I stayed behind the group, dazed and concentrating on my feet as they shuffled through the thin powder coating. Though I walked with Ira, we didn't really talk, but instead spoke with nods, hushed sighs and occasional single-sentence remarks that did little to capture what we saw. "There was no grass here before," a survivor once told our guide, Melinda.

"How do you know?" Melinda asked her.

"If there were, we would have eaten it."

This was Majdanek, where 360,000 Jews, gypsies, homosexuals and prisoners-of-war were murdered by the Nazis. Melinda told us that if someone gave the order, Majdanek could be fully running again within 72 hours-even 60 years after its liberation.

Majdanek was the first concentration camp we visited in Poland that week; later, we stopped at the work camp Plaszow, and on our last day, we visited Auschwitz-Birkenau. Then, after a three-hour flight, we landed at Ben Gurion International Airport.

On the same day that I arrived in Israel and climbed Masada in time to see the sun rise over the Negev, I had also walked through Auschwitz. It was chilling, infuriating and like the Negev-only terrifying and completely unlike the Negev-spread uniformly in all directions until it faded beyond my sight.

I wish we could linger. We were at Plaszow for about 20 minutes, Birkenau for an hour, Majdanek and Auschwitz each for less than three.

I had no time to process what I saw at the sites where millions of people died, where my great-grandparents, great aunts and great uncles were slaughtered.

It was freezing. My toes, my fingers, even my legs, lost all sensation by the end of each stretch outside. I found myself complaining about the cold.

Here I was, bundled in two sweaters, a down feather jacket, my March of the Living windbreaker, two pairs of socks and gloves, a hat and scarf, outside for a few hours at a time, and I had the nerve to complain. I tried to imagine standing in the same frigid air wearing one threadbare layer and pushing to exert myself past my physical limit for eight hours day after day after day. For years. But I couldn't.

This was my strategy each time I felt I should cry. I closed my eyes and put myself in the concentration camp as a victim. The tears, however, would always elude me. I had been yearning for the physical cues, but even once I was there, I saw only the carcasses of concentration camps. I couldn't grasp the emotional link.

In Birkenau, I almost succeeded. I sat by myself on a stone step where a crematorium had once stood and pressed my eyes shut, almost hoping to squeeze tears out of them. Then-and this is almost like cheating-I thought of my own family, taken from their lives, thrust into this macabre freak show.

I thought of my father, a professor permanently armed with reassuring advice; my mother, an artist who is never quite calm and always unrelenting when she cares about something; and my 17-year-old brother, a soccer goalie and a high school junior who, caught up in the personal fable of adolescence, believes he is invulnerable.

I'm no gargoyle. When I imagined my family murdered, I felt my chest grow tense and my eyebrows crease; I longed for them to be sitting next to me. Still, the tears refused to come.

Auschwitz is organized like one horrific museum, contained in the neat line of two-story red barracks, or blocks. We saw photographs of children whose lives were stolen from them. We saw their miniature clothing preserved in a display case. We shuddered at piles of human hair, all gray by now, at roomfuls of silverware, plates, leather shoes and suitcases scribbled with names of people who believed they might someday get their bags back. We passed endless rows of photos lining the barrack walls-men and women with shaved heads, each an inmate who died.

And these were only a few days' worth of specimens, a fraction of the faces.

At Majdanek and Auschwitz, we stumbled into the gas chambers, their walls stained with blue splotches of Zyklon B, and lit the room with white memorial candles as we recited the Mourner's Kaddish, the prayer for the dead.

Soon, though, I was too angry to cry, fuming with each step I took.

Majdanek is a national park. We have redwood trees in our parks; Poland has gas chambers.

Yes, that's an exaggerated statement. I realize that the national park status mainly means that the government pays for the camp's upkeep, but the label offends me; it seems an indication of the disregard with which Poles treat the camp. The mausoleum-a dome shielding an immense heap of human ashes-was littered with food wrappers and other trash. We visited the camp on Christmas Day, and a trio of church-clad Poles strolled across a field, chatting and carrying shopping bags.

Most hurtful were the billowing smokestacks that seemed to be encroaching on all sides of the camp.

Was this some kind of cruel joke? I'm sure these smokestacks were part of a factory, but to me, they were just reminders that prisoners' bones were burned there, that similar chimneys released the remains as smoke.

Now, I wasn't crying, I was cringing, squinting my eyes and shaking my head in disbelief. I watched my peers reach their breaking points and wander in red-eyed bewilderment. I was in a daze, too, but a different one, my arms crossed and my stare fixed ahead at the ghost town as I waited for it to hit me. I felt removed, chilled, so incensed that I couldn't absorb anything.

The only time I cried during the entire trip, I didn't even mean to. I was standing at the Kotel, the only remaining wall of the platform that held the ancient Jewish temple in Jerusalem, singing "Lecha Dodi" to welcome the Sabbath with the other girls. Rings of dancers wove around us, their infectious melodies rising, then fading, as they passed. I gazed at the towering wall and remembered the religious girl I had just seen sobbing with her head bowed, one hand holding her prayer book, the other on the cold stone.

That morning in Tzefat, the center of Jewish mysticism, we had visited the synagogue where Rabbi Shlomo Alkabetz, the mystic who wrote "Lecha Dodi," once studied. Now we were singing the same song in front of the holiest site in the Jewish world alongside throngs of Jews doing the same. I noticed my eyes getting moist, my smile stretching wider, and soon, the tears on my cheek. Finally.

I know it sounds trite. The bleakness of the camps, my inability to comprehend the devastation of the Holocaust, the catharsis of Israel-it's all predictable. It probably shouldn't be. How desensitized must we be? The Holocaust happened, no matter how many times we write about it. It still aches, even if everyone knows about it.

I wrote this piece in an attempt to confront numbness and resentment. But upon re-reading it, even my internal struggle seems stale.

And here's a frightening truth: I've changed nothing about my life since I returned.

Spring semester started three days after I returned from Israel. I threw myself headfirst into my editor job at this newspaper, into my friends, into picking up where I left off in the fall. No one at school had been there with me, so it was all too easy to go back to high-strung Brandeis mode.

I resolved to write about my trip during the first week back. That was more than three months ago.

Lisa, a student at UCLA who went on March of the Living with me, gained 10 pounds since our trip. I saw her last month in New York, and she straight-out told me that she had gained weight because to her, staying slim seems so trivial after being in Poland.

She has begun to say the Mourner's Kaddish every day. Also, she said, when she is stressed over schoolwork, she need only remember the Holocaust and her problems seem minor.

"Last year, my dad used to tell me to think of the people dying in Iraq or starving in Africa and be thankful that I wasn't them," Lisa said. "I knew he was right, but it didn't work."

Now, when she thinks of what prisoners faced in the camps, it works. Lisa actually appreciates life more because she can compare it to the nightmare whose ruins we saw.

Meanwhile, I've been expecting a miracle to take place-some transformation to just happen that will suddenly instill me with a broader, enlightened perspective.

I'm going to Israel again this summer; that's the most concrete step I've taken so far. The buzz of Israel makes me proud to be Jewish, and it is this connection that makes me so furious at the Nazis. Going to Israel will fortify my Jewish identity, but it will not help spread knowledge about the Holocaust, which is crucial now, with a worldwide surge of anti-Semitism reminiscent of that felt in the 1930s.

I am not imagining this animosity; I saw it in Poland. I may have projected malicious intent onto the smokestacks outside Majdanek, but other signs left little room for interpretation. In the hallway of a Jewish school in Lublin, preserved only because it was used as Nazi headquarters during the war, we saw that someone had drawn a Star of David hanging from a gallows. Noah, dubbed "The Rabbi" of our group because of his beard and the religious knowledge he imparted to us, discovered this graffiti and then immediately obscured it with Hebrew letters. "Am Yisrael chai,"-the nation of Israel is alive-he wrote, retracing his livid pencil lines until they were dark enough.

It took me three months to write about this. Not because I'm lazy, though. No. It's because I didn't know what to write. It's hard. You can't make sense of the Holocaust because it doesn't make sense. I guess that's the point; I hope it never starts to make sense.

I wish I were the type of person who bawled at the camps, who turned my life around upon return. I'm not though, and I've realized I shouldn't feel guilty about it. I was still affected. I still walk around seeing the mound of hair, the train tracks, the empty gas chamber. I stiffen at mention of the Holocaust. I cried in Israel, not Poland, but I cried in Israel because of Poland. So if I can keep the trip with me-even the anger that it bolstered-then I have found meaning.