England team learn about life's bigger picture

Ian Herbert joins Hodgson's players as they pay visit to Schindler's factory and sees a maturing group visibly moved by the experience

Joleon Lescott is well acquainted with racial prejudice, having said it felt like he was the one on trial when he provided written testimony alleging such abuse four years ago. But the factory here where Oskar Schindler saved 1,200 Jews from the ravages of Naziism taught him something new yesterday.

Lescott was in a group of 14 England players who walked through a museum which recreated the dark, forbidding walkways of the Krakow ghetto and, above all, Lescott emerged with the realisation that a word which now means indulgence actually signifies something very different. "Most youngsters today have a glorified image of a ghetto but the ghettos we have learned about today are not like that," he said. "I didn't have a full understanding of what the word means and for a lot of people today it has been lost in translation. You see it in films and learn about it in music but learning the origins of the word 'ghetto' opens your eyes."

A smaller, hand-selected group of England players had been given the chance to experience the enormity of Auschwitz yesterday but in its understated ways – the hollowed-out images of those recalling the ghetto, the two-foot square cells of those imprisoned there and the parquet floors adorned with swastikas remembering the brutal Nazi occupation of 1939 – this was just as powerful.

Steven Gerrard leaned back against the cold, uneven brickwork of the ghetto, where 17,000 people including an eight-year-old Roman Polanski were incarcerated, and stared into space. John Terry peered intently into the lofty vault of the cylindrical room where the names of all those on Schindler's List of saved souls (immortalised in Steven Spielberg's film) are inscribed. Some of those listed – children then, elderly now – still come back here and leave in tears. Yet it was perhaps the recreation of the Krakow concentration camp, where the commandant picked off Jews at will for shooting practice, which will remain through the years for most who attend. "The first impression is terrible," recalls one of the survivors in a message which England's players read, on one wall. "It looked liked a cemetery. You don't come back from a cemetery..."

"Days like today you tend to look back on as much as the tournament itself in years to come," Lescott reflected. "The things you have done, the people you have met. This is my first experience of something like this." It is no exaggeration to say that in its own way, such a shared experience provides a bond which translates into the work the players are here to carry out. Lescott confirmed as much and Sir Trevor Brooking, who was with the group, also felt it could translate to the field of play. "You can get the feel of how strong those people's souls were to survive in so terrible a period when many didn't," Brooking said, after he and Gerrard had signed the visitors' book. "I'm sure experiences like this can only make players grateful for their own situation and show people back home how much it means to be here."

As the players' coach pulled off, they may have reflected that the entire museum, set on an unprepossessing, pot-holed backstreet, ought not to have been closed off to the public – as it was – to await their attendance. The gesture was welcoming but contributed to that sense of footballers as royalty, which they are not. As they reach the first weekend of this new journey into the unknown, it is fair to reflect that Roy Hodgson's England have certainly not conducted themselves like princes and that – for all the injury problems and the questions about Rio Ferdinand's omission which unacceptably remain unanswered – the England squad touring now has been put in touch with itself.

The squad's city-centre Hotel Stary helps, even though the prospect of any player bar Martin Kelly strolling off into the town square for coffee is unthinkable. Its location created the once unthinkable prospect, on Thursday evening, of the players taking a 50-yard stroll to the local art gallery for a Mayor's reception and, once the formalities had been concluded, being left to take their chances with the punters. There are similarities to the remote Rustenburg experience of 2010, like the darts competition which Terry so excelled at, but a greater sense of activity too. Video games, of course, and a table tennis table, but books for Leighton Baines and the successful sound system with which the players acquainted those uninitiated staff with the Stone Roses at a fearsome volume on Wednesday night. The prospect of the players actually encountering anyone outside of the bubble no longer seems something to be feared. The golf day at Hertfordshire's Grove Hotel which they entered into with invited outsiders, a week before leaving for Poland, revealed the new mentality, as much as the barbeque that followed – even if the alien concept of players meeting journalists informally meant that Gerrard, Phil Jagielka and Gary Neville were the only three who looked particularly comfortable.

This is not a new environment of Hodgson's making – the FA was intent on introducing it, regardless of the manager – though the new manager belongs to the overriding impression of a squad more at ease with itself. The way Hodgson casually pulled up a chair at chairman David Bernstein's table at the barbeque and plonked himself down is something we would never have seen in the Fabio Capello era. The novella Hodgson dropped into Bernstein's hands that night – Chess, Austrian writer and journalist Stefan Sweig's only examination of the Naziism which forced him to flee to London and later the United States – suggested two men on the same intellectual level. However the events of the next three weeks turn out, Hodgson will be in place for the Brazil 2014 campaign.

One of Hodgson's overriding regrets of his preparations for the 1994 World Cup campaign with Switzerland was the decision to isolate the squad from the outside world too early in the United States – though their progress to the last 16 did not represent failure.

The new free spirit of England is not out of keeping with what he has learned. On the trip to Auschwitz yesterday, Joe Hart, who has been especially affected by the Holocaust Education Trust's work to help the squad get the most from it, was clearly moved. "Everyone should come here," said Hodgson, while Rooney paused to read a sign: "The one who does not remember history is bound to live through it again."

Back in Krakow, near the simple bronze plaque to Schindler, who saved so many from those atrocities and yet who died in poverty 30 years after spending his entire fortune bribing the authorities and buying black-market supplies to save his workers, Lescott reflected on the importance of "not resting" on what you possess and achieve. "You must not take that for granted. You have to move forward and use this information to pass on to our children to show how people struggled and survived." A very stern challenge is about to arrive for a very challenged squad. But this is a less burdened England – and a stronger one because of it.