Darren Laing

From Istanbul to Iochdar, there's nowhere Eòrpa won't go to bring you the best stories.

Our producer in the office said to me that I should write about the Eòrpa trip which affected me the most recently for this. This wasn't a difficult choice to make because I'd just returned from the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Poland.

Many of you will already be familiar with the names and statistics synonymous with Auschwitz. Hitler, Höß, Himmler; over a million people murdered in the camp; almost a million of them Jews.

However, it was the things you can't put a number on which stuck most in my mind. "Verhalte dich ruhig" or "keep quiet" written on the walls of the communal latrines. Even as they were herded like cattle to use the meagre sanitation facilities, they were not allowed to talk.

Although the inmates were kept in medieval conditions, the camp authorities fitted a state of the art sewage system. It was a priority that the goings on at the camp should not pollute the soil so that it would be clean enough for German settlers after the Jews had been exterminated.

And a shoe which had been taken from a small child before she was sent to her death, a school report card hidden inside. The prisoners would hide the things most precious to them in their shoes so they wouldn't be taken by the camp authorities.