People were taken here to die without a thought

The sun is shining, a bright but breezy spring day that lifts the heart.

We pick our way along a dusty old train track but the grass is green either side of the nearby fences and birds sing merrily in the trees. All is peaceful.

We reach a small wooded area where children once played, revelling in the space after a long journey.

Minutes later they would be dead.

There is a pile of rubble which, at first glance, could be the remnants of a rundown old farm cottage.

It is not. It is the remains of the gas chamber and crematoria that once stood here in Birkenau, also known as Auschwitz II, where Nazis murdered more than a million Jews.

Many of them walked this path, past rows upon rows of the wooden buildings used to imprison the victims, with no idea of the fate that awaited them.

Probably they were glad to have been released from the cramped windowless railway carriages in which they had come from all over Europe.

The carriages had travelled here along – as our guide put it – the train tracks to nowhere.

A doctor was waiting for them at a crossroads. Not to tend to them but to sort them into two groups.

The fittest were sent one way, they would be imprisoned hundreds at a time in old stables and forced to work.

The majority were herded the other way down the train tracks to their death.

Why them? Perhaps they were old, or young, or ill, or pregnant.

Maybe there was some other reason why they were expendable or no reason at all.

Eerily there is a picture here taken just yards from where I stand.

In it, the doctor’s arm directs a man at the front of a long queue to his right.

The snapshot captures the man’s fate but was it to go right to die immediately or to live for a few weeks or months longer? I can’t tell.

There is fear on the faces in the picture but the condemned did not know they were soon to die.

So they walked in an orderly fashion. They had probably realised enough about their captors to want to remain anonymous, not to make a fuss.

They probably felt relief when told ‘let your children play’, but the order was not borne of compassion.

It was just another way to keep them calm, to keep alive the lie that they had a future.

The sheer amount of people put to death apparently without a second thought is one of the most sobering messages for the teenagers who I joined on this trip to Poland with the Holocaust Educational Trust.

The visit to Birkenau is different to Auschwitz because it was purely a death camp – its primary purpose to kill people, mostly Jews.

About 70 or 75 per cent of prisoners were killed on arrival so there is no record they were ever at the camp.

Instead their belongings were taken, they were told to strip and had their hair shorn before being sent to the gas chamber under the pretext they were to have a shower.

The students are appalled.

Andrew Price, aged 17, from Pershore High School, said: “Some people were just taken here to die. I thought that was really shocking. I didn’t realise that.”

No one knows how many victims died at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the name for the three camps of Auschwitz, Birkenau and Buna, but it is thought to be 1.2 million people in the years 1940-1945.

Among them were 1.1 million Jews, 140,000 Poles, 20,000 gipsies and 10,000 Soviet prisoners of war.

The students are encouraged to try to connect with the individual stories.

To do so we visit the sauna – so called because the Nazis used a type of steam cleaning for the clothes they had stolen from their prisoners.

On display here are dozens of pictures taken from the victims.

Mostly they look like family photos. In one, a group are at the seaside fooling around. In another, children sit in a garden.

My eye is drawn to one man.

His trousers are high waisted – the style of that era – and remind me of the kind my own grandfather used to wear.

These are photos replicated in photo albums the world over.

It is a stark reminder each victim was somebody’s son or daughter, father or mother.

Outside we hold an impromptu memorial service conducted by Rabbi Barry Marcus, the man who founded the one-day visits.

The teenagers join in the wellknown psalm The Lord is my Shepherd before Rabbi Marcus incants a prayer in Hebrew.

We cannot understand the words but no translation is needed as he hauntingly lists the names of the camps including Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen and Treblinka.

He urges the youngsters to bear witness to what they have seen in their daily lives so the mistakes of history need never be repeated.

Georgia Duncan-Gill, 17, from The Chase Technology College, said: “It’s only two of us from a school but if we can tell people what we’ve seen then maybe people will be aware.”

After the trip they will be asked to come up with ideas of how they can pass on the lessons they’ve learned to others.

I ask Andrew who had previously felt uneasy about taking photographs at Auschwitz if he will use his pictures.

“Definitely,” he says. He wants to do his bit. And in writing this I hope I have too.