Header photo: Polish children murdered at Auschwitz.

Last summer, my partner and I visited Auschwitz.

Because there so many visitors (2 million every year), we were divided into groups, assigned guides, and taken through the various parts of the immense camp.

One of the most harrowing parts of the visit was the tour of the victims' personal objects.

The thousands of suitcases (many with names or initials on them), eyeglasses, shoes, prosthetic limbs, toys, and other personal effects -- each category of particular item displayed behind glass in its own warehouse-sized room -- at first tore at the heart, then eventually numbed the mind. Knowing that all these items had belonged to real people just like you and me, who had jobs, people who loved them, hopes and dreams, daily routines, and physical challenges, transformed each item into a world of its own. And behind that glass, piled like mere junk -- as they were treated like junk by the Nazi mass-murderers who had stolen them from their owners -- were countless worlds, brutally destroyed. A universe of senseless, stupid, bottomless cruelty and death.

As horrible as these giant dioramas were, for me, one item in particular stood out from the rest: the "Hair Room".

Because of its deeply personal as well as religiously sacred nature, the Hair Room is one of the few areas in the camp where visitors are not allowed to take photos, though you can see photos of this room on the Auschwitz official website. It is a veritable warehouse of hair cut from the women's heads after they were murdered in the gas chambers. Hair of all colors, young hair and old hair, in ponytails and braids, piled up inside the glassed-in space like a transparent landfill. I imagined how the victims' fingers braided this hair -- or someone who loved them braided it for them -- for the last time, some morning long ago: a farewell to normalcy, to routine, to identity, to civilization... to humanity itself.

Hours later, when the tour finished, I walked out of that camp with a sensation in my gut that I don't ever remember experiencing before.

Yes, I felt sadness. I also felt anger. But I was surprised by what I felt most of all: hardness. Hatred. Cynicism.

My heart was hardened not just against the Nazi murderers who had done this to 6 million Jews, 17 million people in all, but also against the world that had let it happen.

It was a visceral response to what I had seen. The scale of the horror that I saw at Auschwitz severed my connection -- thankfully temporarily -- to the rest of humanity.

This feeling led me to understand, for the first time, the following mentality:

Fuck the world. My life has been destroyed by this evil. Everything I once believed in has been destroyed by this evil. I have been destroyed. I trust nobody. My humanity has been stolen from me. I am no longer human; I have been rendered an object. Therefore, I divorce myself from humanity. I don't give a damn about anyone else. From now on, I only care about myself and my group.

I understood how it felt to have that part of myself that is connected to the rest of humankind, annihilated. Because, for several days, it was.

The experience brought me a little closer to understanding how it might have felt to be a victim of that death camp. But ironically, it also brought me back to my childhood in the U.S. and to the present day. Because I now was inhabiting the mentality that had troubled and repulsed me, growing up in my particular Jewish community. And that mentality was:

We only care about our own. We only care about the Jews.

I remember, as a teenager in the 1980s when Reagan was president, finding out about the genocide that the U.S. government was directing in Central America against indigenous Guatemalans by funding and training death squads there. I was reading reports of horrible massacres against innocent civilians, simple folk just living their lives in rural mountain villages.

Having been instructed from an early age that the Jewish people are experts on genocide, I cried out to my elders about what I was reading. This was genocide! We knew what genocide was; we ourselves had experienced it! We had to do something! We had to organize! We had to march in the streets and demand that our tax dollars not be used to murder thousands of innocent civilians who had done nothing wrong! We had to spread the word about what our government was doing and demand that it stop! I was about 13 years old.

Silence. Indifference. Even scorn that I would compare our genocide to that of some brown Indians in the mountains of Central America. Our Jewish community was overwhelmingly white, European, and integrated into U.S. culture, so the racism was unmistakeable and unavoidable.

I was told that nothing could compare to the Holocaust. The Holocaust was special. Any other genocide that happened to other people was a) not nearly as bad as ours, and b) not our concern.

Not all Jews had that perspective, I know. Some Jewish communities were and are more progressive. But I did not grow up in one of those communities. I remember how shocked and disillusioned I felt by my Jewish elders. All those traumatizing pictures, stories and lessons that they subjected us to in Jewish Sunday school: what was it all for? Wasn't the point of it to make sure it never happened again? After all, as Jewish people, that was our motto: "Never again!" I had believed it meant "never again" for anybody, not just the Jews. But I was learning a depressing lesson: that's not what they meant.

Later, in college, I began to learn about Israel's history, since its inception, of human rights violations against the Palestinians. Once again, I reached out to a Jewish elder: our rabbi. I wrote him a letter about what I was learning about Israel's treatment of the Palestinians; stuff we had never learned in our Zionist-based education at the synagogue. In fact, we had learned the opposite: that Palestinians were our enemy. I asked him if he knew about these stories. I asked him how something called The Jewish State could treat others with such cruelty and immorality. I asked him how this squared with the Jewish values he spoke of every day at the synagogue.

I never heard back from him.

Time and again, when appealing to my fellow Jews with regard to the suffering of other people in the world, I saw indifference. Not from all Jews, but too many. I saw an utter lack of concern for other groups who were, right at that moment, experiencing the same violence, terror, and injustice that our ancestors had experienced. These Jews were simply unmoved by the pain of others. And when I would try to jog their conscience by reminding them of one of our favorite slogans, "Never again", they would bristle at the idea of comparing any other groups' suffering to ours. Our Holocaust was sacred; it was one-of-a-kind. To draw parallels between it and other events was to profane it.

It was as if the Holocaust were some pretty artifact to be kept on some high-up shelf: admired, but never touched.

Whereas I believed that the Holocaust should make us more sensitive to the suffering of others, not less.

And so all this came back to me at Auschwitz. I finally internalized, in my gut, that hardness and indifference.

For a day or two, I cared about nobody. It seemed that, after witnessing such mass-scale murder, a chunk of my humanity had been murdered as well. So I could finally empathize with that lack of empathy that had so frustrated me in my youth. I felt it in myself.

Looking back at it, it was a gift. I could finally understand, from the inside, this attitude that had pushed me away from my Jewish community.

Empathy is not the same thing as sympathy. Empathy doesn't mean feeling sorry for someone else or agreeing with them. It means understanding reality from their perspective. Looking at life through their eyes. Putting yourself in their shoes.

For a few days, I looked at the world through a traumatized, stunted soul. My compassion for others dried up and hardened like an old raisin.

I was prepped to dehumanize others. In that moment, I would have made a good Nazi.

And this is what happens when you leave a place like Auschwitz with trauma but no wisdom. It's what Jewish author and activist Naomi Klein, in her critique of standard Holocaust education, described as "learning the rule but not the principle." The rule we learned was: Jews were victims of the genocide called the Holocaust. No one must ever hurt the Jews again. But we missed the principle: No one must ever commit genocide again. Never again, for anybody.

She argues that the typical Holocaust education like the one she (and I) received simply retraumatizes without transcending. Its only lesson is "Never again" (an unfortunately ambivalent message, as I pointed out above, many Jews interpret that message as "Never again for only the Jews") and nothing more universal or redeeming.

The evil cycle plays out, and the victim becomes the oppressor.

And now, in the present day, as we enter the final stage of Israel's annihilation of the Palestinian people, we can see gravity of that failure.