AT THE end of a railway track between two bombed out gas chambers we stood in silence.

Just a few yards from where we stood at least 1.1 million people were murdered by the Nazis in a programme of industrial-scale Genocide.

Just 70 years ago, at the snow covered spot where we stood, one SS doctor looked you up and down and directed you to the left (immediate death) or to the right (slave labour) with the flick of a leather-gloved hand.

Nearly 75 per cent of the young, old, or ill Jews, Poles, gypsies, Russians, and gay people, were sent straight to the gas chambers.

The rest were sent to the horrors of the labour camp and almost certain death by forced labour.

It’s not until you see the baby clothes, the piles of shoes, and the mountains of luggage that you really understand the true horror of the Holocaust.

It is the these personal items, the photographs that were left behind and the sheer size of these death camps that will never leave you.

That is why the Holocaust Educational Trust invited me along with 200 sixth-form students from across the West Midlands.

The government-backed Lessons From Auschwitz Project aims to bring two pupils from every school in the UK with the motto that “hearing is not like seeing”.

The scheme, now in its 11th year, starts at the Polish town of Oswiecim, which was Germanized to become Auschwitz when the Nazis invaded east.

The town was 58 per cent Jewish before the population was wiped out during the war. The one Jew who came back after 1945 died in 2000.

At Auschwitz 1 (the forced labour camp that used to be a Polish army barracks) the students walk under the entrance bearing the replica sign Arbeit Macht Frei, which means work will make you free. The original sing is now in a museum following its theft and recovery.

We pass through the double enforced electric fences that penned in 15,000 prisoners before being taken on guided tours of the barracks where the prisoners were kept between working 15 hour days.

Here we are shown cavernous rooms filled with bowls and hair brushes that the women brought for the “new life” they were promised in the East.

It is here that you see piles of false limbs, baby clothes behind glass, piles of spectacles, and mountains of shoes.

In the films the shoes are all grey. In Auschwitz they are different sizes, in different colours, and mixed together with summer sandals, flip flops, and even high heels.

It’s these shoes and the piles of suitcases that brings it home to the students, some of who are now visibly upset.

The names are painted in white on the old brown cases – Jacob, aged one, Prague