Schoolchildren from across Kent joined Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg to face up to the terrible realities endured at Auschwitz.

Mr Clegg joined 200 students aged between 16 and 17 yesterday on a journey to the Nazi concentration camps.

It marked the 100th visit to the site by students with the Holocaust Educational Trust.

The one-day visit to Poland involved students from Dartford Grammar School, Dover Grammar School for Boys and Girls, Folkestone School for Girls, Isle of Sheppey Academy, Pent Valley, The Archbishop's School, The Marlowe Academy and Wilmington Grammar School for Girls.

The Trust launched in 1999 and since then nearly 20,000 students have seen Auschwitz first hand.

The trip began with a visit to Osweicim, the town where the Auschwitz death and concentration camps were located and where the Jewish community lived prior to the war.

A trip to Auschwitz One then followed where the realities of the Nazi camps really hit home.

Rooms filled with hair, roughly cut from the victim’s bodies were stored by the Nazis before being sent back to Germany for use by their people.

Within one of the barracks, a room is filled with their hair, recovered when the camp was liberated by the Russians in 1945.

Most of it is now discoloured to grey, but strands of blond hair from little girls, still pleated and some with ribbons tied into it, stand out from the merciless mounds.

Another room is filled with thousands of shoes, all taken from those shipped to the camps, whether because they were Jewish, gypsy, gay or a petty thief.

The shoes resonated most with Mr Clegg.

He said: "It’s very harrowing. There were specific things that stand out in the mind. The shoes of the little children, similar to ones I put on my kids today.

"And it was the little details that I didn’t expect. A whole building dedicated to experiments by Nazi doctors on Jewish woman; forcibly sterilising them - just terrible, haunting things.

"And it stuck me how mundane and practical it seemed to be. It was like the precision of a factory."

Wilmington pupils Fatima Jama and Rebecca Dunk, both 17, said it was a powerful day.

Rebecca said: "It was seeing all the little kids’ shoes piled up and when the people got told to go left or right when they arrived at the camp.

"That really was the difference between life and death, all decided by a Nazi officer.

"It’s difficult to believe that someone just chooses your destiny like that – someone choosing you to die."

Also on the trip was Rabbi Barry Marcus who held a service at the end of the day.

Fatima said: "I found the talk at the end really good – it gave us something to take back with us and his message talked to everyone and makes you think.

"He talked about how intolerance still exists today and how we need to work together to overcome it."

About 1.3 million people, including 1.1 million Jews from across Nazi-occupied Europe, died in Auschwitz.