I don’t know if you all know that the reason I went to Poland was to visit Auschwitz-Birkenau with my school. I feel I need to write about it, and I won’t be able to convey how it is because (and I don’t mean to sound patronising here) you honestly cannot comprehend the awfulness and horror of those places unless you have been there or witnessed it firsthand.

It is honestly the most surreal place I’ve ever visited. I’m not even going to try to describe it to you, as I feel it would somehow diminish the experience I had and the experience of the many who were forced to survive there. (as that’s what it is, you cannot call that place somewhere one would live.)

There were points where you would think you were just walking around, like it was a museum, or a model of some sorts, and then it would hit you. That this place is real, and that you are standing in a spot where hundreds of thousands of people had died.

I truly believe everyone should visit Auschwitz-Birkenau. Certainly in England we (or I did) learn about WWII when we are about 10/11. At that age you can barely comprehend what 1.5million is, let alone comprehend that someone could formulate a protocol to murder 1.5million human persons and carry it out. In history lessons you are bombarded with the statistics and ratios of the war and I certainly became desensitised to it. There is no possible way I could relate to how those people were treated and how they suffered, sitting in my warm classroom, paying for the privilege of an education while I lazily noted a few sentences off a SmartBoard.

But when you visit those places, you physically stand in a spot where a baby was drowned in a bucket, and someone had Phenol injected into their heart. You put your hand against the wall where they shot 20,000 people and stand next to the lake where the ashes of everyone who died there were dumped. Then you certainly start to relate to it. When I stood next to the train line I imagined seeing my father and mother for the last time, my hair being shaved of and made into felt for a Nazi’s uniform.

But the worst photo I saw while I was there, was one of a SS doctor (not that they deserve the title of a doctor). With the two lines of persons standing in front of him, he indicated with a flick of his wrist whether they should die immediately, or whether they should die slowly of starvation and exhaustion. No one should have that power over another person.

No one should ever feel they are superior to another person. Whether you feel they have a shittier music taste than you, or dress too modest, or dress to sluttily. You are just the same. Never feel like you are better or worse than them.

I am not a religious person in the slightest, but I have never admired a people more than the Jewish religion. To have faith that strong is so beautiful; to believe they are still ‘chosen’ after being told they are not even human is so admirable I can hardly put it into words to show how much respect I have for them as a race.