But the shoe Jones was focusing on so intently wasn’t piled neatly in a closet.

It was carelessly thrown into a room with maybe 80,000 other pairs, a disturbing parallel to the fate of their owners after they walked into a mock shower to their deaths.

Armed with hindsight and an understanding the prisoners didn’t have, Jones couldn’t take his eyes off that little shoe. His heart broke with the knowledge that that bit of stitched leather — nearly lost in the pile stacked six feet high — was all there was left to mark a little girl’s life.

The Milton District High School principal said there was nothing he could’ve done to prepare himself mentally for the experience of visiting Auschwitz, the extermination camp in Poland where more than one million people were murdered.

“I don’t think you can ever be prepared for what you’re going to encounter there. The presence of evil… that people could be so cruel — you can’t explain it,” he said.

And it’s pretty safe to say the 41 students and seven staff members who accompanied him on last month’s trip feel the same way.

With this week being Holocaust Education Week, Jones is more than willing to talk about his trip and how it affected him.

So many images seem permanently seared into his mind. In another room not far from the shoes was one that, behind glass, contained 1,400 kilos of human hair. Jones said that before the Jews and other prisoners were killed, their heads were shaved and their hair collected to weave into cloth.

Yet another room held hundreds of pairs of glasses.

Also impossible to forget was seeing firsthand the gas chambers and crematorium.

The group stood where Jews were selected for either gassing or slave labour, and visited the building where Nazis performed “medical experiments” on prisoners.

Perhaps one of the most moving moments was watching some of his students light candles and set them on the railway tracks leading into Auschwitz alongside some Jewish students.

The 12-day trip was the pinnacle of the school’s numerous cultural proficiency initiatives, which included trips to Ghana, New Orleans and the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles.

The group travelled first to Berlin, Germany, where they visited a memorial for Jews killed in Europe.

Next they went to the Terezin concentration camp, northwest of Prague in the Czech Republic, and then to Prague itself, where they experienced the Jewish quarter, which was left intact by Hitler as a sort of “trophy” of the civilization he said he’d destroyed.

Poland was their next stop, where they visited Auschwitz 1 — the original concentration camp — and Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest of the Nazi camps.

Their trip concluded in Vienna, where they took a necessary rest from the darkness they’d seen and did some sightseeing.

Jones said the biggest challenge for him was to take all the information crammed into his head about the Holocaust and let it travel to his heart. It’s at that more personal level that truths change you, he said.

Matt Carson, 17, said the trip is one he’ll never forget.

“I wanted a chance to actually go to the place (Auschwitz) where the largest act of intolerance ever happened,” he said. “It was an unreal experience.”

Like Jones, Matt also has an image he can’t shake of a shoe. This one is a white men’s shoe and isn’t much different from those you’d see today, he said. “It’s pretty much burned into my mind.”

It was a neat coincidence that put the group in the same hotel restaurant as an elderly man who’d spent three years as a political prisoner in a concentration camp for handing out anti-Nazi literature in Norway, Matt said. The man was more than happy to share his story.

This generation is fortunate to still be able to hear first-hand accounts from survivors, Matt said.

“They won’t be around much longer.”

The Grade 12 student said he feels a responsibility to do something with what he has seen. He has already begun writing a play about the Holocaust, and constantly watches out for small ways he can promote tolerance.

“I’m not able to go out and change the world, but I’m starting with me… speaking out about racial jokes… things that happen every day,” he said. “I’m so happy I went. It was honestly life-changing.”

Another student, Maia Pattison, wrote about the experience in her school newsletter.

She wrote about how it wasn’t possible for her to comprehend the enormity of the Holocaust without going to the places where it happened.

“We learn about the ghettos, the cattle cars, the camps and the marches, but rarely can we put faces to the figures,” she wrote.

In her poignant account of the trip, Pattison spoke of feeling the immensity of the silence as she looked upon row after row of barracks at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

“You see the ghosts file past you. You long to reach out to them, to warn them, to save them. To simply ask them their names.”

She urged her peers to speak out against injustice, as so many didn’t do during what Hitler called “the final solution.”

“Just remember, stand up, because it so easily could have been you.”

Stephanie Hounsell can be reached at sthiessen@miltoncanadianchampion.com .