A SMALL boy stares back from the photograph, clutching what looks like a brand new toy. He is grinning from ear to ear.
Dressed smartly in dark, knee-length shorts, black braces and a crisp white shirt, the blond-haired youngster is standing outside a brick building. Was it his family home? Was there a devoted mother or father behind the lens, capturing another moment
of a cherished child's life to add to the family album?
Stuck on a wall, surrounded by other happy family snaps – of weddings, new born babies, holidays, groups of friends or work colleagues sharing a joke – it is a picture that says so much yet leaves so many questions unanswered – who was he, when was it taken, what was the occasion?
In front of the wall of pictures stands a teenage girl. She wipes tears from her eyes, holds her hand up to her mouth, and walks quickly outside to the open air. Because one thing is certain about the boy – he ended up at a Nazi death camp, the photo stripped from the suitcase his family would have carefully packed with their favourite possessions, believing the lie that they were off to a new life.
Carla Reddie, a 16-year-old student from the capital's Royal High School, also stops looking, taking a deep sigh and breathing out slowly as she walks away.
In a former wash room in the Birkenau death camp in Poland – better known as Auschwitz II – the girls have just stood where thousands of persecuted prisoners, mainly Jews, did before them, having been stripped and shaved, only to wait in freezing conditions to be disinfected by German soldiers.
"That's really brought it home for me," Carla says, walking across the camp. "There was one particular photograph that just struck me, though – it looked exactly like two of my own friends. It makes you think, doesn't it?"
Which, of course, is exactly the point of this trip organised by the Holocaust Educational Trust for 226 pupils from schools across Scotland, including many from Edinburgh and Lothian.
The pictures provide a freeze-frame glimpse into the lives of the 1.2 million people who arrived at the camp with suitcases crammed full of clothes, shoes and toiletries ready for their new lives and who would never leave.
They were only found after the camp's liberation in 1944, dumped by the soldiers who had rummaged through the prisoners' possessions for anything of value that could be sent back to Germany, after their owners had either been set to work or sent to the camp's notorious gas chambers.
Now they bear silent witness to the atrocities of the Holocaust.
"There is something we can all relate to in that room," sighs Martin Bryden, an educator with the Holocaust Educational Trust and also a retired Edinburgh history teacher.
"We all know how important photos are to us and how many we have in albums or on our walls."
Martin is one of a handful of teachers leading the pupils around the camp. It has been an emotionally intense day for the visitors, who had left the Capital in the early hours of the morning and were set to arrive back shortly after 11pm the same day.
Already they have toured Auschwitz I just a few miles away, entering under its eerie "Arbeit Macht Frei" (works brings freedom) gated entrance and the atmosphere is very different from that on the bus from the airport.
Then the mood resembled that of any other student trip – teenagers chatting about their plans for the weekend, listening to iPods and sharing jokes about goings-on at school.
But once the announcement was made that the bus was arriving at Auschwitz – the most notorious of the Nazi concentration camps – silence fell.
"We were taking about cheese, of all things," says 17-year-old Becky Stewart, also a student at The Royal High School, shaking her head with a frank smile. "Cheese?! We felt terrible when we saw it – we had no idea."
From the outside, Auschwitz is surprisingly civilised, built by the Poles themselves before the war as an army barracks, before being taken over by the Nazis.
Birkenau is a different story – a death camp the Nazis built to kill Jews from across the world, housing men and women in segregated sheds designed only for animals, divided by train tracks used to bring them in their masses to meet their end.
Becky and Carla were among the hundreds of students and other visitors touring rooms of possessions belonging to prisoners – mounds of human hair and piles of suitcases, shoes and spectacles.
They entered the Auschwitz gas chambers, its crematoria and saw where Hitler's deputy, Rudolph Hess, had lived happily with his wife and children, in a house just metres from where his soldiers were murdering millions of people.
Back at Birkenau, the girls make their way across a field, spotting a solitary black and white cat playing in the grass not far from the site's gas chambers on their way.
"It's hard to take all of this in to be honest," says Becky, looking out across the expansive camp. Waiting from them at a memorial plinth is Rabbi Barry Marcus, a key member of the Trust, who is preparing to hold a service for the millions of Jews killed during the Holocaust.
As the sky darkens and a cold chill takes over the camp, other visitors begin to leave, with the Scottish students the last remaining, lighting candles of remembrance and placing them on the infamous train tracks.
"If we wanted to observe a minute's silence for the all who died here," the Rabbi tells the group. "We'd have to stand here for four years.
"The numbers lost here are the equivalent of a 9/11 attack every single day for two years, or a 7/7 bombing every hour for four years, or two times the population of Edinburgh."
He adds: "This place has a significance for each and every one of us.
"Jews and other people who did not fit Nazi ideology were killed here. Why? Because they were different. But we are all different students and we are all special."
FUTURE GENERATIONS WILL NEVER FORGETESTABLISHED in 1988, the Holocaust Educational Trust formed to teach young people about the Nazis' death camps.
The group is based in London, but works regularly with schools and universities in Scotland, taking students on trips to Auschwitz and other concentration camps, as well as offering other teaching resources.
The aims of the Trust are to raise awareness and understanding of the Holocaust; to motivate future generations to speak out about it; to inspire individuals to consider their responsibilities within society; to influence parliament and the media; and to challenge anti-semitism, racism and prejudice.
More than 4,000 students have so far been taken to Auschwitz-Birkenau, along with MPs, government officials and journalists.
