CHIPPING Campden School student Evie Smith Lomas, 17, was one of 200 young people from across the West Midlands chosen to visit Auschwitz recently. Here, Evie, from Paxford, describes how coming face-to-face with the past horrors of the notorious Nazi death camp made a huge personal impact on her.

"Walking into a room that was once used for the murder of thousands of innocent men, women and children is the strangest but, oddly, most life-affirming experience I have encountered. It was the feeling that people experienced such immense suffering and injustice while you and I are basically free to do what we want, to undertake everyday tasks, something that would have meant the world to those incarcerated.

I was one of 200 like-minded 17-year-olds from across the West Midlands selected to visit the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland, which had been occupied by the Germans in the Second World War.

Auschwitz was one of the largest concentration camps in WW2 used by the Nazis to persecute the Jews and other minority groups. It was the site of 1.1 million deaths, most by poisonous gassings.

The visit was organised by the Holocaust Educational Trust (HET) and was set up to educate the younger generation about the Holocaust in an effort not to let the living memory die out with the last remaining survivors.

We travelled from Birmingham airport to Krakow early one morning in March. We spent the day travelling to Auschwitz 1 and Birkenau, the site of what became known as "The Final Solution". I was apprehensive, unsure of how the trip would affect me, if at all. We had guided tours around the sites where we were given an insight into how the prisoners here would have lived. The conditions were, as expected, horrendous.

The last remaining gas chamber (all others were blown up by the Nazis after the war to destroy evidence) was one of the strangest rooms I have ever stood in in my life. It was such an uncomfortable feeling that I find it hard to describe the mix of emotions running through my head.

The place that sticks with me most is a room in Auschwitz 1. Here, when you walk in, you are faced with a long glass wall filled with human hair (about 2,000kg of it). When I learned that the Nazis cut off the hair of the dead to use for textiles I felt anger and despair at how disrespectful they could have been as humans - where had humanity gone?

We rightly think of the Holocaust as genocide against the Jews and prosecution of many other minorities such as disabled people, Gypsies and homosexuals. However, I learnt that this is not the only way it has affected the world; it also caused culture, tradition and ideas to be lost. In Poland alone the population of Jews has dropped from around three million to only 45,000 and the Jewish population generally still is not as it was before the war, meaning many traditions and cultures have been lost.

I have had an interest in the Holocaust from a young age. It is often viewed as a one-time event never to be repeated, yet today we still witness persecution of groups due to their colour, ethnicity or simply for being "different". The horrific massacre of around one million people in just 100 days in Rwanda is a modern-day equivalent. This by neighbours who had lived together in peace until this point. Each time we say “never again”. But fast forward a few years and Kenya, a country in which I spent a significant part of my childhood, came very close to it during the post-election violence in 2007, where people were targeted simply because they belonged to the "wrong" tribe.

I have always seen myself as a person with a positive outlook. I believe that what happens always happens for a reason and that people are never innately bad or evil but good, kind people who have maybe lost their way. It is a sobering thought that given a certain set of circumstances, maybe a disenfranchised young person and a charismatic speaker, people can be driven to losing their way with such catastrophic effect. This is as true today as it was in 1939.

Even after my trip to Auschwitz I still believe that people are inherently good, but having seen such horrendous and terrifying experiences others have been put through I value the people around me more and the freedom we all enjoy.