A Government-backed initiative aims to send every school to see the horrors of the death camp at Auschwitz, in Poland. The Northern Echo's Jim Entwistle joined the region's students on their harrowing journey.

A NORMAL school trip, or so it seems, as a fleet of buses trundles through the small Polish town of Oswiecim.

But there is an air of apprehension on the buses, a quiet contemplation and not the usual excited teenage banter.

The students, 130 in all, from all over the region, are not visiting an outdoor education centre or a tokenistic French seaside town. They are visiting the site of one of humanity's darkest hours - a place where as many as three million people met their untimely death.

The camps at Auschwitz-Birkenau have been preserved, largely as they were, to provide a reminder of the destruction caused by racial hatred.

The exhibits are unabating in their frequency and unimaginable in their origin. A mountain of faded human hair, shorn from prisoners to be used in clothing; the tangle of a thousand spectacles, a sea of shoes; but perhaps the most striking thing about the camp is the silence. It would be peaceful if you closed your eyes.

But to see the expanse, to imagine the number of people to whom this was "home", and to think of the noise that the thousands would generate, the mournful chatter, the barked commands, the trains, steaming in and out, the bullets. The silence hits home.

An unnerving sense of order, regimentation, and clinical murder, Auschwitz was the embodiment of the Nazis' final solution, and presents a pronounced contrast with the raging chaos of the war. A war being fought to preserve this camp's very existence.

At Auschwitz, instruments of death are everywhere you turn. A gallows pole stands in the shadow at the end of a barrack house corridor. In the courtyard outside, black wrist shackles dangle, swinging gently in the wind, casting shadows onto the killing wall, where executions were carried out, still pocked with bullet marks.

Like many taking part, Kimberly Dodson, of the Queen Elizabeth Sixth Form College, in Darlington, is left stunned by the scenes.

"We cannot forget these people," she says. "And it's all very well saying that, but if we don't pass this message on, we are not doing their lives justice."

Katie Hall, of Teesside High School, said: "It affected me most when I saw the small shoes and children's clothing."

Natalie Lowes, also of Queen Elizabeth Sixth Form College, said: "I was shocked. It was so quiet. It's important for as many people to know about this so they can tell others."

Towards the end of the day, the students gather between the rubble of two of the gas chambers, left as they were found when the Red Army liberated the camp in 1945. Leading a memorial service, Rabbi Barry Marcus, of the Holocaust Educational Trust, says the students must always remember what they are seeing, and communicate that message to others.

"Who here would tell me they are not unique?" he said. "We are all unique, but so were they. They, like you and I, had families, had hopes and dreams. But they were snuffed out."

And as the sun dipped beneath the treetops, bringing with it a sudden chill in the air, the group trudges back to the buses, placing candles along the railway lines.

Within a few hours, each one would be in their home, fed and asleep. If only the millions, the deserted, the dead and debased could have had that same comfort.