We are on our way back from two days away in Poland. The main purpose of our trip was to visit Auschwitz. To say that it was harrowing would be an understatement. The things that really stuck in my mind was the mountain of children's shoes, taken off no doubt by the mothers knowing that their child was about to be slaughtered, the suitcases packed in fearful hope, the massive heap of human hair hacked off before death, the piles of spectacles, the every day personal items like shaving brushes and combs, the individual photos of men and women with their hair shaved off and the dates they arrived and the date they died, very few of them surviving more than a couple of months, the appalling living conditions and torture chambers, the undressing room where tens of thousands of men, woman and children were forced to strip naked before being herded by guards with dogs and guns into the gas chambers, the chimneys which had belched out black smoke from the bodies of innocent people day and night, the killing wall where thousands of people were executed and still bore the gunshot marks, the freezing cold and the disgustingly dirty and thin stripey pyjamas they were forced to wear with no washing facilities, denying them even the smallest scrap of dignity. The vastness of it was horrifying.

Unimaginable horrors took place behind that fence

Over 4000 people were shot against this wall as young as nine years of age

One of the original railway carriages that transported eighty passengers at a time for days on end

Over a million innocent people treated with such cruel contempt. To try and understand how the German army could behave in such a despicably inhumane manner was beyond us all. Our guide was a young and very beautiful Jewish girl who was still full of emotion when she spoke about individual horror stories. At the end of the tour she thanked us very sincerely for taking the time to come to Auschwitz so that we could understand the enormity of what religious/racial hatred can do and to make sure that the lives of those persecuted people were not lost in vain.