HER voice was calm and the detail chilling, as guide Halina Jarnot refused to spare the teenagers of Scotland, the appalling truth of Auschwitz.
She told how the dead were found, piled in a pyramid in the gas chamber, as the desperate had clambered towards the sky for air.
She described the stench of the barrack huts, where the strongest fought for the prize of the top bunks to avoid excrement trickling down from fellow prisoners.
How the little children were allowed to take their toys to the gas chamber because it stopped them being troublesome.
And how the huts would be loud, with begs for mercy in Italian, Polish, Hungarian and Yiddish and how that mercy never came.
As she spoke inside the wooden barrack, those voices seemed to whisper from the walls.
No book, no photograph or grainy film footage could bring that same sense of touch.
The students said nothing, their faces fixed in contemplation of Halina’s words.
Just over 200 pupils from across Scotland were taken to Auschwitz this week by the Holocaust ?Educational Trust.
It is an ongoing scheme, funded by the Scottish Government, in the hope that those who bear witness to the Holocaust will spread the message that it must not happen again.
More accurately, that it can’t continue to happen. After all, there have been more than 50 genocides since the Holocaust.
For each person on the visit, there was a moment when the human cost became tangible.
For Lara Cochrane, 17, it was the tangled nest of spectacles ripped from the faces of the ?persecuted.
For Lucy Smith, 16, it was the pots and pans, taken from wives and mothers who had thought that they were being taken to a better life in the east.
For teacher Sam Hamilton, the tears came when she saw the baby clothes.
Sam, 27, teaches history and modern studies at Cathkin High School, near Glasgow, and believes the visit will revolutionise her approach to the subject of the Holocaust.
She said: “History books and pictures only take you so far. You don’t get the overall feeling that makes it personal.
“The children’s clothes, the baby clothing, was difficult to see. I suppose when I am teaching, it’s easier to not think of the kids who were taken straight to their deaths with no opportunity to survive.
“I don’t think I will ever be able to talk about the Holocaust with my pupils without sharing what I felt walking through Auschwitz. It will now always be an emotional lesson for me to teach.”
The teenagers, aged 16 and 17, will now become student ambassadors and they will give talks and write reports and spread the word of what they have seen.
Nazism is not some abstract notion. The far right is on the rise across Europe, the only difference is that Islamophobia, even more than anti-Semitism, is now the glue that binds these hardline groups together.
In Scotland, fascist groups ?have threatened to celebrate Hitler’s birthday on the streets ?of Edinburgh next year.
Just as it did in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, financial crisis has seen extremism prosper in Europe and its hatred is finding fertile ground among the young.
Lucy, from Cambuslang, near Glasgow, said it took time to reflect on what she had seen.
Speaking the day after the visit, she said: “It was so shocking and a lot to take in.
“I woke up this morning and it really hit me. I was brushing my hair and I was thinking about the piles of hair at Auschwitz that had been shaved from the heads of the Jews. I was thinking I was so lucky to have my hair.
“The personal effects brought the whole thing home to me. The pots and ?pans symbolised how hopeful people were that an ?ordinary life lay ahead where they could cook for their families. They could have been my family’s pots and pans.”
Lara was touched by the ?spectacles. She said: “They are such personal items. Then there was a pile of prosthetic limbs, taken from people who relied on them. There was no mercy, no sympathy for any of these people.
“I think everyone should see this to see what can happen if we don’t stop prejudice.”
The Holocaust Educational Trust’s Lessons from Auschwitz Project is now in its 13th year and has taken over 17,000 students and teachers from across the UK to Auschwitz-Birkenau, as well as many MPs and other guests.
Auschwitz I served as the administrative centre and was the site of the deaths of roughly 70,000 people, mostly ethnic Poles and Soviet prisoners of war.
Auschwitz II was an ?extermination camp, the site of the deaths of at least 960,000 Jews, 75,000 Poles, and some 19,000 Roma.
The four-part course includes ?a one-day visit to Auschwitz-?Birkenau and participants also hear a survivor of the camps share their testimony at a seminar.
Students were taken first to Osweicim, the town where the Auschwitz camps were located and where the local Jewish community lived prior to the start of the war. There are now no Jews in the town.
In Auschwitz I, the teenagers saw the prison cells where for misdemeanours like feeding another inmate or picking up a guard’s cigarette, the “criminal” was hauled before a kangaroo court which despatched its victims, one per minute.
Then they were taken to ?the shooting wall and the ?punishment dispensed.
Feet away is a post with a hook where a 14-year-old hung until he starved to death. His crime – feeding bread to a dying Jew.
It was the second camp, the place of mass extermination which was most familiar.
The railway lines carried victims to their fate. Up to 100 people were packed into a cattle car with no food, no water, no toilet, only a bucket amid a breathless stench.
As the youngsters touched a replica freight car, they were asked to visualise what it must have been like.
Ryan Mullaney, 17, from Trinity High, in Rutherglen, near Glasgow, ?said it must have been suffocating.
He added: “It must have been terrible for them, trapped in there, in such an airless confined space. The cattle car is also an important part of what you see here because it is a symbol of that last journey, that people took to their deaths.
“I will always remember seeing it. I will always remember this day.”
For Sam, it was the hope that the passengers clung on to which seemed so cruel.
She said: “You wonder after being so cramped in there, whether just in that second when the door opened, there must have been a gust of air and relief. They thought they were coming to a better life but then that hope was taken from them.”
Halina said: “Hope is the last thing to die. People struggle, they fight to survive.”
Birkenau, a German translation of Brzezinka, birch forest, referred originally to a small Polish village destroyed by the Germans to make way for the camp.
The camp stretches across 6720 acres and the factory of death sprawls as far as the eye can see.
As we walk through the area where men and women were stripped of their possessions and dignity, naked to the inhumanity of their masters, Halina talks of how the guards would leer at the female arrivals.
She said: “They would look at the beautiful women, still healthy looking, still feminine. The women who had been in the camp for a while no longer looked like women. They were shaved, starving, walking dead.”
At the end of the tour is a wall of photographs salvaged from the cases of the last to arrive at the camp, hundreds of Hungarian Jews.
I watch as a young Scottish girl concentrates on a picture of three sisters, just a little older than her. They are beautiful, youthful, frivolous and smiling.
The girl looking at them is thinking: “They look just like me”.
In a memorial service afterwards a rabbi sings, his melancholy voice carries across balmy air.
A flock of birds flutter in to the sky and Ryan’s eyes follow them.
He said: “We haven’t seen birds all day and then, just as we take this time to remember, they have appeared. Like they knew, like they were taking our thoughts and prayers in to the distance.”
The sun sets as the teenagers walk along the railway line, laying memorial candles along the way.
The tracks took the inmates to their deaths but now they carry the young who will keep their memories alive.