A BITTERLY cold wind cuts across the ruins of Auschwitz-Birkenau’s barracks.

The train tracks that stretch off into the horizon from the watchtower at the entrance are covered in snow.

Students hidden under several layers of coats, hats, gloves and scarves gaze around the barren landscape as they trek the long walk to the final part of their day-long tour of the former Nazi concentration camp in Poland.

It is minus 13 degrees Celsius, with a wind-chill that occasionally sends the temperature plummeting even further to minus 24.

The Holocaust Education Trust bring secondary school and college pupils from across the South West here every February to learn about the Holocaust in a way that a classroom cannot teach them.

The pupils then bring what they've learned back to Britain and become ambassadors for the trust.

Due to the extreme weather, we spend more time on this year's tour in the barracks-turned-museums of the main Auschwitz site and less time in the unforgiving open air of Birkenau, where it is simply too dangerous to stay outside for long.

As our group, made up of HET members, teachers, students and this Adver journalist, shiver and shuffle their way into a building formerly used as a disinfection chamber, we think of the former residents of this camp who had to endure these treacherous conditions wearing little more than a thin, ragged uniform.

This was one of several inhumane indignities that Holocaust victims had to endure, which we learned about in detail during our visit.

While being guided from building to building, we are told of how millions of people - mainly Jewish, but also Sinti, Roma, Soviet prisoners-of-war, disabled, gay, and Polish Catholic - were brought here under false pretences, how the fittest were put to work and how the rest were exterminated with horrifying efficiency.

We see their hair, their glasses, their suitcases, their kitchenware, their shoes - and their prosthetic limbs.

We wander under the Arbeit Macht Frei gate and past barbed wire fences, we walk into the gas chamber shower rooms and have the privilege of walking back out alive.

Our time here is spent going from one extreme emotion to another - shock, horror, nausea, misery, anger, disgust, disbelief, despair.

Though our guide is very helpful and the exhibits are extremely well-done, it all feels quite relentless.

Moving rapidly through so many examples of unimaginable suffering eventually made me go numb to it all.

The full extent of this awful tragedy sank in slowly when I was thinking about it on the coach back to the airport, on the plane back to Britain, and at my desk at work while trying to find the right words to express what I’d witnessed.

Exploring the former Nazi concentration camp in person is the best way to fully understand the scale and gravity of the Holocaust - doing so is vitally important in an age where anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial are still worryingly-common.

There are many sights that linger in my memory, but Block 27 in particular stands out.

From the outside it looks the same as Auschwitz’s other blocks, but inside is a modern exhibition funded by the state of Israel called ‘Shoah’ (Hebrew for ‘Catastrophe’).

The exhibition is simple, stark, concise, and devastatingly effective - it’s a microcosm of all the causes and consequences of this atrocity.

Its rooms feature pre-war footage of Jews laughing and celebrating in their everyday lives, audio and subtitles of Hitler’s hateful speeches which de-humanised an entire race in the minds of many, white walls that are empty save for fragments of sketches made by children at the camps, an enormous book featuring the names of every single Jew who was killed during the Holocaust, and videos of survivors’ testimonies.

The schoolchildren who got the chance to go on this trip, including Izzy Archer and Becky Deverell from Royal Wootton Bassett Academy, will never forget that day.

Izzy said: “It’s not normally an experience people get to have, we were very lucky.

“I couldn’t go into the shower area, it’s a lot more intense than you expect.

“You cannot appreciate what you have or understand their suffering until you have been there physically.

“I’m a student ambassador for a student rights program so I was invited to come here and I enjoyed it, if that’s the right word.”

Becky said: “I run a book group at the school about Holocaust literature and I wanted to get a sense of what it was like first-hand,

“I thought I’d understand their testimonies better by being in the same environment, it was enlightening."