By SCOTT GILMOUR

As part of the ‘Lessons from Auschwitz’ project, Annie May and I were selected by the school to visit the Auschwitz (I) and Auschwitz (II) Birkenau concentration camps in Poland.

The notorious camps were home to 1.3 million people between 1940 and 1945, but more disturbingly the final resting place of more than a million people of predominantly Jewish descent.

The ‘Lessons from Auschwitz’ project is run by the Holocaust Educational Trust. So far nearly 40,000 people have been taken to Poland by the Trust since it was formed in 1988. Those chosen to go are responsible for making sure the events that took place in Germany leading up to and during the war, stay fresh in the public’s memory. It is equally important to teach those who don’t know about the Holocaust. There has also been a resurgence in anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial in recent times, showing that the project still has a purpose after 30 years.

Several days before our journey to Auschwitz we attended a seminar in Cardiff. The highlight of this was a testimony from Eva Clarke, whose mother survived the Holocaust. Eva’s mother had been living in Prague, newly married, when Czechoslovakia was occupied by the Germans. More and more regulations were introduced, restricting every aspect of Jewish life. One example was that Jews were not allowed to go to the cinema. Eva’s mother recalled one time when she had gone to the cinema, against the law, and several SS guards entered the building. If they had not stopped searching people the row before her, the red ‘J’ on her identification papers would have given her away and she might never have gone home. It wasn’t long before the Jews in Prague were to be transported to Terezin, an old army barracks, and later Auschwitz. Eva’s mother managed to survive both, and gave birth to Eva on a cattle ship, right at the end of the war.

Our visit started by touching down in Krakow airport at around 8am on February 20 of this year. Prior to visiting the concentration camps, we were driven by coach to the town of Oswiecim (pronounced oz-vee-eh-shim) which is a five-minute drive away from the death camps. It was here that we got a taste for pre-war Jewish life, as this small town had a population of over 8,000 Jews before the war, which made up the majority of those living there. The town people coexisted peacefully, with Jews and Christians celebrating each other’s holidays.

I found the visit to this small town to be more insightful than the actual camps themselves because it humanised the victims. These people were no longer an extra zero on paper, but tangible photographs with a backstory, with a culturally rich history. Unfortunately, this was not to last, as out of the 8,000 Jews in Oswiecim, only one was returned there after the war.

The Auschwitz camps themselves were an eerie place. In one room there was a wall, lined either side with thousands of pages, containing the names of every single person who had died during the Holocaust. Another room had projectors showing films of Jews before the war; people on holiday, people worshipping, or people at dinner.

Eva Clarke is an inspiring woman, who has taught me and many others not to take our lives or our liberty for granted. The trip to Auschwitz was a difficult but important one, and I think it is a journey everyone should make at least once in their lives. I cannot recommend the whole experience highly enough.