ABOVE the entrance gates to the infamous Auschwitz concentration camp in southern Poland are the words “Arbeit Mach Frei”– Work Makes You Free.

But for so many of the Jews who passed under that archway the only freedom from the tyranny of Hitler’s Nazi Germany lay in death.

Standing here with a group of students, including some from Tynedale, on a trip offered by the Holocaust Educational Trust in the 70th anniversary year of the camp’s liberation, it is hard to process the scale of the atrocities that unfolded at Auschwitz.

Between 1940 and 1945 at least 1.3 million terrified people were deported here.

Over 1,100,000 of them were Jews, around 140,000 were Poles, 23,000 were Roma Gypsies, 15,000 were Soviet prisoners of war and 25,000 were from other ethnic groups.

At least 1.1 million people died in Auschwitz – 90 per cent of them were Jews.

Another five million Jewish people were slaughtered during the genocide that we know today as the Holocaust.

Since 1988, the Holocaust Educational Trust has had one mission – to educate young people from all over the UK about this dark horror of the Second World War and the important lessons that can be learned from it.

Working in schools, universities and in the community, it tries to raise awareness and understanding of the Holocaust, its victims and their stories.

Through its “Lessons from Auschwitz Project”, which 20,000 students and teachers have taken part in over the last 16 years, it offers a four-part course comprising two afternoon seminars and a day visit to the former Nazi extermination camps of Auschwitz I and II.

The fourth and final part of the course enshrines the trust’s all encompassing hope: that future generations will be motivated to speak out against intolerance; that they will feel the weight of their responsibilities to their communities; that they will pass on the lessons they have learnt.

“Hearing is not like seeing” claims the trust when it comes to highlighting what can happen when racism, prejudice and anti-semitism become the acceptable, expected, norm.

And I can vouch for that, for no textbook could ever convey the weight of loss and despair that seems to thicken the very air over Auschwitz as you step down from the coach from Krakow airport.

The trip from Newcastle last Thursday was the 150th Auschwitz visit and a milestone journey in its own right for the trust.

The Polish town of Oswiecim – renamed Auschwitz by the Germans – was like many other communities before the Second World War with a large Jewish sector that made up nearly 60 per cent of its population.

Now, despite there being a synagogue here which has been carefully restored and maintained, no Jews live in the town.

Instead, there are row upon row of cold, dank, red brick blocks once used to house those sent to Auschwitz as part of the Nazi’s so-called “Final Solution”.

Many of these blocks now contain exhibits of photographs and belongings taken from the prisoners who were rounded up from across Europe and crowded into freight wagons, carrying just one small bag of personal possessions.

The fit were put to work on the roads and those not able to work – pregnant women, boys under 15, the elderly and disabled – were put to death.

Their clothes, shoes, sandals and boots, their suitcases marked with their names, combs, kitchen utensils and thousands of pairs of spectacles, are now preserved behind glass for visitors to see.

But it is the exhibit filled with tiny baby clothes that is perhaps the hardest to bear.

And just when you think you’ve seen enough, there is a room filled with more than two tonnes of hair – once red, black and brown, all knotted, now greying.

Next is a corridor of faces, the walls lined with photographs of prisoners taken as they arrived at the camp and recording their name, occupation, date of birth and date of execution.

Then it’s on to the so-called “wall of death” where prisoners were shot, sometimes after weeks of incarceration in cells so cramped they were forced to remain standing up, or after they’d been subjected to experimental testing in the name of science.

Standing outside the former camp headquarters, with a gallows and a gas chamber to the right and left, there’s a stately villa just out of sight behind a line of trees.

This belonged to the camp commandant Rudolph Hoss, who lived there in luxury with his wife and five children while just a few hundred yards away over a million people suffered and died.

But perhaps most disturbing of all is the walk through one of the remaining gas chambers, where up to 700 people would be packed in like cattle before lethal cyanide gas was released into the air.

Their bodies were looted and then burned in purpose-built crematoria, often by members of the Sonderkommando – Jews forced to carry out the slaughter who were ultimately gassed themselves so their work remained secret.

At Auschwitz II, or Auschwitz-Birkenau, a short bus ride away, the first thing that hits you as the watchtower comes in to view is the scale of the site – over 250 acres of land dedicated to murder, torture and suffering.

This camp stretches as far as the eye can see, with hundreds of brick built barracks to the left and even more wooden buildings to the right.

All housed prisoners who, if they escaped the gas chambers, often died within three to six months from disease or starvation.

Prisoners here were fed with bread made with sawdust to accompany the one meal a day of cabbage soup. Those who asked for more were brutally punished.

At the heart of Auschwitz-Birkenau, stands a single freight wagon marking the place where hundreds of thousands of prisoners arrived.

Most were sent one way – straight to the gas chambers – others, if they were strong and resilient, were put to work, but not before they were stripped, shorn and issued with striped uniforms.

The gas chambers and crematoria were blown up by the Nazis prior to the camp’s liberation in an attempt to conceal what had been going on, but the ruins still exist, and it is here that the day ends with a moving service of remembrance, led by Rabbi Raphy Garson.

“It’s shocking and hard to comprehend and to think that it all began with hatred,” said Alice Walton, who is an A-level history student in Year 13 at Hexham’s Queen Elizabeth High School.

“We heard the story of a survivor at the pre-trip seminar and it’s so overwhelming to think he was here and survived this.”

Fellow QEHS history student, Ellie James, said: “He spoke of becoming obsessed with survival and still feels guilty that, as a 14-year-old boy, he wished people would die on the journey here because he so badly needed to sit down.”

Reflecting on the trip, humanities teacher at Prudhoe High School, Sarah Wills, said: “This whole experience has made it so much more real for the students and I think most of us have been surprised by what moved us the most – it’s not necessarily the things you’d expect.”

A-level history student, Rhiannon Stevenson, said: “It wasn’t the gas chamber that was the most disturbing, I think what will stay with me is seeing the hair and the children’s clothes.”

Lily Kroese, who studies philosophy and ethics at Prudhoe High School, said: “It’s so hard to imagine what it must have been like for people; it’s so overwhelming.”

On returning to school the students will be tasked with coming up with an innovative way to relay the key lessons they have learned to fellow pupils – whether that be through a photography exhibition, memorial service, seminar or assembly presentation – as they become Holocaust Educational Trust ambassadors in their own communities.

For them all the horrifying statistics of Auschwitz now have a very human meaning.