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Seventy years ago today, the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz was liberated. In 2013 reporter Nigel Canham visited the Polish site with a group of sixth form students.

Here is his account.

HALF a century ago a number of atoms collided and presented themselves in united form to the world as Nigel Adrian Canham.

They had me born a white male in southern England, to kind working class parents of no great religious or political persuasion.

Some may say this was divine order, others that the law of physics was at work. It's unlikely anyone would deny an element of chance was involved.

As luck would have it on the same day my trip to Auschwitz was confirmed I was scouring a charity shop bookshelf and came across an unfamiliar title - The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas. The tale is about yet more fortune. Two eight-year-olds, born on the same day in the 1930s, meet either side of the fence at Auschwitz. Because one was a Polish Jew, the other the camp commandant's son, with no idea they were meant to hate each other they became friends.

Whether this could have ever happened was questioned by a representative of the Holocaust Education Trust who escorted our 200-strong party to Poland but, surely, he was missing the point.

Striped Pyjamas is an allegorical tale. Through no fault of their own, people find themselves divided and directed by circumstances.

There can be no excuse for the Nazi attrocities but having seen the killing ground for myself, having stood in a gas chamber and been spared death by nothing other than timing, I cannot come to any conclusion other than most people involved, regardless of which uniform they found themselves in, were victims. We all lost.

Before anyone thinks of me as a Holocaust denier, hear this.

One of the main messages drummed into us at Auschwitz was to humanise the events of the holocaust.

An industrial killing machine didn't just appear. It had to be conceived, planned, drafted, built, operated and maintained.

All these steps required the actions of human beings, people like you and me.

They would wake up each day, perhaps have coffee and a wash, choose which clothes to wear. Some would remember an aunt's birthday, see the children off to school and think about what to have for supper.

How did such ordinary people find themselves becoming complicit in genocide?

I'm probably wrong, but at times I got the feeling our hosts hoped that by giving these faceless people personalities we would end up hating them more than we did already.

Acknowledging the Holocaust, learning its lessons, didn't seem enough.

I wondered, however, if at least some of those responsible 70 years ago ever looked back on their actions and, as a result, lived with overwhelming guilt and grief. Perhaps they found their own hearts to be as cold and dead as those of the people whose lives they had taken.

Those of us lucky enough to be here today, in heaven-on-earth 21st century Devon, what we would have done back then? Would I – you – have been prepared to kill on an industrial scale?

I'm as surprised to find myself feeling some of these thoughts as perhaps you are at reading them. But a visit to a death camp, being confronted with the unthinkable, messes with the mind. So if some humans are capable of unspeakable acts of violence and disrespect, must others try to balance that by offering forgiveness on a scale we find distasteful in the extreme?

Is that where resolution lies? I'm not saying let it go, but to quote Kurt Vonnegut in his 1962 novel The Sirens of Titan, a book which explores the impact of wealth and experience on the human condition: 'Everyone knows how to find the meaning of life within himself. But mankind wasn't always so lucky.'

A few facts:

*Hitler convinced an impoverished nation it needed to rid itself of the Jews (and other 'anti-social elements') he thought had helped to deliver defeat in the 1914-18 war.

*The Polish town of Oswiecim (Auschwitz in German) was selected as the site for a concentration camp, Auschwitz 1, as it had excellent rail links and army barracks ripe for conversion.

*The resident population was evicted and the death camp, Auschwitz II or Birkenau, was created by sweeping away the village of Brzezinka.

*Prisoners slept in three-tier bunks, nine to each level, with the fittest fighting for the top to avoid the constant diarrhoea, caused by endemic dysentery, falling from above.

*Their most prized possessions were the bowls from which they ate, used as pillows and, unbelievably, put into action as improvised toilets.

*Hair shaved from the dead was harvested and sold to make cloth, gold teeth removed from their skulls. Ashes from the burned bodies was used as fertiliser.

*The Jews were not considered to be human. One woman gave birth as she arrived in a cattle truck. A soldier cut the umbilical cord and threw the baby into a rubbish pit.

*It is thought 1.5 million people were murdered at Auschwitz, mostly Jews, and even as the war ended plans were in place to step up the execution rate.

*It would take three years to give each of the dead a minute's silence.

Arrival at the Auschwitz 1 of today is a rendered a touch surreal by the presence of a large commercial car park, cafe, neighbouring fast food joint and hotels. It's also right in town.

Inside the camp and it's hard – impossible? – to look at the perfectly normal bricks and mortar and appreciate what took place there. Only the tall barbed, electric fencing gives a clue.

Nothing is out of bounds to the visitor, not the wall up against which countless thousands were shot, nor the building where unspeakable 'medical' experiments were carried out. Entering the gas chamber is bizarre, an unremarkable looking building with the outside world going about its business just a few yards away.

But how can anyone, who didn't witness the place in action, truly picture the scenes inside when Zyklon B crystals were dropped on to the heads of the naked people below and who would take half an hour or more to suffocate?

The commandant's wife requested an earth bank be built around the structure as she didn't like the noise from within.

A short bus trip to Birkenau and things start to look much more like the Auschwitz of the imagination. It is here the iconic images of railway tracks and watch towers come sharply into focus. But again, it doesn't feel real, more like a film set.

To stand on the exact patch where that newborn baby was tossed away requires no more effort than a short walk from the gate. But to feel even a fraction of the emotions experienced by those there at the time, well, that was a feat beyond this reporter.

And again, I mean the emotions of those on both sides of the divide.

Some of our party found themselves in tears, others went quiet. I hid behind a camera lens telling myself I was working, watching other people's reactions. And time and time and time again we listened to our guide telling us things we really, really didn't want to hear.

On the trip was 17-year-old Jake Slater, a student at Trinity College, Teignmouth. He too found Auschwitz 1 a bit odd with its mixture of tourism and death.

'Birkenau was completely different though, quite terrifying,' he said. 'The atmosphere was suffocating, you could talk but didn't want to. The saddest point for me was the cattle truck. Horrible to think that was where people were split up, never able to say goodbye.'

Jake also shared my worries about what any of us might be capable of should life lead us down a unexpected course.

'It was a time when people were indoctrinated to hate,' he said. 'If you press the right buttons you can get people to do anything. They always listen to what the man in the white coat says.'

Fellow Trinity student Tom Carr, also 17, found it hard at first to identify any one aspect which had left its mark more than any other but then said: 'It was the hair, there was just so much of it. The way these people were treated, they were just commodities to be exploited.

'For me it was a difficult experience visiting Auschwitz but worth going, it makes you appreciate what really happened.'

Tiffany Lait, from Newton Abbot College, was also there. 'Until now I'd heard about the statistics but going there put a different perspective on things. As they said, it humanises things,' she told me.

'By looking around you can try to feel the pain of what happened there, it was very emotional. Afterwards it doesn't feel like you've been there, you've experienced it but not taken it in, all the death and destruction. You just don't feel like it's happened.'

Thinking back to being in the gas chamber she had difficulty imagining what could have driven people to such acts. 'We're in a very cushioned society, you can never imagine how something like that can happen,' she said. 'To stand in there chamber there was overwhelming, really.'

The girls had been through one experience I'd not, meeting with a Holocaust survivor before the trip to Poland.

'Ziggy told us don't hate, that was his essential message, don't hate,' said Tiffany. 'Don't hate anyone because that's what happened then, that's why it happened. Ziggy said it was up to God to forgive, up to God to judge. I strongly disagree though, I struggle to see how such evil can be forgiven.'

Laura had a different take: 'If someone's done something really terrible to you, rather than hate them and want them to spend all eternity in hell, is it easier to forgive?' she said.

'To say that's what happened, let's move on, but do what we can to make sure it never happens again?'