We were told it was OK to cry, but maybe we should have been told it was just as acceptable not to cry. I went last month on Immanuel College's sixth form trip to Poland willing to weep, but unable to do so in what I had anticipated would be the most affecting places, such as the gas chambers at Majdanek.
The camps are just too terrible to comprehend. They were so far from what I knew that, although I felt a sense of loss when trekking over the long grass of Treblinka, I came away feeling more confused than anything else. It felt unreal, like I was touring a film set. One of my friends remarked: "The more you learn about the Holocaust, the less you understand."
But I did have some powerful emotional experiences. My great-great grandfather was a dayan before Poland was occupied in 1939. How he was killed is unknown, but he may have been one of the many taken and shot in a forest. It was visiting the sites of numerous mass graves - usually found at the bottom of a modern-looking village - that left me wishing I had known killed family members, and frustrated by their pointless deaths.
To honour my great-great grandfather, I leined the first portion of Vayeshev about the story of Joseph, coincidently my father's barmitzvah portion, on a Thursday morning. My father was named Joseph after the dayan, and thinking about this spurred my only bout of tears during the trip.
