How Auschwitz reminded me to never forget - The Jewish Chronicle

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.

However small, this personal link reminded me that each of the six million people who died were individuals. The death of one in my mind was more powerful than a pile of ash in Madjenek, which I just could not take in.

But I find this concerning: if it is hard to feel emotional at the site of these atrocities, how can we expect those with no personal connection to feel anything? I worry that the famous clock tower at Auschwitz is now a tourist destination to share with friends on Facebook, rather than a monument to humanity's darkest day.

Other memories made the trip difficult. At a young age, I met Leon Greenman, the only English Jew to survive Auschwitz. His son and wife were gassed, but he promised God that, in exchange for his survival, he would expose the horrors inside the camps.

Well into his eighties, he marched with anti-fascist demonstrators against racists. He signed a copy of his book for me: "Read, think and tell people." I kept this promise by sharing his message with my peers while standing opposite the Auschwitz crematoria. We must make sure that the Holocaust will never happen again - to anybody.

Since coming home, I have felt reignited passion for Zionism. Last year, John Prescott wrote that "what happened to the Jewish people at the hands of the Nazis is appalling. But you would think those atrocities would give Israelis a unique sense of perspective and empathy with the victims of a ghetto". Whatever one feels about Gaza, comparing it to the Holocaust is an insult to the many who were systematically murdered. The trip has given me the drive to fight this ignorance, and to keep reminding people of the horrors so that it is never forgotten.

How do you end a trip to hell? On our last day we visited the Lauder-Morasha School in Warsaw. Instead of looking at ghosts, we shook hands with the next generation of Jewish people from Poland. We played games with them and sang Am Yisrael Chai.

Despite Hitler's attempts to annihilate the Jews, he failed. Perhaps my pride in being Jewish will be the overriding emotion I take away from my time in Poland. One that I hope will stay with me for the rest of my life.

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