A profoundly powerful and poignant place that should be visited by all Secondary School children far and wide. I spent most of the tour choking back tears in despair at the abhorrent and unfathomable horrors that were perpetrated here. The sight of the womens hair that was shorn from their heads after they were gassed, and is turning grey because traces of Zyklon B are still present; and the tiny childrens clothes and shoes that were violently ripped from their bodies before they were herded like garbage into the gas chambers, would reduce even the most hardened of hearts to mush! Our guide was wonderfully informative and struck the perfect tone for the entire 4 hour tour. It must be an incredibly tough job to take people around one of the largest sites of mass murder in modern times days after day - most visitors are emotionally spent after a single day! We gave our guide a huge tip and thanked her personally at the end of the tour. We wanted her to know how intensely important her job is - to preserve and to educate - and to express our acknowledgement that it cannot be an easy one. We brought our teenage son, who listened to every word the tour guide uttered and absorbed everything he witnessed in the full knowledge that it is incumbent upon his generation to ensure that such obscene inhumanity on this scale is NEVER allowed to happen again. My family and I were appalled and enraged to discover that some morally-bankrupt visitors had scratched and scrawled their names (with pen and various other instruments) onto the walls of the womens barracks to mark their attendance here. This is not some youth club or your local park. Instagrammers also need to pack it in with the whole balancing on train tracks and pouting for selfies as though you're at a night club nonsense. Show some respect and decency, for crying out loud. The levels of ignorance and narcissism at a place that is essentially a giant graveyard and is still visited by friends and relatives of people who perished here are, frankly, staggering and alarming. …

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