NOTHING can prepare you for visiting and learning of the horrors perpetrated at the abyss which was Auschwitz-Birkenau - as pupils from across Gwent learnt this month.

More than 100 pupils from Wales visited one of the most notorious extermination camps in Nazi-occupied Poland in a one-day visit last month, with a simple aim: to never allow the Holocaust and other crimes committed by Nazi Germany to be forgotten.

The Lessons from Auschwitz project, which was arranged by the Holocaust Educational Trust, involved pupils visiting Oswiecim, a town with a once high Jewish population, as well as Auschwitz-Birkenau.

South Wales Argus:

Gradyn Paders-Ball, Shireen Balouch, Claudia Peters and Carlo Fenucci

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Pupils quickly learnt of the crimes committed by the Nazis against Jews, Poles, Roma people, homosexuals as well as other countless groups.

And they reacted with a range of emotions and have described how the experience made them feel.

South Wales Argus:

Pupils and Tomos Povey listen to Jaime Ashworth talk of Oswiecim

St Josephs R.C. High School pupil, Gradyn Paders-Ball, said: "I had been feeling a little excited but also unnerved by what I was going to see.

"When I got there it quickly became a hard-hitting experience. It gave to me a different perspective as to what actually happened."

South Wales Argus:

Daniel Turner and Louis Watkins

Shireen Balouch, who is also from the school, said: "I found it overwhelming. I have studied history since primary and to come here and see it really does humanise it while in a classroom does not.

"I have so many emotions going around my head at the moment."

South Wales Argus:

Shireen Balouch reading the list of victims

Claudia Peter, who is from St Julian's School, found the visit "upsetting."

"It has been eye-opening today," she said.

"Seeing people's hair and items was very upsetting. It must have been horrendous for those people."

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Pupil Carlo Fenucci, also of St Julian's School, added: "I found it very humbling and overwhelming."

For the two John Frost School pupils who visited, they found the experience an "eye-opener".

"It was very upsetting and I did not quite realise lots of the victims - like the Poles and Roma people," said Louis Watkins.

"It was a real eye-opener. We must never allow what happened here to be forgotten."

And Daniel Turner added: "Reading about something is not the same as actually seeing it with your eyes.

"It was an eye-opener for Louis and I."

The Holocaust took place between 1941-45, with an aim to exterminate the Jewish population in Europe. By the time World War Two had come to an end in 1945, Nazi Germany had systematically murdered an estimated 17 million people who were deemed "racially inferior". Those who fell victim were primarily Jews, ethnic Poles, Roma people and other Slavs.