We spent the first day on a walking tour of Berlin taking in places like the Reichstag building, the Brandenburg Gate; as well as memorials to the Murdered Members of the Reichstag, the Roma & Sinti of Europe and the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.                       

On our second day in Berlin, we started with a visit to Gleis 17 Grunewald Bahnhof, a disused train platform which is a memorial to the 50,000 Jews from Berlin who were transported to the East. A very poignant and emotional reminder of the scale of the deportation of so many people.

We then visited the Wannsee Conference House where the ‘Final Solution’ was decided in 1942 followed by a visit to the Berlin Olympic Stadium and saw the Olympic Bell for the 1936 Olympics. Later that afternoon we focused on some Cold War history and heard stories of the escapes and tunnels dug underneath our feet as people tried to escape from East to West Berlin.

Following our journey from Berlin to Krakow we spent the day at Auschwitz-Birkenau, which was something that none of us will ever forget. The sheer size of the site was overwhelming, let alone what we saw and learnt about from the incredible guides who work there. A very powerful experience for us all. It was also made more poignant for us in 30° heat knowing that prisoners endured the extremes of temperature on very little food and water, and we were struggling in the heat for a few hours.        

That evening we had dinner at a Polish restaurant in Krakow and had time for all of us to reflect on all we had experienced so far.

On our final day we were fortunate to meet with a Holocaust survivor, Anna Janowska Cioncka, a child who survived SS-Untersturmfuhrer Rosenbaum’s control of Rabka and listened to her incredible story. It seemed very timely as she told the students about her experiences including the murder of her grandparents, the loss of her father to typhus after surviving in a Soviet prisoner-of-war camp and the bravery of her mother and strangers who hid her and her sister. She told the students that people with kind hearts are the real heroes as it was kind hearts that kept them alive until the end of the war, which was a powerful statement for today’s world.

An extraordinary and unforgettable trip for all of us and it was a privilege to take this outstanding group of students who did themselves and us proud every step of the way. They were an incredible bunch of young people, and we had compliments from our Anglia guides, our coach drivers, hotels and Auschwitz guides, even staff at Stansted praised them! I know that I speak for all of the teachers on the trip when I say that they impressed us again and again with their kindness, respect and friendship over an incredible 5 days.