One of the bleakest images of the horrors of the Second World War is the sinister gate of Nazi death camp Auschwitz. Yet within the grim walls of the camp, a Wharfedale vicar found hope and an important message for people everywhere today.

Bert Townend was among Allied soldiers who liberated survivors from Nazi concentration camps towards the end of the Second World War.

Many today are familiar with the devastating scenes of inhuman cruelty which lay within these camps, captured on film and camera to show to the world the very worst of the Nazi regime.

Bert never spoke of what he witnessed himself.

This is something which led his grandson, the Rev Lee Townend, priest-in-charge at All Saints Parish Church, in Ilkley, on a quest to learn more and question how man could inflict such cruelty on his own kind.

Mr Townend, 46, his father, Keith, and son, Joe, recently travelled to Poland to visit the most notorious death camps at Auschwitz-Birkenau, near Krakow.

More than a million people were killed there, the majority of them Jews.

Trainloads of people arriving at the camps were coldly divided into those who would die at once in the gas chambers and those forced into slave labour, many of whom were also killed or died of starvation.

The sheer size of the camp was something which struck Mr Townend — the size of around 30 football fields — and the eerie silence.

“One of the things you hear said is that no birds sing at Auschwitz, and it’s true, they don’t,” he said.

The camp is preserved today as a memorial to those who died and a warning of the consequences of supporting the politics of hate.

Mr Townend said it was difficult to hold in the emotions as he saw the gas chambers and the areas where people were deceived into labelling the belongings taken from them and told they could collect them later.

The Townends were also confronted by the distressing scene of the piles of shoes taken from children and other victims — and hair shaved from victims, which was collected to make cloth.

But there were also tales of hope. One man in the camp volunteered to die in order to save another man who had a family — and this man survived the war.

They visited the factory of industrialist Oskar Schindler, who saved more than 1,000 Jews by giving them jobs.

Mr Townend said: “It struck me, as we come up to Remembrance Sunday, how, as individuals, we have incredible power within us to change the world for good, through small prayers and offerings for peace and writing letters to governments to pursue peaceful goals.”

He concludes that the warning from the past is also telling us of the dangers of blindly following a popular movement or idea. “What is popular is not always right and what is right is not always popular,” he said. “Human beings have the power to change the world. If a child who is of an age to do so could go and visit Auschwitz and see what can happen, it would quite possibly change them forever, to people who pursue peace at all costs.”