Young Lions visit Auschwitz

Boothroyd added: “It was something that we wanted to do, it’s a poignant and quite an upsetting place, but it’s somewhere that everybody should visit to see what happened there.

“It is a place that I’m glad I’ve gone to, it just puts things into perspective and in a strange way, I’m pleased that a lot of the lads wanted to go and visit to show their respect.

“We’ve done what I think is the right thing. Everybody wanted to go, staff and players, so I’m glad we’ve done it.”

The group were taken on a guided tour of two main sites at Auschwitz, seeing the cramped conditions in which prisoners were held and the piles of human hair and clothes which were taken from the murdered victims.

That was followed up with a walk into the death chambers and the yard where prisoners were tortured or executed, before heading into the gas chambers at a location where an estimated 1.1m people lost their lives.

From there, the group headed a few kilometres away to the second camp at Birkenau, seeing the railway platform which prisoners would have first alighted onto from trains which came from across Europe.

And they walked from there to the International Memorial, situated either side of the two crematorium buildings, which were the largest gas chambers at Birkenau.

The tour concluded with a walk into the women’s barracks and it brought back memories of learning about the Holocaust and World War II for Ward-Prowse, who will be leading the Young Lions into action again on Tuesday when they play in the Euro semi-final.

“I think that’s where our interest was generated really, in the schooldays,” he explained.

“You hear and learn about the Holocaust and it’s a tragic thing, but to actually go to Auschwitz and see the scale of it, it brings it home to you about the enormity of it all.”