It's the hair that does it.
Piles and piles of human hair, stacked high and long, two obscene tonnes of it, behind a long glass wall in Block 4 at Auschwitz concentration camp, writes Lee Marlow
There is blonde hair. Brown hair. Grey hair. Hair from mothers. Hair from daughters. Hair still tied in pig-tails.
It's a grim mosaic of stolen human identity. Yet hair like this was sold every week, for pennies, for Zlotys, to make dynamite fuse or blankets.
The hair survives. The people they took it from perished long ago. This is the story of Auschwitz.
And then you move from the hair to the suitcases; mountains of old, brown-leather suitcases, kids' suitcases many of them, neatly labelled by their parents as if they were going on a school trip or to the seaside.
You can still read their names – Elsie Meier, Franz Engle, L Bermann of Hamburg. They arrived at Auschwitz and never saw those suitcases again.
The suitcases were important. They represented hope, a sense that they were going somewhere, that they may have lost their homes and their jobs, but they still had a future.
It was a cruel lie. They didn't have a future. They were going to Auschwitz. The pile of suitcases – unclaimed 70 years on, behind a glass case, pulling on heartstrings – tells its own story.
Auschwitz is an important lesson from history; a story told in big numbers – the 1.3 million people who were killed here, 1.1 million of them Jews, a 400-acre site originally built as a Polish army barracks and transformed by the Nazis into the world's biggest and most efficient death camp.
Men, women and children were murdered here on a callous and industrial scale. Six hundred thousand people now visit this small Polish town every year. It has become one of the country's most popular tourist attractions.
But it's the small things, the routine detail buried beneath the big facts, that make the biggest impression, agree Wreake Valley students Charlotte Walton, 16, and Lucy Harper, 17
"I expected it to be harrowing, but I didn't expect it to be quite as bleak as it was," says Charlotte. "I know what happened here but seeing it for yourself – the hair, the suitcases, and then standing outside during the ceremony and looking at the gates – it's so much more vivid."
Today is about re-humanising the story of the Holocaust; colouring in the gaps of a history lesson we all know, giving life to millions of people robbed of theirs 70 years ago.
It begins at 5am at East Midlands Airport, a yawning queue of 250 students from Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire schools.
They will make a 2,000-mile round trip to southern Poland, to spend the day at the Auschwitz-Birkenau camps and return home.
Door to door, it takes the best part of 20 hours. It's the longest and most exhausting school trip they will ever make.
But what they see today – through bleary, often tear-stained, eyes – will stay with them forever.
It begins in the small town of Oswiecim. We arrive as the town is waking up. A street market is in full swing, old men gather in groups and swap animated stories. Buses come and go. There's a busy Lidl. A busy petrol station. A normal Polish town, an abnormal history.
Few people notice the long line of students from the English heartlands making their way to the town's Jewish cemetery.
Oswiecim became Auschwitz when the Nazis invaded in 1939. They had big plans for this little town. Before the Second World War, 12,000 people lived in Oswiecim, 7,000 of them Jewish. Now the town of Oswiecim has a population of 40,000. None are Jewish.
The town's last remaining Jewish resident, Szymon Klueger, died in 2000. He is buried, behind locked gates, in the town's Jewish cemetery. There is no-one left to tend his grave.
Amid row after row of old gravestones, Klueger's is the only one that marks a final resting place. The original gravestones, hundreds and hundreds of them, were taken by the Nazis, uprooted and used as paving stones. This is the story of Auschwitz.
Ted Wright, 18, of Bosworth College, finds that hard to stomach. "It's so degrading, taking up gravestones to make paths, so they could walk on them," he says. "They showed them as much respect in death as they did life."
It's a short ride from the cemetery to Auschwitz-Birkenau. This is the biggest of the Nazi concentration camps, comprising three camps: Auschwitz 1, the main concentration camp; Birkenau (Auschwitz 2) the death camp, and Auschwitz 3, the labour camp, whose imposing twin chimneys still dominate the skyline.
Why here? It was a simple matter of geography. There was a sizeable Jewish population in Poland and there were Jewish communities scattered across western and eastern Europe.
Auschwitz, thanks to its central location and its good rail network, was the ideal location for what Himmler described as the "final solution of the Jewish question in Europe."
We arrive where they arrived 70 years ago; a pair of imposing iron gates and a big sign declaring Arbeit Macht Frei. It means Work will set you free.
It was a cruel, mocking lie, says our Polish guide. They worked. And then they were killed. This was the story of Auschwitz.
New arrivals were greeted by the sounds of the house band; a rag-tag group of striped-uniform wearing prisoners deluding frightened inmates with the strains of Bach. It was supposed to be a sign that life here was not going to be as bad as they feared. Another lie.
The entire camp was built on murder and lies. Each block had a boiler. The boilers didn't work. Gas chambers were squirreled away among the trees, away from prying eyes.
The so-called hospital was little more than an execution bay. No-one came out alive.
The hospital was overseen by the sadistic Josef Mengele, the notorious Angel of Death, the doctor who did experiments without anaesthetic, sterilising patients with minor complaints so their blood and genes would never be passed on.
Josef Perl, a young Jewish Czech, arrived at Auschwitz in 1942. He was 13. He had already witnessed SS guards shooting his mother and four sisters.
Arriving at Auschwitz, he remembers the wagon doors opening and a smart man in a white coat running a cold eye down the line, deciding who would live and who would die.
"He would wave his riding crop and say 'links orde rechst' (left or right) with a casual flick of his wrist."
Those on the right were deemed strong enough to work. The ones in the longer queue to the left were sent to their death.
"I could hear the screams of children calling for their mothers," he said. His body was covered in goose pimples.
The commandant walked away. It was Josef Mengele.
The tour continues. We move from one block to another, pummeled by stories of unimaginable cruelty and murder.
There's the courtyard, where prisoners were removed to be shot in the back of the head. Tiny prison cells – a yard wide by a yard long – where four inmates would be forced to spend days on end.
We walk along corridors lined with photographs; men one side, women the other, all wearing the same clothes, the same expression, virtually the same dates underneath. Arrived 26/1/44. Died 15/3/44.
Few survived longer than three months.
Then we reach the displays. The wall of hair. The shoes. A mountain of steel-rimmed spectacles. A room full of enamel basins and cups, tins of shoe polish. Toothbrushes and hair brushes. A cheese grater.
"It was the cheese grater that I'll remember," says Sam Hooper, 18, of Ashby School. "It just seemed so surreal – not just that someone had brought it here, but that amid all this death and horror, 70 years on, it had survived."
Within the camp perimeter lived Auschwitz commandant, Rudolf Höess. He resided in a grand house with his wife and five children. His day would start with a family breakfast. Then he would walk the short distance to the camp, order the extermination of thousands of innocent people, and return home for dinner and perhaps a trip to theatre.
Killing them, he said during his trial at Nuremberg, was never a problem. It was burning them, disposing the bodies, that was more troublesome.
Auschwitz's first gas chamber was here, a small former bomb shelter on the edge of the camp.
Inmates were ushered in, naked, told they would get a warm shower, and slowly suffocated to death by inhaling Zyklon B, a cyanide-based rat poison. Victims were found half-squatting, their skin reportedly covered in welts, some foaming at the mouth or bleeding from the ears.
The gas chamber remains. We walk through it in silence, the gloom pierced by tiny shafts of light from small holes in the ceiling. No-one needs to tell us what they were for. There's just enough light to see the claw marks on the wall.
The death chamber is 20 yards from Höess's front door. His children could see it from their bedroom windows.
This was the prototype. Höess designed bigger chambers at Birkenau, capable of killing 5,000 people every day.
Remember, says our guide, this didn't happen thousands of years ago, in a far-off land. "This happened here," he says, "in the middle of Europe, in the time of your grandparents."
Höess was hanged at Auschwitz in 1947, from gallows constructed at a specially selected spot equidistant between his home and the camp's first gas chamber.
If Auschwitz the concentration camp is chilling for everything you can see, nearby Birkenau, the death camp, is chilling for everything you can't. It's a sprawling 400 acre site, its eerie, malevolent atmosphere somehow managing to spoil a beautiful spring day.
Birkenau was divided into two; dissected by a watch tower and train track which brought Jews from all over Europe to their death. Women on the left, in brick-built barracks. Men on the right, in wooden sheds.
Conditions were dire. There were 1,000 men to each shed, 20 latrines in each one. One toilet for every 50 men. The camp was over-run with disease and rats. Inmates were often too ill to keep the rats away, says our guide. The unlucky ones were slowly eaten alive.
Punch-drunk and drained from the sights and stories of a relentlessly harrowing day, the students gather outside for a final ceremony.
Around them are the remnants of the death chambers; the birch trees that shielded them from public view, the sheds where men died in their own faeces, footpaths built from the ashes of those who were gassed, then cremated.
As the sun fades and the birds sing – it's not true that there are no birds at Birkenau – Rabbi Barry Marcus, a big South African-born London-based Rabbi, takes the service.
In this cemetery of 1.3 million people, Jews were killed because they were different, he says, because they were Jews.
But it won't always be Jews. Tomorrow, who knows who will pay the price for being different? Those who forget history, he says, are those who are destined to repeat it.
There's a minute's silence. If we were to take a minute's silence for every single person who died here, it would take two years.
We all light candles, and walk back along the train track. Free to leave, drained and humbled, we wonder how on earth it could have happened. This is the story of Auschwitz.
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