I shared the experience with four South Tyneside students who made the trip recently.

It's difficult to try to explain how you feel once you've been to Auschwitz.

Everyone has heard of the Holocaust, even if some people choose to ignore it.

But I don't believe anyone can imagine the horrors of Auschwitz without actually seeing the bleak, expansive space where the worst atrocities of the Nazi regime took place.

There's a strange morose feeling which takes over your senses and you know, without any history lessons, something terrible happened there.

I travelled to Auschwitz with the Holocaust Educational Trust (HET) as part of the Lessons from Auschwitz Project.

Every year sixth form and college students travel to the former Nazi camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland where around 1,100,000 Jews, 140,000 Poles, 20,000 gypsies, 10,000 Soviet prisoners of war, German criminals, gays and other 'anti-social elements' were sent between 1940 and 1945.

The project, now in its 10th year, is based on the premise that 'hearing is not like seeing' and aims to increase knowledge and understanding of the Holocaust.

The four-part Lessons from Auschwitz Project focuses around the one-day visit and was preceded by a seminar in Newcastle where around 200 students and teachers met survivor Zigi Shipper.

On Tuesday, the students will meet once again to discuss the trip before coming up with ideas on how to pass their experience on to their peers and around the community.

When we arrived in Krakow, we were taken straight to the small Polish city of Oswiecim (Auschwitz in German).

Before the war, 58 per cent of its citizens were Jewish. Now, none of them are.

We visited a Jewish cemetery which gave a glimpse of the normality before the Third Reich invaded.

The gravestones – which the Nazi soldiers had used to pave the streets – were all marked with names and symbols giving some indication of that person's standing in the community.

The cemetery, which had the stones returned after the war, was evidence of natural deaths – a stark contrast to where we were heading.

We got back on the bus and as we arrived at Auschwitz I – the concentration camp – there were gasps from the students. It was the sheer size of it.

So it was an even greater shock when we found out the death camp Birkenau, or Auschwitz II, was 25 times bigger.

The barracks have been turned into mini museums, each housing their own horrors. As you walk through the gate, you are greeted with the mocking words "Arbeit macht Frei" – work brings freedom.

Photographs around the museum show families being separated, prisoners being sent to their deaths, the mutilated victims of Josef Mengele's experiments and starved, emaciated bodies.

Then there was the hair and possessions found in Auschwitz I after the camp was liberated in 1945.

To see piles of real human hair which filled half a room gave me shivers.

Then there were the hundreds of pairs of spectacles and shoes, but it was when we saw the everyday belongings, like chamber pots and kitchen utensils, which really got the better of me.

Many of these people thought they were coming to Auschwitz for a life, and the majority were led to their deaths.

In the same building there are piles of suitcases with names and dates of birth on them. Thousands of identities wiped out.

Our guide told us people have returned to the museum and seen their case in the cabinet, but followed that up by pointing out a case belonging to a one-year-old, someone very unlikely to have survived.

Having young nieces it was something which really struck a chord and as we were shown tiny baby clothes and toys which were left without owners, all I wanted was to go home and hug them.

Everyone had different moments during the visit which affected them. This was definitely one of mine.

Block 11, the "Death Block", was a so-called camp 'jail'.

Tiny standing cells, in which up to a dozen prisoners would be forced to stay in night after night while working during the day, or suffocation cells used as torture.

Bizarrely, "trials" also took place here – with up to 200 individuals sentenced to death in just two hours.

It was also the building where the Zyklon B gas was first tried out.

Carly Wilson, 17, an A-level student at South Tyneside College, from Marsden, South Shields, said: "Everyone should have a little bit of knowledge about it. They need to see the hundreds of shoes and glasses.

"These things had a different impact on everyone. Seeing the standing chambers in Block 11 got me – I didn't know about stuff like that."

For 17-year-old music student Anthony Dunn, as a twin, with sister Emily back home in Whiteleas, South Shields, he was shocked to find out about Dr Mengele's experiments which often left twins mutilated or dead.

He added: "That was a bit weird. To think if I was there, that would have been happening to me."

Nautical lecturer Tommy Proctor, a father-of-two and grandfather-of-four from South Shields, added: "To see all the spectacles, and the hair, to know they took all these from people and were gong to use it themselves was just incredible."

St Joseph's RC Comprehensive student Emma Czestochowski, 17, from Harton Villlage, South Shields, added: "When I was in the room with the model of the gas chambers and saw all the canisters used for the gas, that upset me.

"We were given a poem to read before we saw the human hair. Walking around that part of the museum was chilling. It had a weird atmosphere."

Joshua Hall, 16, who also attends St Joseph's, said: "The thing that had the biggest effect on me was seeing the children's clothes and a girl's doll.

"Just thinking how could they do that to children? They were totally innocent."

The visit ended with a visit to the site's gas chamber and crematorium before we were taken back to Birkenau. This is the place most people associate with Auschwitz and, in turn, the Holocaust.

The vast land area is unbelievable, but when you discover this area held more than 90,000 prisoners – more than all the men in South Tyneside – it is terrifying what ignorance and hatred can do.

As we walked to the crematoria and gas chambers, which the Nazis destroyed in an attempt to hide what they had done, the temperature dropped from cold to icy.

As we looked at pools filled with the ashes of their victims, there was a strange smell and a mist hanging in the air.

As darkness approached, we gathered at the end of the train track as Rabbi Barry Marcus led us in prayer and students gave readings.

Among the students chosen to read were Joshua and Emma.

Joshua, from South Shields, who is studying biology, chemistry, history and critical thinking, said: "It was good to play a bit of a bigger part in the day but it was hard.

"I had a line where I had to say 'and behind my back 3,000 people were put to death'. It was difficult to read that particular line."

Emma said: "I wasn't sure if I was going to be able to do it but it felt like the right thing to do."

Rabbi Marcus, from Central Synagogue in London and the man behind the one-day visits to Auschwitz programme, put the scale of death into perspective.

He explained we would have to suffer a 9/11 every day for 500 days or a 7/7 every hour for three-and-a-half years to match the human toll.

After a prayer, sang beautifully in Hebrew, we all stood in silence befor lighting a candle and leaving them on rail tracks in memory of more than a million people killed on this site.

Carly, who is studying English language, literature and psychology, said: "The moment which brought it all home to me was when we were walking along the infamous train tracks with our candles.

"I looked up and saw the entrance, the one everyone associated with Auschwitz-Birkenau, and it was dark and creepy."

Anthony added: "I was moved by the Rabbi's prayer, and everyone walking back up the tracks with their candles in silence was a good way to pay our respects."

Emma, who is studying history, maths and biology, said: "I had to study the Holocaust as part of my AS exam.

"It was a lot of statistics, but going round the place stopped you thinking of it like that. It stops being statistics.

"You cannot comprehend it without going there."

Auschwitz is a World Heritage Site. It's kept, not just as a museum but as a reminder of the very worst humanity can do.

A scar that can never heal, a constant warning of how humanity can turn on itself.