"Anyone know the language of the Jewish people? It starts with an 'H'."

The year four class look at each other nervously, before one 10-year-old tentatively raises his hand: "Holocaust?" he volunteers.

I am standing on the sidelines as 20 young pupils get a crash course in Shoah education. They may not know the word "Hebrew" when they begin the day - or even where Jews go to pray (general consensus is "Church") - but in a few short hours, they will have had an extensive and immersive Jewish educational experience that will most likely stay with them for the rest of their lives.

They will have witnessed a recreation of the kind of the persecution faced by Jews in Germany and eastern Europe as the power of Hitler grew; they will have handled precious objects rescued and preserved from the time, and they will have met and spoken to a survivor who fled to the UK just before the outbreak of war.

Welcome to an average day at Beth Shalom, the National Holocaust Centre and Museum in Laxton, Nottinghamshire, which happens to be the only museum in the UK purely dedicated to Holocaust education. Every year, the centre ushers more than 25,000 schoolchildren on organised trips through its doors, offering two distinct learning programmes depending on the children's age and prior knowledge of the Shoah.

The first programme, known as "The Journey", is the session that I am observing on this Monday morning alongside a class of nine- and 10-year-olds from Abbey Hill School in Stoke-on-Trent. Over the next two hours, we will be guided by Beth Shalom educator Lynda Bullock through an exhibition specifically designed for primary school children - following the diary of Leo, a fictional German-Jewish boy living in Berlin in 1938.

We begin by entering Leo's dining room, with pictures on the walls of his family, and a dinner table set for Shabbat, complete with chicken soup and kosher wine. We then listen to a radio clip of Hitler telling the German public that "the Jews were to blame for losing the First World War".

Leo appears on screen, telling us that his family are feeling nervous and confused, and have started to be ostracised by neighbours. "Do you know what we call people who pick on others because of their skin colour?" Ms Bullock asks the pupils. "We call them racist."

Next we find ourselves in Leo's school classroom, where we watch a survivor on screen explain that, as a Jew, he had been forced to sit on the floor at the back of the class.

We hear again from Leo: "Teacher pointed to my nose, my hair and my chin and everyone laughed," he says. "I was no longer allowed to sit with my friends."

Ms Bullock tells the Abbey Hill audience that Leo's classmates were being taught "to be racist bullies. Jewish people were a minority - only 0.5 per cent of the population - yet Hitler was making out that Jews were causing trouble for Germans. It was all just lies."

As we walk through the exhibition's next few rooms, we travel back to pivotal moments from history. The first is a scene depicting Kristallnacht, with Stars of David daubed on Jewish shops and broken glass at the students' feet. We discover that Leo's father's tailors' shop is one of the looted businesses.

From there, we enter Leo's family's secret hiding place, before boarding a train carriage that is taking Leo to Britain on the Kindertransport. We see Leo's parents waving him goodbye. And then, as if the train has transported us straight from 1938 to 2016, we leave the exhibition and meet Hedi Argent, who came to the UK with her parents from Austria after the Anschluss.

She tells the assembled pupils her story; how her family went from privilege to privation, how her lawyer father had been dragged outside every night to scrub pavements, and how they had left their lives behind in order to survive.

"It wasn't just a home we were leaving, it was our family. My grandparents, cousins, aunts and uncles were all put into camps and murdered," she tells them. "It took me a long time to share my story, as I thought nobody was interested. But it is only by hearing each other's stories that we can understand each other.

"We hear a lot about refugees today. Have any of you thought about how it feels for them to go to school here? Be aware of each other and never walk away. Treat others how you wish to be treated."

So ends "The Journey", kicking off the pupils' Holocaust education in, probably, the most affecting way possible. But it is just one strand of the work happening daily at Beth Shalom.

Drive down a country road 15 minutes from Newark Northgate station and you will find a sprawling site that holds two permanent exhibitions - "The Journey" and a secondary school-aimed presentation; a memorial and reflective garden space; memorial gardens; and teaching and viewing rooms. The centre also counts 40 Holocaust survivors as "ambassadors" who visit on a rotating daily basis to add to the experience of visitors.

"A lot of the survivors think of the centre as family," explains Sarah Coward, Beth Shalom's development director. "They find comfort and relief in sharing their stories."

The centre's outreach is extensive. As well as welcoming primary and secondary school pupils, it also offers training programmes for teachers, sessions for children with special educational needs, and also runs a scheme with the police to educate young offenders, as a means of restorative justice for hate crimes.

Now, in its 20th year, the centre is about to launch its most ambitious venture to date: the £1.25 million Interactive Testimony Project, which has set out to solve the dilemma of how to ensure that survivors' stories endure when they are no longer with us.

Over the past 12 months, Beth Shalom's directors have been filming extensive interviews with nine survivors - they have one more to go - asking them between 800 to 1,200 questions each and so presupposing anything a child might think to ask. The idea is that this will enable future visitors to the centre to not only see and hear a survivor, but also interact with them. The life-size digital recording will be projected onto a stage and will, if all goes to plan, be able respond to questions from the floor. The scheme is being piloted in the next few weeks and will officially open in the spring.

"This project is truly groundbreaking," explains James Griffiths, Beth Shalom's director of learning. "We were most concerned with losing the Q&A experience. But this will ensure that survivors really are still 'there'."

As far as Beth Shalom's directors are concerned, their duty is two-fold: on the one hand, they wish to memorialise and pay tribute to those who suffered so greatly during the Second World War; but at the same time, their role is to influence the future. By reaching as many of the UK's schoolchildren as possible - many before they reach the age of 11, when stereotypical attitudes are believed to begin - they hope to cut ignorance and prejudice at its source.

After an emotional, jam-packed and illuminating day, I leave Beth Shalom with Ms Bullock's words to Abbey Hill's pupils ringing in my ears: "We hope that you're going to go back to your school and talk about what you learnt today," she tells them.

"This is just the beginning of your learning."