Video: Shropshire youngsters take harrowing visit to Auschwitz

Carefree and self-confident, they quietly make small talk among themselves as they shuffle forward, anxious not to be queuing too long in the rain.

The faces of the teenagers coming out of the building, though, tell a different story. Each one looksvisibly shaken. One young girl tenderly comforts her friend as they come to terms with what they have just seen.

They are the lucky ones, and they know it. The youngsters, including several from Shropshire, are visiting one of the gas chambers at the Auschwitz II-Birkenau death camp.

They leave only too aware that many thousands of people who went through before them were not so fortunate.

For them there was no exit door.

"The bit that really got to me was seeing the scratch marks in the gas chambers," says 17-year-old Tom Hopkins, a pupil at Oldbury Wells School in Bridgnorth.

"That affected me. It's really unthinkable that people actually did these things. It's really hard to take in."

Alex Hughes, aged 17, of Sir John Talbot's Technology College in Whitchurch, says there was little that could have prepared him for the experience.

"When we went into the gas chambers I found it hard to breathe, I was so shocked.

"We were constantly reassured and told there was nothing to worry about," says a tearful Chaim Ferster, as he recalls the day his family was told to report to the sports stadium in the small Polish town of Sosnowiec.

The warning signs had been there. It had been almost three years since the Nazis had occupied Poland, and the treatment of Jews had become progressively worse. Chaim's father had been forced to clean the toilets at the family business after it was taken over by the state, and a German manager appointed.

The casual murder of Jews became part of daily life, and in one particularly traumatic incident 300 Jews were forced into their synagogue which was then set alight.

But despite their appalling treatment at the hands of their occupiers, they dutifully complied. "We wanted so badly to believe the Germans, that we allowed ourselves to be duped and willingly obeyed the orders," he says.

"This was the last time I saw my mother, she was sent to Auschwitz."

Mr Ferster, now 92, was guest speaker at Sir John Talbot's Technology College in Whitchurch, where he told sixth-formers about his experiences as a Jewish prisoner at the hands of the Nazis.

On this occasion, 20-year-old Chaim avoided selection, but it was only a matter of time. By the end of the year, his younger sister Manya was taken away.

"In every home, at least one family member had been sent to Auschwitz," he says.

"In the streets, you could find little children searching and crying, 'Mummy, Daddy, where are you, where are you?', to no avail. Hours later, German trucks were driving around picking up these unfortunate children and sending them to Auschwitz."

It was in March 1943 when his time was up. The Germans closed the sewing machine factory where he had been working, and he was taken to the Markstadt concentration camp.

"I met a few people who I had known back in Sosnowiec. They told me how terrible life there was, but after two or three days of doing nothing, I was sent to another nearby camp called Klettendorf . For the first few days I couldn't eat the food, a watery sugar-beat soup, but I soon learned to take what was given."

It was in September 1944, with the Allies advancing through Europe that Chaim was taken to Auschwitz.

"This was extremely frightening, I was shocked," he says. "We arrived in cattle trucks in the middle of the night after a 24-hour journey, with very little food. When the doors slid open, the quietness and stillness made me shudder. There was a heavy smell of carbolic. "As I looked around, I could see electrified barbed wire for miles and miles. Every 10 metres or so, large light bulbs lit up rows of barracks as far as the eye could see. In the distance I could see flames coming out of chimneys on all four sides. I did not realise it at the time, but these were the flames from the crematoria."

It was his skills as a sewing machine repair man which was his passport out of the camp. Six weeks later he was transported to Niederorschel in Germany, where he worked in a factory assembling wings for aeroplanes.

"As engineers, the Germans needed us and as a result there was a more relaxed atmosphere with regards to discipline," he said.

With the Allies fast approaching, the Germans closed the camp and forced the inmates to march towards Buchenwald, on a journey which lasted about eight days. Some died along the way, others who were struggling to complete the route, were shot on the spot.

On arrival at Buchenwald, rumours circulated that inmates were being transported out of the camp to be shot, so when inmates were assembled for a march the next day, he feared the worst. "Suddenly, a number of American planes appeared on the horizon and all of the German guards started to run," he says.

"A few hours later, American tanks drove through the gates, soldiers were shouting 'you're free, you're free'. The soldiers were throwing large blocks of chocolate. Many of us were sick, as we hadn't had such rich food in years.

"Had they arrived a day later, I wouldn't be here. I would have been sent out to be shot."

Several weeks after liberation, he was lying on his bunk one day when his sister turned up. Manya, who had not been seen since she was taken away in 1942, had been liberated by the British at Belsen.

From about 40 people in his family, only Chaim, Manya and their cousin Regina Bornstein survived.

"You can learn about it and see it in films, but you can't feel it until you come here."

The trip, made up of around 200 youngsters aged 16 to 18 from across the north-west Midlands, has been organised by the Holocaust Educational Trust, which is determined that the horrors of Auschwitz should not be forgotten with the passage of time.

And while many of us may think we are reasonably knowledgeable about the horrors of Adolf Hitler's nightmarish rule over Europe during the 1930s and early '40s, it really is only until you get there and see it at first hand can you really comprehend the scale of the inhumanity.

It is impossible to stand on the railway platform at Birkenau, where camp guards would arbitrarily decide who would work and who would die, without trying to imagine the thoughts of new arrivals at the camp. After days being packed into sweltering, stinking cattle trucks, would they have felt a sense of relief in finally arriving at their destination?

Auschwitz guide Waldema Tanski paints a vivid picture of how everything was planned with clockwork precision, and nothing was left to chance.

He points to a jar of ashes, which has been preserved as a memorial to the 1.1 million who perished at the camp.

"This was a factory, a factory of death, and this is the end product," he says drily.

"People came in the one end, and 40 or 50 minutes, later, this is the product that came out of the other end."

He explains how the I G Farbenindustrie chemical works (now BASF) opened a new plant a few miles away, to take advantage of the ready supply of forced labour.

"They would pay the SS half the going wage, so it was quite lucrative for all concerned," he says. Incidentally, I G Farbenindustrie is the company which manufactured the Zyklon B crystals used for the gas chambers.

"To begin with, they would gas them using the exhaust fumes of cars, but petrol was expensive, so they were looking for a cheaper, more efficient way to do it."

He shows the group the small room at the original Auschwitz I camp where the Nazis carried out their first experiment with the Zyklon B cyanide poison gas crystals. The crystals were originally developed as a pesticide, emitting poisonous fumes when they reach room temperature, but in 1941 they started using them for genocide.

"The Nazis didn't know how many crystals they had to put in, the didn't want to waste them, so they began with a small amount," he says.

"However, when they went back several hours later, they found that only half of them were dead, so they put in some more crystals.

"Eventually, they found they needed five to seven kilogrammes to kill 1,500 people in around 20 minutes."

It was the discovery of this new tool of genocide which prompted the Nazis to create the purpose-built gas chambers at Birkenau, and was used in the extermination of around a million prisoners.

Equally disturbing is the room containing two tons of women's hair. While the museum is fairly relaxed about photography, this is one of the rooms where cameras are strictly forbidden.

"Every prisoner who came here had to have their hair shaved off, for the women this was particularly humiliating," says Waldemar.

"They used it to produce a material called haircloth, which was used to make clothing - socks and the lining of German soldiers' trousers. And the company which used the haircloth in its clothing? Hugo Boss."

The danger of talking about the industrial scale of the atrocities, of course, is that one loses sight of the individual tragedy behind each individual who lost their life.

It is the rooms filled with the personal possessions: keys, photographs, clothing, ruthlessly sorted by the Nazis at a warehouse complex called "Canada" which brings home the full horror of what happened. There is a cabinet filled with immaculately preserved children's clothing, which had been confiscated from the tiny youngsters who were sent to their deaths.

There is a pile of suitcases, each bearing its owners' name. To keep peace in the camp, the Nazis peddled the wicked lie that they were being resettled in new homes, and were told to bring their own provisions in a suitcase before beginning their journey of death.

Hundreds of pairs of shoes are piled in another display; the suede brogues, the bright red sandals, every pair tells a story. In the sauna, where the Nazis would steam clean the clothes ready for recycling, there is a poignant display with hundreds of personal photographs: the smartly dressed young couple, who appear to be celebrating a special occasion, the bride beaming beneath her wedding veil as she raises a glass of wine, the formal family portraits. Who were these people? Nobody knows, their stories perished with them at the hands of the SS.

Joe Foster, aged 18, who also goes to Oldbury Wells, says: "There's been a lot of stuff to try and take in, the scale of some of the things that have been said today.

"It's quite hard to try and imagine what happened. I thought it might have been a bit more distant in terms of producing facts and numbers, but it's the things like the suitcases that brought home what actually happened to individuals, when you see the clothes and glasses.

"And seeing the bunk houses for the privileged prisoners, that was quite hard to take in, really," adds Joe, who lives in Perton.

Privileged prisoners? While the vast majority of the Jews starved in squalid conditions, a small number known as the Sonderkommando lived in comparative comfort, being given proper bunk beds, decent food rations, and even treats such as alcohol. But this wasn't an act of humanity on the part of the Nazis – it was to keep them fit to do one of the most degrading jobs of all.

"The German guards didn't want to pull the bodies out of the gas chambers, so they got Jews to do it. It was a way of humiliating them," says Waldemar.

"It was a hard, heavy job, so they had to keep them fit and strong."

And the special treatments were sadistically used as to divide and rule the camps, being withdrawn for the slightest hint of disobedience.

"The prisoners who had these privileges didn't want to lose them, so they could be even more ruthless than the Nazi German guards," says Waldemar.