Teenagers from Tooting are to visit the World War II concentration camps in Auschwitz, Poland as part of a national initiative to let students see history for themselves.

Two sixth form students from Graveney School and Ernest Bevin College will join 150 others on Tuesday to visit the site where an estimated one million Jews were murdered by the Nazis.

The pupils are preparing themselves for a moving trip in which they will be shown the gas chambers used by the Nazis for mass extermination, and registration documents, piles of hair and shoes belonging to the people who died there.

The Wandsworth Borough News will join the young people to capture their reactions to the life-changing history lesson.

The visit is part of a £1.5m Government scheme to send children from every school in the UK to Auschwitz, to increase understanding of the atrocities committed by the Nazis and ensure they are not forgotten by future generations. When the pupils return from their trip they will go to younger pupils' lessons to talk about what they saw and the impact it had on them.

Tooting MP Sadiq Khan, who will be flying to Auschwitz with the group, said: "We can learn about the Holocaust in history books but there's no substitute to seeing it for yourself. This happened just 50 years ago, on our doorstep and it has happened again since in Bosnia, Rwanda and today in Darfur.

"I'm keen for tomorrow's leaders to see if there are any lessons we can learn from it."

Also in the pupils' itinerary is a visit to Osweicim, a Polish town next to where the camps were built.

Sorcha Long, head of history at Ernest Bevin, said being able to see what Jewish life was like before the genocide began would give the pupils a deeper understanding of the subject.

She said: "Children just see these people as victims and don't think they were ordinary people just like they are."

Ms Long said the scheme offered a "life changing experience" and a unique opportunity for inner London schools like Ernest Bevin, where many pupils could not afford to go on trips like this.

Principal of Graveney School Graham Stapleton said: "It is hard to grasp the numbers of people who died in the Holocaust, but also the systematic way in which they died. It is going to be traumatic but we want to make pupils aware of this tragic event, in the hope it will never happen again."

You can read about the pupils' day in Auschwitz in the Wandsworth Borough News on November 14.