Entry Gate to Auschwitz I

Pupils from Ounsdale High School, Staffordshire, travelled to Poland to participate in the official sixtieth anniversary commemorations of the liberation of Auschwitz, and to learn about the events of the Holocaust through visits to related sites in Krakow and around south-eastern Poland.

Although the concentration camp at Auschwitz is most often associated with the death camp at Auschwitz II-Birkenau, with its guardhouse and railway line, the Auschwitz complex actually has three main sites, and thirty-six smaller sub-camps. These entry gates to the labour camp at Auschwitz I read ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ (literally ‘Work Brings Freedom’), a slogan also used at many other sites in the Nazi concentration camp system. Of course this statement was very far from the truth for the millions of prisoners held there.