When he is done, we wander to other graves, and the extent of their disrepair is staggering. Money is not available for preservation, and the caretaker is very old. Even those graves that are still intact lean this way and that, cracks twisting out from their centers in spiraling webs. One grave, whose size and shape suggest what must have been an imposing grandness, has an enormous hole in its center, which is mystifying. It looks like vandalism, but how did this appear, this huge, circular, hole? How, I demand of one of the other rabbinical students, has the center been gouged out of this, out of something so solid, so old, so sacred? He shakes his head, silent. There’s no answer.

Around the edges of other graves, weeds push their leaves up, springy and resilient. They crowd around the Hebrew letters, and make the cemetery seem almost normal, the way these graves are sinking back into the earth, monuments from and for another time. And, in a way, it is normal because these graves predate the war. None of the rabbis buried here, none of these Jews lived to see what would happen a century later, and this is some small comfort: the privilege of a natural death, everything in its own season.

In the New Jewish Cemetery, which we visit next, gravestones mark the loss of entire families, and often there is only one date on them: the day the families were taken to Majdanek or Treblinka or gunned down in the Lublin ghettoes. “Liquidated” one of our Polish professors will say each time he refers to what happened there. None of the historians that speak to us that week, except our Israeli professor, will say killed or murdered, just “liquidated.” Here, the weeds creep in and around gravestones as well, gravestones that are, like those on the other side of town, in terrible disrepair, their pieces falling onto the ground. We push aside the shrubs and rub away the dirt to read names.

Is this how history survives here in Lublin? I wonder, pushing the hair out of my cold face. Untended and overgrown with weeds? Maybe, I think, and hope that I’m wrong.

Back in the monastery that afternoon, the Polish students have been invited to tell the group about their relationship with Judaism and with the history of Jews in Poland. They are terribly uncomfortable as they begin speaking, and when they describe what they know about Jews, it sounds as if they’re talking about ideas in a history textbook. In many of their homes, Jews and “what happened during the war” were a taboo, never mentioned, or mentioned only very briefly and quietly, once they were old enough to understand.

Slowly, though, the tone shifts, and one of the women, a college student, says this: “When I found out [about the Holocaust] I was wondering how it was possible to destroy an entire nation.” She stops, her voice cracking. “But now I know it only takes one generation, because my grandfather lived next to and knew Jews and my father didn’t know any. But I hope my children will.”

I think the sentiment is lovely but can’t help but wonder how this will happen. As far as I can see, there are no Jews left here. There are no Jews here but us.

The following evening, we take a bus to Kazimierz Dolny, a beautiful town in the Polish countryside surrounded by lush hills turning orange and gold with the arrival of autumn. Today, Kazimierz Dolny is a tourist town for urban-dwelling Poles, but before the war it was home to 3,000 Jews, all of whom died in the death camps, and who, before their deaths, made up half the town’s population.

Our first visit is to a well-kept Jewish graveyard, set on a forested hillside outside of town. Afterward, we drive back into town and meet our Polish tour guide, who, for the next half hour, tells us about Kazimierz before World War II. But when she gets to the war, she says, without missing a beat, “Let’s not bother with all the sad stuff,” and skips over it entirely. The Jewish community is barely mentioned, the Holocaust excised. All the Jewish students and some of the Notre Dame students turn to one another with wide eyes. We can’t believe what has just happened, how history has been glossed over and Poland’s Jews ushered out. Most of us, then, decide to forgo the rest of the tour. We’re in a tourist town after all, we say. We might as well browse the gift shops.

There’s not much of interest in the stores and as we wander from one to another, we start to wilt. “Maybe just one more?” I ask Gabby and Brian, two other rabbinical students, and we walk into the closest store, which doubles as an art gallery. Inside, there are glass cases with different displays, and just as I’m wandering from the jewelry to the figurines, I see them in a corner. Carved wooden Jews. The one I’m staring at is dressed to resemble a rabbi. He has an oversized nose, a tallis, a kipah and sad, huge, dark eyes. In his hands he holds a wooden platter, and when I lean in closer, I see that an enormous carved pig’s head rests on it. Bile rises in the back of my throat, and I blink hard, sure that this cannot be real. I drop the first rabbi, as if I’ve been scalded, and see that there are others behind him. These rabbis are not carrying pigs’ heads. They are carrying moneybags and some of them have noses double or triple the normal size. I stand there for a few moments before picking up the rabbi with the pig and carrying it over to Gabby and Brian. Their eyes widen.

“What is that?” they demand. “What is he carrying?!”

“A pig’s head,” I say flatly.

“What?!” says Brian. “Where are they?”

I take them to the other rabbis. Brian picks up the rabbi holding the moneybag and pushes it forward, under our noses.

“This cannot be for real,” he says.

“It is,” I say. “Look, there are more behind him.” I gesture behind us, at the rows of statuettes.

I buy the rabbi with the pig’s head that afternoon. I buy him because I know that someday soon, in a synagogue on the Upper West Side, I may be asked to teach about anti-Semitism to Jewish children who will simply be unable to believe what I am telling them: that anti-Semitism, the dark and heavy cloud their ancestors lived under, still exists. I buy the rabbi so I can teach about how deeply bigotry—our own, or others—can wound. I buy the rabbi because I think the best thing that can possibly happen to him is to be used as a teacher, as a symbol of our ability to dehumanize those who do not think, believe, or act like us.

I keep him in my apartment in Brooklyn now. Bound in a rag and thrust into a plastic bag, buried at the bottom of a box, waiting for the day I will bring him to a Hebrew school. I know he’s there, but I don’t want to have to look at him.

Later that afternoon, another rabbinical student asks a shopkeeper about these figurines. Who buys them, and why.

“Poles,” the shopkeeper says. “They keep them in their homes. For luck. They’re like lucky charms. People think, for example, if you keep a rabbi with a moneybag in your living room, it will help you get rich.”

I want to leave Poland.

Majdanek
Majdanek is not on the typical tourist circuit of death camps visited by American Jews. It does not have the scope of Auschwitz or the fame of Treblinka. But Majdanek, set just outside of Lublin’s city limits, was nonetheless one of the Nazi’s largest camps, and it is our destination the following day.

For the Jewish students Majdanek is also the axis of the week, the day around which our minds spin and which we are dreading. The night before we all sleep badly, and in the morning, at breakfast, there is uneasy silence at the table. Our anxiety is thick and heavy; we want to get this over with.

As we pull into the entrance to the camps, Gabby, who is sitting in the seat next to me, gasps. “Why is it so . . . so . . . nice looking?” he demands, gesturing at the lush green fields, the well-kept barracks. He’s right. From a distance, Majdanek looks like summer camp. If not for the telltale chimneys rising up into the background, the barbed wire fences, it might be mistaken for one.

There are no words for what we see in Majdanek that morning. It is horrifying and stomach-turning, and far worse, in every way, than the movies and books warned me about. The crematoria are small and cramped, the palettes on which bodies were shoveled into ovens defiantly large. But it is the shoes that stop me in my tracks. Nothing I have learned or known or believed prepares me for the shoes.

One of the barracks has been emptied out and filled entirely with cages of shoes. There must be thousands of them and they’re the shoes of the victims: the 110,000 Jews who were killed here, the 75,000 Poles who were murdered, the 50,000 others whose lives were prematurely ended.

The shoes have turned black and brown with age and dust, but it’s still possible to see, if you look closely: this one was a pump, that one a loafer, this an infant’s bootie.

Very little of what I have learned about God in rabbinical school and at Harvard before that survives the room with the shoes, but everything I have learned about evil does.

We are broken into three tour groups at Majdanek. One is for Hebrew- and English-speaking students, one for Polish speakers, and another for German speakers. We are staggered, but somehow, the English group keeps catching up to the group with the German tour guide, and when we overhear German my internal pressure valve blows. The sound of German is, here and now, terrifying. I walk out of the crematoria, and sit on the side of the barracks, shaking. I will not rejoin the group until the end of the tour.

At the end of the tour, we ascend the stairs to the mausoleum, a huge stone structure set on a hill above the camp. From here, we have a bird’s-eye view of Majdanek: the barracks and the barbed wire, the crematoria and new apartment blocks being built a few miles away.

Behind us is an open pit that looks like a massive stone bowl. In it are the ashes of hundreds of dead Jews, mixed with cement so they won’t blow away. If we turn around now and face the pit, we’ll see a small hill of human remains. Instead, we are facing a sprawling green field, pocked by more deep pits. These pits divide sections of a mass grave and the field, which is a brilliant, glowing green tomb. On a cold day in November 1943, 18,500 Jews were lined up here and murdered.

Our presence here has been choreographed by our group leaders; we have been instructed to hold a prayer service. And so, in the midst of the ashes, we start to pray. Students read Psalm 23 in Polish, German, Hebrew, and, finally, English. When they are done, I read the Mourner’s Kaddish in Aramaic: “Yitgadal v’yitkadash sh’mei rabah.” We are all grieving, and many of us are crying, but when the 23d Psalm is read in German, “Der Herr ist mein Hirte, mir wirdnichts mangeln,” the Jewish students flinch. And I try not to be, but I’m not just grieving—I’m also angry. I’m angry at the statuettes in Kazimierz, angry at the silence of our tour guide, angry at the seminarian who told me Jews were rude and smelled like garlic, and furious about the Jewish festivals that happen in the shadow of these places. This anger feels cavalier and besides the point, but no matter. Even though I know I should, I just can’t shake it.

On the walk back to the bus, Hans Peter, one of the German clergymen and professors, walks next to me, but says nothing. I realize this for what it is, accompaniment at the bottom of the pit, and I am grateful, although I don’t say anything. Neither of us does. As we begin to pass by the barracks, though, he stops and says in a shaking voice: “My people, the Germans, did this. And mostly, they were baptized. It’s unbelievable.” He pauses for a long, long moment, staring into the distance. “You know,” he says, “the Jewish people lost their lives here, but we, the Germans, we lost our dignity.” He shakes his head, and we walk on.

Lublin
The Jewish students reconvene at the pub, where we order many bottles of Polish vodka. As we are pouring shots, Gabby, an Israeli who has spent years serving as a rabbi in the Israeli Defense Forces, says to the group, “As a human being, and a Jew, I think that Judaism is . . . about how we don’t do [these kinds of things] to people.”

Yoki, our Israeli professor, a rabbi and a scholar, is quiet for a moment, then nods. “I hope so,” he says, looking up at the ceiling and adjusting his kipah. “You know, there are two crucial moments in the Kuzari,” he says, referring to the classic book of medieval Jewish philosophy written in the twelfth century by the great Rabbi Yehuda HaLevi. “HaLevi said . . . when you [the Jewish people] have a state, let’s see how you behave . . . . He was saying, we have the means in Judaism to fight against the national human tradition to be animals. He was saying: we can do it, all people can do it. But then Himmler once said, ‘Only those who really carry the “holy mission” can do it, but other human beings will be disgraced by it.’ “

He pauses then, and rubs his beard: “But, see, it is up to us to realize that . . . we’re both animals and holy creatures. And in some ways, we have the easiest task of all the groups here, which doesn’t mean it’s not also the deepest. The Germans have the most difficult task because they have the clearest sense of guilt and they know that it is their country [that did this]. The Poles are also facing an enormous challenge, almost impossible. You can bet they are accused of being Jewish [for being here, with us], which in contemporary Poland is a terrible accusation. For the American Catholics, they know Christianity bears a deep sense of anti-Semitism. The liberal Catholics have an easier task—they can say this is part of our tradition but we don’t accept it. But if you’re more conservative . . . you bear not only responsibility but also guilt. We Jews are the only ones who can mend this—even with the amount of vodka we’ve had, which is very significant. We can bring mending to the seminar.”

“But what do we get out of all of this?” demands Gabby, asking the question I’ve been thinking.

Yoki frowns, then says: “For the first time in Jewish history, we get to get rid of our exclusiveness. If the God of Israel is only the God of Israel, that God is gillulim [idolatrous], and Judaism is practically idolatrous.” He looks up at Gabby, and around our small circle. “And this question, What do you get from this? At the end of it, you might be a better Jew.”

There is a long silence and Yoki speaks again. “You know what a Hasidic rabbi once said about the Shoah?” he asks. We shake our heads no, we don’t.

“He said, ‘It could have been worse. We could have been the murderers.’ “

We stare down at our vodka, and no one speaks for what feels like minutes. But then Benji raises a glass and offers a toast. “L’chaim,” he says, smiling at all of us. “L’chaim,” we echo him, raising our shot glasses. “L’chaim,” we repeat. “To life, to living, to life.” We say it again and again, watching one another.

There’s nothing else to say, I think. Nothing to say.

We leave the pub then and walk crookedly back to the monastery. I am drunk and depleted, woozy and exhausted. My head feels fuzzy from the vodka and my limbs are warm and loose. I never drink this much, and can’t imagine how I’ll stay awake through the next part of the seminar, but the day is not over yet. To begin the afternoon, the German students will reflect on their personal histories, and their relationship to the Holocaust. We are all dreading this. It has been a long day, and we don’t want to listen anymore.

When the German students begin to talk about their personal histories, the room is absolutely silent. Most of the German students have never met a Jew before, although they grew up in cities like Potsdam and Augsburg. Nazism, they tell us, still runs rampant in small towns all over Germany, towns where there are no Jews left. The day is not getting easier. But after long days of silence and far too much vodka, I hear myself speak: “I have a question for all of you. After the Shoah, in the Jewish community there was a great deal of theological discussion about whether God died here, about whether God died during the Holocaust. How do you answer this?” One of the German professors begins to tremble.

A German man in his 20s named Uwe, who has not said a single word publicly all week, speaks. “I think,” he says, and then starts to cry. “I think,” he begins again, but each time he tries to talk, he bursts into tears. Finally, after a few minutes, he says, “I think that if we can all stand together at the mausoleum at Majdanek and pray, there must be a God.”

No one speaks. No one moves. But I think, thank you.

It is not all so straightforward. Just as we are leaving Majdanek, one of the Notre Dame students says to one of his colleagues from South Bend, within earshot of another rabbinical student, “I am so glad that Jesus stopped the evil here, through the rosary.”

The rabbinical student who repeats this statement back to me is confused—he’s not sure what it means. But I think that I am, and I’m furious. I feel like a fetish the Notre Dame student is using to work through his theology and his guilt, and although I never confront him, it will become impossible for me to be in his presence for the remainder of the trip. I am so angry; I can’t even look him in the eye.

New York
Three days later, I walk into my apartment in New York and put down my bags. The flight back from Warsaw was direct and overnight, but I was awake the entire time, nine hours of reading for all the classes I missed this week. I am bleary-eyed and exhausted as I crawl into bed, but after 24 sleepless hours, I find that I can’t fall asleep. So I turn on the TV. And there, on HBO, is Sacha Baron Cohen starring in Borat.

It is the beginning of the movie and he is participating in “The Running of the Jews.” The first time I saw this sequence in theaters, I laughed until my stomach hurt. And I laugh now, too, lying in my warm bed in Brooklyn. As the running continues and the requisite jokes about anti-Semitism are made, as Cohen mugs for the camera and mocks the stupidity and bigotry of anti-Semitism, however, I realize that my face is wet. I’m not laughing anymore. I’m crying, and I can’t stop, but I don’t want these tears. I choke them back, turn off the TV, switch off the light, and pray for sleep.

A week later, I call my friend Rabbi Melissa Weintraub. I tell her about the week in Poland and I tell her how, for the past week, I’ve been unable to sleep, how each night I fall asleep quickly only to slip into nightmares. I haven’t had nightmares since I was a child, but now, every night, I dream violent, terrifying dreams that wake me from the deepest sleep. I need to do something, I tell her. I need to let go of this, I need to forgive, and if I can’t forgive, I need the solace, right now, of forgetting.

I remember, I tell Melissa, how in Israel, at cemeteries we wash our hands at the exits in clear, freezing water. In Judaism, it is traditional to wash yourself in cold water after contact with death, to purify yourself so you can return clean and new, back to life. I tell her that the entire week in Poland felt like walking through a cemetery. “Everywhere I stepped,” I say, “felt like walking on graves. Please”—I am surprised by the ease of this request, its clarity—” Please can we go to the mikvah?”

Melissa agrees and the next week, on a cold autumn afternoon, just before Shabbat is about to begin, we take the subway to Broadway and Seventy-fourth Street. When we arrive, an attendant ushers us into private bathrooms, where the instructions are clear and precise, rows of black letters on laminated paper: Undress completely. Remove your jewelry, remove your nail polish, wash away your make-up. Brush your hair. Clip your nails. Wash between your toes, between your fingers, behind your ears. Shave. Scrub under your nails, behind your knees and in the crease between your forearm and bicep. Don’t forget anything.

When we are done, we walk to the mikvah, and Melissa recites the blessings and I immerse three times. The water is warm and clear and when I dunk under, as custom dictates, I raise my hands and feet from the side and floor, so every part of me is naked and floating, held in the gentle sway of the warm water. Under the water, there is a quiet swish and slosh and I watch as a slow line of bubbles rises to the surface. I come to the surface and take a deep breath, walk up the stairs out of the water, and wrap myself in the bathrobe. It’s over, I think, wrapping the belt tight around my middle. Finally over.

Back in the bathrooms, we take showers to rinse off the mikvah water, and prepare ourselves for Shabbat. And as I am washing my hair, I am surprised to feel my hands stop, and drop to my sides. I am crying, and this time, I won’t try to stop. This time, I weep.

Jordie Gerson is a rabbinical student at Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion in New York City and a freelance writer. She received a master of theological studies from Harvard Divinity School in 2004. She is currently working on a memoir about her first year of rabbinical school in Jerusalem.