WATCH: Scots schools boss "overwhelmed" at Auschwitz

Education Secretary John Swinney says he has been left "shocked" and "overwhelmed" after visiting Auschwitz with nearly 200 Scottish school pupils.

He joined students from 94 schools across the country, in a trip organised by the Holocaust Educational Trust as part of its Lessons from Auschwitz (LFA) programme.

Around 1.1 million people, including one million Jews, were murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the concentration and death camp set up by the Nazis during the Second World War.

Mr Swinney, visiting the site for the first time, said:

"Nothing prepared me for what I've seen and what I've witnessed.

"I think it's very difficult to come to terms with the sheer enormity and awfulness that this represents in our recent history.

"I take away from this a realisation and an understanding that it's so important that young people in Scotland have the opportunity to have their learning shaped by experiences of this type."

The Trust's LFA programme, supported by Scottish Government grant funding, offers pupils an opportunity to visit Auschwitz-Birkenau and return home as ambassadors to pass on their learning.

The students began with a stop in Oswiecim, the Polish town which became better known by the Germanised name of Auschwitz.

From there they moved on to the Auschwitz I camp, first established by the Nazis in 1940, and then to the expansive Birkenau, which, from 1942, became a killing centre for Jews housing a series of gas chambers and crematoria.

With its piles of belongings taken from victims - shoes, suitcases, spectacles and prosthetic legs - the displays in Auschwitz I help to provide a visual representation of the scale of the killings.

A pile of human hair weighing almost 2,000 kg, and the enormous 'Book of Names' containing the identities of victims, are the most potent reminders.

Andrew Purdie, 17, of Turriff Academy in Aberdeenshire, said:

"I think the artefacts were particularly harrowing, the human hair especially.

"That struck a chord more than most, because it really did enforce that it didn't just belong to someone, that was someone, and that's just discarded and taken away from them."

Fellow student Ross Walker, 18, added:

"There's a certain amount of guilt that comes with it, that as humanity we can do something as terrible as the Holocaust, but also a sense of purpose that we need to prevent this from happening in the future, and just how easy it was for this to happen is quite terrifying."