PUPILS from the John of Gaunt School in Trowbridge who recently visited the former Nazi concentration camps in Poland now want to set up a permanent display, to help others benefit from the insights the trip gave them.

The sixth formers visited Auschwitz and Birkenau camps as guests of the Holocaust Educational Trust, which more than 70 years after the Second World War is still working to make sure the current generation learns the lessons of history.

Pupil Bailey Frost, 17, said: “For me those most surprising thing about Auschwitz was it was just buildings – you look at it and unless you knew what had happened there you wouldn’t be able to tell.

“There were two lines of barbed wire around the perimeter but if you stood in the middle you would have no way of knowing where you were. You might just think you were in an old-fashioned town that had really bad roads.

“You’ve got rooms there with people’s possessions, their shoes, even their hair. One room has 1.96 tonnes of human hair – you stand and look but it’s almost too hard to take in. You know what it is but it’s hard to realise.

“There were these corridors with hundreds of faces down each side – that was one of the areas that got to me. You see all these photos face to face.

“Another room had pictures from before the war showing them with families and friends – they were just normal, ordinary people."

The whistlestop one-day visit to Poland saw the pupils, who included youngsters from Hardenhuish School in Chippenham and Royal Wootton Bassett Academy, bombarded with facts and images.

“In Birkenau you felt more like you were in a concentration camp – standing and looking down the railway tracks to where the gas chambers were. It was oddly flat, you could see all the way down. It was massive," Bailey said.

“We’ve been thinking about what we will do now that we’re back. We want to get one of the information boards in the school and remake it so that one half shows the story of the Jewish people and who they were and the other half looks at the Nazis and the ethical and philosophical questions around what they did.

“If anyone was to ask me whether it is an opportunity they should take I would encourage them to do it, it’s definitely worthwhile.”