Students from Marling Sixth Form have returned from a deeply moving and educational one day visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland, as part of the Holocaust Educational Trust’s Lessons from Auschwitz Project.
This programme brings people to Auschwitz with the intention of learning from the past to understand the future.
Students Eve, Theo, Henry and Eva reflected on the way it made them feel and how it changed their perspective on their own lives and the world we live in.
Eve Fletcher
Visiting Auschwitz is an experience that words can barely capture.
Walking through one of history’s darkest chapters, you feel a heavy silence settle over you, one that deeply strengthens your sense of empathy and gratitude, and one that I will carry with me forever – a silence not of peace but of mourning. The air in certain rooms feels thick with memory, with the weight of stories left untold. Every building, every artefact, every pathway held echoes of lives unjustly taken.
One of the most striking and emotional sights, at least for me, was the room filled with victims’ personal belongings. Among them, I was particularly drawn to the massive display of pots and pans—everyday objects that once belonged to families. These were not just utensils; they were symbols of home, of love, of the ordinary rhythms of life. Each bright, scraped pot and worn pan had once been used to cook meals, to nourish children, to bring families together around a table. These objects spoke of warmth and normalcy, now stripped away in the cruellest fashion.
I imagined the people who had carried these pots with them on their forced journeys to Auschwitz, still holding onto hope that they would one day cook for their families again. They clung to the belief that survival was possible, just as my mother and father and little brother would have done. But in the end, these pots and pans became relics of lives never allowed to continue. It made me think of my own family, of the simple yet profound rituals we take for granted – Sunday dinners, cooking together, big extended family meals, the smell of food filling our home. How easily we overlook the importance of such moments until we are confronted with their absence.
In this room there was also a display full of baby shoes. It was a sight so overwhelming that I struggled to hold back my tears, let alone speak. Tiny, worn shoes, some scuffed from playful steps, some smaller and in better condition – barely worn or grown into. They belonged to children who never had the chance to grow up. Each pair represented a stolen future – a child who might have learned to read, to dance, to love, but whose life was extinguished before it had truly begun.
Standing there, I felt the full weight of what was lost. It is one thing to read numbers in history books, but quite another to stand before thousands of shoes and realize that each one belonged to a real child, to real parents who loved them. I thought of my brother. The laughter, the curiosity, the boundless energy when we were growing up – and I struggled to comprehend how anyone could justify the destruction.
These rooms were not just displays; they were warnings. They reminded me that the cruelty of the past is never as far away as we would like to believe. Prejudice, hatred, and dehumanization still exist in the world today. Seeing those pots and pans, those tiny shoes, the symbols of family that unites every person in the world. I felt an urgent responsibility to ensure that their stories are not forgotten – that such horrors are never repeated.
Leaving Auschwitz, I carried with me a deepened sense of gratitude for the ordinary moments of life and a commitment to remember those who were denied them.
Theo Jones
In the moment at Auschwitz I found it hard to comprehend the reality of it.
We learn about the fact and figures, but really being there you couldn’t comprehend that reality behind the facts. How could people do this to one another? In the popular imagination, it’s almost as if Auschwitz is a fantasy place where bad things happened and then you move on, but being there you literally cannot comprehend the reality of it.
When people have asked me how the experience was, I said that there was so much to feel at any one time that you felt nothing at all – until you randomly started crying.
The trip made me reflect on the effects that hatred can have on a society. Individual people didn’t matter, it was a single label that condemned you to death.
That was the effect of hate going unchecked in a society. Hatred wasn’t just a state-sanctioned thing, it was a grassroots system that grew from popular complacency.
This made me reflect on how hatred affects our society. There are daily instances on the news of prejudices and discrimination in society. Grassroot hatred starts in our daily lives, and most of us just move on and say that this is just how it is. But this is a popular acceptance of hatred that allows it to slowly grow unchecked. My concern for the future is that people will continue to allow small acts of hatred to infiltrate their minds and lives.
Henry Wilton
What struck me most were particular shoes that stood out amongst the piles and piles of grey, worn-out footwear that all looked the same.
It was the few different pairs scattered through the piles that showed me that the Nazis hadn’t completely succeeded in removing signs of individuality. One pair that stood out to me the most were nearly pure white and looked extremely out of place compared to the other shoes that were there.
When I saw these shoes, I imagined that their owner had taken pride in keeping them clean as a mark of who they were as an individual. Sadly, it is far more likely that they had been murdered quickly and so didn’t have the chance to muddy their footwear. This was just one of many heartbreaking signs of the efficiency of the camp. That is what I think is the most important lesson to remember in today’s world from the Holocaust – how quick and brutally efficient genocide can be. So we must hold those in power to account, at every opportunity, to prevent ideas of mass extermination spreading, and we must protest against them immediately if they do.
Eva O’Rourke
I expected tears, and I expected a rush of emotions, but instead I felt nothing. There was nothing: no feeling, no thoughts and no emotions. Not until a few days later.
It was like I was watching another lifetime. Instead of it being like any other museum of just learning and interesting facts, it was surreal and horrifying. It was like my eyes were touching all the lives affected, while my body felt like it was in a different room. I felt helpless and it burdened my every thought.
As I ventured through the corridors, an array of photos hung from the wall of victims of the holocaust. Their eyes felt like they were seeing into my soul. I felt their fear from the photos and this humanisation struck me most as I felt forced into a time so close yet so separate from me. It forced me to see the victims individually and consider their livelihood, their personalities and their aspirations – all the same experiences I related to.
I firstly take away gratitude, that I can be a viewer and a learner. I can be someone who visits a museum on something that didn’t affect me, I can be someone who can’t even imagine myself in those circumstances. Yet, I also know that’s it’s important to not just be an observer, but someone who feels the human experience.
In my French lessons we had been studying Un Sac Des Billes, a story about the fate of a Jewish family during the Second World War. What I previously saw as an A Level text, I now understand as the story of people’s lives. I’ll never read that book the same again.
