Poland was cold. There was a chill in the air that burrowed down through your skin and tried to extinguish your internal flame, the flame that is your heart and soul.

I enjoyed my time in Poland, but it was not in any way fun. Poland was a learning experience, both because we were being actively taught and because we couldn’t help but learn things about ourselves and about our people. The subject matter was very simple—we were learning about life and death. Our experiences—I won’t call them lessons because they were much more than that—were split into these two categories: life and death.

Some days we would spend our time walking around the old Jewish quarters of Polish cities. These areas were, for the most part, devoid of Jews. We would visit beit knessets (synagogues) that had not been in use for over 50 years. These empty halls filled with the relics of pre-Holocaust Judaism were not living houses of worship. We would spend hours in graveyards reading the names of great men on headstones. We spent a great deal of time in these barren and desolate places; places where our group made up almost 100 percent of the Jewish community.

But in these graveyards and empty buildings, it was life that we studied. We learned how the great men who lay under those weather-worn headstones gave us ideas that today make up an important part of our Judaism. We filled those empty temples with our faith and made their stone walls echo with our prayers and songs. In Poland, we learned the details of how one of the greatest Jewish communities of all time lived. On Shabbat, we met some of Poland’s modern Jewish community.

 There’s a phenomenon in post-World War II Europe that has never existed anywhere else in the world. It’s the idea of finding out that you are Jewish. This is a completely alien notion to Jews elsewhere. You are either born and raised Jewish or you find Judaism yourself at some point during your life.

In this community we met people who had discovered their Judaism in a very different way. I talked with an 18-year-old who was circumcised at the age of 16 after finding out that his grandfather had lied about who he was to escape the Nazis. That’s a type of dedication I admire but am not sure I can fully understand. Life was important in Poland. We learned about the prosperous Jewish community that had once lived there, and we met the struggling one that lives there now. This was the easy part of the trip; in the other portion, we would learn how this thriving community had come to an end.

Learning about European Judaism before World War II made learning about its destruction even harder. We all came to realize that the Ashkenazi Judaism of Eastern Europe is an important part of who we are. This made its destruction seem akin to losing a limb or a family member. That’s a scary thought, because the dismantling and extermination of families is exactly how the Nazis tried to destroy Judaism.

The camps and memorials were painful. I have felt sadness and anger before, but my time at the camps, especially at Auschwitz, introduced me to grief and rage. Even after all the debriefing and discussing we have done, I’m not comfortable probing my feelings too deeply yet. However, while I was there I kept a journal of how I was feeling. Below are a couple of entries from this journal. Hopefully they’ll help convey the magnitude of my emotions:

“I am a Jew who walked into a gas chamber in Poland. I’m a Jew who walked back out to feel the sun shining on my face, the same sun that is, at this moment, warming the earth of a sovereign Jewish nation.”

“I am torn. My range of feeling is not great enough to encompass this much rage and this much grief. I hate the [thought of] Jews digging their own graves and all but lying down in them. I hate them for not fighting, and I cry because I don’t know if I would have, either. I hate the Nazis because they were crueler than any human could be. Someone who can kill and not feel has lost their last grasp on humanity. I’m not big enough to feel all this.”

“We are a group of Jews who will, in a few hours, be returning to a Jewish homeland. We survived, and all that is left of your Third Reich is the rubble that lies before me.”

Poland was hard; it changed my view of the world. It may have even changed me. Poland was cold, but being able to return to Israel and look out on the hills of Jerusalem is all the warmth I will ever need.

Jake Bleiberg is 17 years old and returned to his home in northern New Jersey in December after living in Israel for four months. Jake is the Religious and Cultural Vice President of his temple youth group and an active member of the Jewish community. He’s also a member of the JVibe Teen Advisory Board.