it will be coming into sight but it still shocks you.

The children on the coach fell silent as we passed the outskirts of the camp and pulled into the car park.

The HET had assigned each group an educator who would help the children think in depth about what they were seeing as they walked round the camps.

We met up with our guide, put our headphones in, and headed through the gates into Auschwitz 1.

Arbeit Macht Frei

The first stop was the iconic Arbeit Macht Frei sign, translated to 'work sets you free'. The irony was lost on no-one.

You walk in one block and see metres of human hair that had been shaved off by the Nazi guards when the victims arrived at the camp. You walk in another and see hundreds of pairs of shoes, including those of children.

As we progressed through each one you could see the children were really struggling. Their eyes turned redder, their heads dropped.

Our educator Elie did a brilliant job in getting us to think more in depth about what we were seeing.

Down the road at Birkenau there was a collapsed gas chamber, one that the Nazis never got round to destroying. We walked in, my head at its lowest point.

I looked up and saw the gap in the ceiling where the Nazi guards would drop the gas into the chamber. One student told me he could see scratches on the wall.

In the next room were a set of furnaces where the guards would burn the bodies of those they had just gassed, after stripping and searching them.

Auschwitz 2 Birkenau

Next it was down the road to Auschwitz 2 Birkenau. This is where the main bulk of Nazi killing took place. The watchtower which sits high above the camp's gates has famously been featured in many a film, including the gut wrenching Schindler's List.

Birkenau is different to the first camp we visited, a lot of it has been reconstructed, but not turned into a museum.

The centre point and crumbled gas chamber were poignant, but there was also a walk through the registration building where the prisoners were brought had they been chosen to live after stepping off the train.

Here, in this building tucked away in the corner of this vast camp, prisoners were washed, cleaned, registered and given their blue and white uniforms.

Numb

In the final room of the building was a huge collection of photographs that had been brought as personal belongings. Seeing family portraits, children playing and posing couples was enough to make me go completely numb.

It was pitch black by the time we stepped out of the registration building and we were right at the end of a 14-hour day, but there was still time to pay our respects to the victims of these atrocities.

There was a very highly charged emotional ceremony led by a Rabbi, before every member of every group lit a candle and placed it at the end of the Birkenau railway line. Then, there was a minute's silence to commemorate the victims.

On the way back to Krakow I asked the children about how they had found the day now we had reached the end.

"It was different, I was expecting it to be more emotional but I found myself having pain in the pit of my stomach rather than crying," 17-year-old Jacob Wilson from Barr Beacon Language College in Walsall said.

But the answer that really stood out was from 18-year-old Shyan Duberry from Joseph Leckie Academy in Walsall.

"I thought it was going to be alright at the start as we were walking round but then I realised that's how they must've felt. They thought it was going to be ok, but it wasn't."