The opportunity to visit Auschwitz was incredibly moving, surreal, and enlightening, all in one.

I am grateful to have seen some of the sites of the Holocaust in person, as even though it was sometimes difficult to truly imagine I was standing in a place of atrocity, it gives a much more personal connection to the victims. You are able to pay attention to the individual, a boy or girl who would have stood just as you are standing, instead of just an oft-quoted statistic.

Coming from the firing wall in Auschwitz I, a series of videos were projected on the walls of some of these individuals before we reached the Book of Names, 8 metres long and 1 metre high, detailing the names of each individual identified person who died in the Holocaust.Being able to touch it, to examine each name in turn and realise they represent a person who had lived a normal life before their persecution, was immensely powerful.

The huge industrial scale of Birkenau was also profoundly impactful, to see the unimaginable conditions these Germans, Jews, Slavs and others lived in. We shall never be able to fully comprehend their experiences, but we are able to tell their stories, combating anti-Semitism today wherever we can to prevent such horrors from happening again.