Kirsty Bosley: Who's really to blame for atrocities at Auschwitz?

Unlike other living things that live to eat and procreate, we can be shrewd and spiteful, kind and selfless and inflict love and pain with equal levels of intensity.

The power that man has over so much has never been as clear to me as it was when I went to Poland this week.

I was travelling to death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau, where an estimated 1.2 million people were murdered at the hands of the Nazis. We saw photos of their weddings and their loved ones that had been snatched from their bags after they were brought to the camp.

They had lived and loved, laughed and dreamed and then been wiped away like a speckle of dirt on glass – gone forever.

The concentration camp was hell on earth, but it was a man-made hell, created of hate and intolerance. To the perpetrators, the victims were Jewish, Polish, gipsies or gay. It would not do.

It was ignored that they were people with thoughts and ideas and emotions. They were mercilessly tortured and killed. Tormented for nothing.

I have not been able to fathom the extent of that horror since. I don't think I ever will, truth be told. If we could understand it, that would mean that it was a logical thing to have happened, and it isn't.

It was an experience that will stay with me for every day of my life, and for that reason, I would urge anyone who has the opportunity to go there to take it.

Through my own upbringing I learned about the Holocaust, at school, in books and on TV. I realised when I was in Poland though, when faced with the hair and shoes of some of those murdered, that it was only ever the words and numbers I'd understood.

The people that suffered were often thought of in their collective general terms. Jews, gipsies, homosexuals, words that took away the true and individual humanity of it all. It numbed me, I think, from the realisation that these were people just like me, in numbers way bigger than I could picture.

That doesn't just go for the victims, either – there was a numbness around the perpetrators too. Nazis, the collective force. During our talk with Holocaust Educational Trust educator Amy, she posed the question: who was responsible for these murders?

The group, including me, said nothing. Was it Hitler? His men? Those that voted for them? Was it the guards fault? Or the man who tipped the Zyklon B into the gas chamber?

Did the responsibility lie with the man that drove the train to Auschwitz? Or the neighbour that pointed the finger at the Jew next door? Who could be blamed for such a travesty? The answer, I assume, is everyone.

Humans allowed this to happen. As the Rabbi Barry Marcus pointed out when we attended a memorial ceremony at the end of the day, people ask him all the time where God was during this time. But he asks, where was man?

I have no belief in God, and so I have the same question.

For as long as there are humans, there needs to be remembrance of what we are capable of, so that we do not let history repeat itself.

Only tolerance can overcome intolerance, and only love can overcome hate. I'll take that lesson with me forever, and for as long as I am capable, I will remember.