William Langridge, Year 12, Tunbridge Wells Grammar School for Boys.

I found my visit to Auschwitz unexpectedly meaningful and it affected me in ways that I would never have expected beforehand.

Although it feels as though the experience should have been more traumatic, when faced with the physical reality of the place, the sheer scale of what happened was beyond what I could comprehend. "Undoubtedly the most difficult part was the photos – schools, weddings and holidays, groups of friends smiling and children playing. The contrast between the people themselves, whose ordinary lives, full of happiness, sadness, frustration and hope, were destroyed, and their systematic, impersonal degradation, where life was simply another way to die, was astounding.

"For me these people are no longer just nameless statistics from a textbook or documentary. They are real people who were herded into sheds, slaughtered like livestock and considered so inhuman that their very lives could be judged in a matter of seconds.

"Personally I found the most moving part the commemoration ceremony when the rabbi sang a Jewish prayer for the victims of death camps.

"His voice alone cut through the silence, across the plain to the infamous gate. After all the Jewish suffering and hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of Jewish deaths, his prayer was all that could be heard, in the snow.

"As an experience I would certainly recommend it to anyone. It offers a more involved, personal approach, to understanding both history and modern atrocities. Most of all it provides a warning of the terrible effects of genocide and how the very worst of circumstances can transform anybody's life to something unrecognisable."