A trip to Auschwitz proved harrowing but enlightening for head girl Margherita De Fraja and head boy Brendan 
Greatorex.
Here, Margherita writes about their experience:
'In March, the two of us took part in a trip run by the Holocaust Educational Trust to Auschwitz Concentration Camp in Poland.
In Auschwitz (formerly known as the town of O?wi?cim), we visited two camps – Auschwitz 1 and Auschwitz Birkenau.
One of the aims of the visit was to re-humanise the victim. To help do this, we visited the only remaining synagogue in O?wi?cim and were given a talk by a Rabbi about Jewish life and culture before the war.
This helped us get into the mindset of a typical Jewish person, and emphasised the lack of difference between the Jewish community and the rest of the residents.
Arriving at Auschwitz was somewhat surreal. It was such a shock to be there knowing how different the circumstances were for people arriving 70 years ago.
Here, many of the blocks that once held prisoners are now exhibitions, the most harrowing of which was the one that showed the possessions that had been taken: items such as suitcases, glasses, shoes, children’s clothes, toys, prosthetic limbs, mounds and mounds of women’s hair.
These were what really connected with us because they were so real, so shocking – they belonged to people. They were once used, loved.
Auschwitz Birkenau was purposely built as an extermination camp while Auschwitz 1 was originally military barracks.
It was unbelievable to see the gas chambers and the barracks where men, women and children were treated worse than animals in a slaughterhouse.
Not everyone was brutally murdered, some were treated like slaves and forced into demeaning and crushing tasks like searching for valuables on the bodies in the gas chambers and eventually piling the bodies into the crematoria. Everything now is how it was left after liberation, and this leaves an eerie desolation.
Most important is what we can’t see: the 90,000 people imprisoned here at any one time.
Seeing what we’ve seen we know it’s important to share what we’ve learnt. Even having been there, it’s still so difficult to take in the scale and reality of what happened there.
It may seem quite crass to have been taking photos, but visually is one the best ways to communicate and we look forward to the chance to speaking about our experience in front of other students of the school and getting involved with the Humanities department's work on the Holocaust.'