A declaration of intent
AUSCHWITZ: Today in Poland, Gordon and Sarah Brown made a journey that very few returned from - a journey that ended in death for more than a million Jews, gypsies and political prisoners. A journey which the prime minister pledged would not be forgotten when he visited the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp run with chilling efficiency by the Nazis.
Mr Brown promised that the British government would donate to an international fund being created by the Polish prime minister to preserve this site, as both a warning from history and a declaration of intent that it should never happen again.
Some claim that the holocaust never happened, or did not happen on the scale written about in the history books. The prime minister, though, was shown the hair of women gassed by the Nazis (which was then sold to textile manufacturers to make soldiers' uniforms) and the glasses which belonged to victims - each someone's son or daughter; each a record of an individual atrocity.
Tomorrow, 200 schoolchildren from Yorkshire will follow in the prime minister's footsteps, their trip organised by a charity, the , to which the government gives financial support.
Its aim is to send children from every British school here - to learn, and to pledge not to repeat the mistakes of the past.
After a visit to the gas chambers that claimed so many, Gordon Brown wrote in the visitors' book: "As we remember the worst of our past, we must each commit ourselves to serve the best of our future." He is planning to create some form of memorial to those British Schindlers who gave their lives trying to preserve the lives of others who were murdered by the Nazis.
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