A SCHOOLTEACHER has told of her harrowing visit to a Nazi concentration camp and how the trip has opened new learning avenues for the school.

Julia Coleman was invited to represent Mansfield High School, Brierfield, on an educational trip to Auschwitz sponsored by the Holocaust Educational Trust.

The school's head of history, she was invited to make the visit after she attended a memorial service at Manchester's Bridgewater Hall on Holocaust Memorial Day at the end of January.

The trip was part of a course run by the trust to educate teachers about the events of the Holocaust. They take around 200 teachers twice a year to the camp.

Before flying to Poland Julia, and 180 other teachers on the trip, went to London to meet survivor Kitty Hart-Moxon, who had spent 18 months at the camp with her mother.

Julia said: "After meeting Kitty in London we all had a good idea what to expect and those of us who are history teachers know the details of the Holocaust well.

"However, nothing can prepare you for the scale of suffering that happened at Auschwitz. In Auschwitz we saw the remains of the murders of millions of men, women and children. We saw rooms full of women's hair, some of it still in ponytails and plaits.

"We saw buckets of spectacles and mountains of suitcases with the names of their owners still visible.

"All of us at one stage or another wept, usually silently. For most of my colleagues it was at the enormous scale of it. For me it was the tiny personal items of the dead."

The group also got to see where Kitty worked sorting out the belongings of those killed in the gas chambers and lit candles at the ruins of one of the camp's crematoriums.

In the summer Julia and others from the trip will meet film director Steven Spielberg.

He talked to numerous Auschwitz survivors in his research for the film Schindler's List and now wants to discuss how the video tapes of the interviews can be used in the classroom.

As well as this potential resource, Julia has brought back to Mansfield digital images from her trip, arranged for Holocaust survivors to come and talk to students in the future and is helping set up a cross-curricular Holocaust Memorial Day on January 27 2003.