IT is the hair that upsets the pupils the most. It fills one room in a building in Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp where thousands of prisoners were starved, forced to work or killed during the Second World War.

What many people don’t know is that Auschwitz was part of a complex of three camps – Auschwitz-Birkenau – which in turn is part of a bigger network of 40 concentration, labour and death camps.

Auschwitz-Birkenau is now a memorial and museum which includes a display of piles of hair shorn from the camp’s victims.

At the front of the display is a blonde plait still tied at the end with a brightly coloured piece of cloth. It is a chilling sight.

One of the pupils who has joined the one-day trip to Poland organised by the Holocaust Educational Trust is Harriet Sale, an 18-year-old from Malvern College.

Harriet, from Ledbury, tells me: “Seeing the hair was just grim. It’s making it all a personal experience.

“It brings it to life. The scale of it all shocks me.”

The Holocaust Educational Trust (HET) has invited me on this trip for 200 pupils to visit the camps.

I have no idea what to expect but walking through the famous Auschwitz gates is rather odd.

They seem familiar with their famous iron lettering that reads Arbeit Macht Frei – Work Brings Freedom – but also smaller than I imagined.

In some ways Auschwitz today looks rather quaint, a series of brick buildings that originally housed an army barracks, and not tucked away but clearly visible and very close to the Polish city of Oswiecim.

Some of the pupils are surprised.

Georgia Duncan-Gill, aged 17, from The Chase Technology College, Malvern, said: “I was expecting it would be a lot more basic.

“It seemed a lot more built up and planned and really solid.”

Andrew Price, 17, from Pershore High School, agrees. He said: “I’m really surprised at how close Auschwitz was to normal society.

“I thought it would be completely isolated.”

The HET hopes pupils will take key messages home with them.

They want pupils to understand the complexity of the Holocaust, the name for the murder of six million Jews during the Second World War.

They want the teenagers to appreciate this was mass murder using industrial methods.

We are told the killing was limited, not by compassion or even orders, but by the number of bodies that could be burned in the crematoria – 1,400 a day.

They want pupils to understand that, as well as those who dropped the canisters through the roof of the gas chamber, there were many others who saw the trains carrying them from across Europe to their fate and did nothing.

They also want the youngsters to realise that behind the huge numbers were individual men, women and children.

So we go to see the belongings found at Auschwitz after the war.

They are mundane items taken from the victims – a cheese grater, lots of shaving brushes and a huge pile of shoes.

For Georgia the shoes hit home.

She said: “What really shocked me was the piles of hair and shoes and especially the babies’ shoes and the children’s. I didn’t like that.”

Eleanor Bemand, 18, from Pershore High School, said: “I felt that when I saw people’s belongings you know there was an individual to the numbers.

“If we had been born then it could have been us.”

Personally, I find the toothbrushes disturbing. Such a personal object. It seems so wrong that these everyday possessions were plundered from people.

We are taken inside a gas chamber – the only surviving one at Auschwitz as the Nazis destroyed many of them towards the end of the war.

It’s a small, claustrophobic brick building. Looking up, you can see the holes in the roof through which the gas canisters were dropped. I feel distinctly uncomfortable. The pupils tell me they do too.

Andrew is an art student and had intended to use his photographs to inspire a body of work but has started to have doubts.

He said: “Hopefully my pictures will go into my art work but I don’t know if it’s a bit disrespectful.

“I’ve really changed my idea of what I thought I’d bring back from this trip.

“I thought it was something I could just bring home but when I was in the gas chamber it was so many real people with families and children. They saw them die. It was horrible.

“That’s the first time I felt something.”

Eleanor agrees: “When I went into the gas chamber I could imagine it and how they thought they were just going to have a shower.”

They both feel uncomfortable by the way Auschwitz has become something of a tourist attraction.

Andrew said: ”The fact that there were so many people around.

“It is hard to reflect on it when there was so much going on around you.”

Later I heard another visitor say the place should be razed to the ground.

HET and Rabbi Barry Marcus, who founded the idea of a one-day trip to Auschwitz, do not agree.

They want to fight against Holocaust denial, ensure the victims of the Holocaust are not forgotten and encourage people to learn the lessons of Auschwitz to avoid history repeating itself.

They believe the way to do that is for people to see it for themselves.

Even if the reality makes them feel uncomfortable.

􀁥 Next week: The train tracks to nowhere.