School trips to Auschwitz

Why visit Auschwitz?

Understand the scale of the Holocaust

Although we all understand that the Holocaust was an awful, terrible event, we often fail to appreciate the scale of the devastation wrought on communities across Europe.

Auschwitz and the rest of the concentration camp system was one of the major tools used by the Nazis to carry out the Final Solution to the Jewish Question. So, a visit here really brings home to students the industrialised murder that took place here and in other extermination camps across Occupied Europe.

It is estimated that of the 1.3 million people who were sent to Auschwitz, over 1.1. million died. Although Jews made up the vast majority of this number, ethnic Poles, Roma and Soviet prisoners of war were also murdered here. A school trip to Auschwitz brings home to your students the scale of the horror perpetrated by the Nazis here.

You’ll tour both Auschwitz I, the smaller original site of the camp, and Auschwitz II, the purpose-built death factory.

This will help your students to better understand the timeline of the Holocaust and how the Nazis developed the gas chambers to commit mass murder. And you can combine your trip to Auschwitz with visits in and around Krakow and Berlin, to deepen your students’ understanding of the Holocaust even further.

Humanise the victims of the Holocaust

Visiting Auschwitz will help to humanise the victims of the Holocaust for your students. Hearing the individual stories of some of the victims and seeing possessions taken from them stacked high, your students will begin to better understand the devastating human cost of the Holocaust.

1.1 million people were killed at Auschwitz, which is horrifying enough in itself. But it’s even more so when you remember each of those was a mother, a father, a brother, a sister, a child – all murdered simply because the Nazis decided that they were undesirable or racially inferior.