(WGHP) -- Melanie Handy, John Haynes and Lisa Mortenson all teach high school students with Guilford County Schools, but now they're bonded by something else. "It's such a not a religious experience but very close to that," said Handy, an English teacher at James B. Dudley High School in Greensboro. "You are so vulnerable at those sites, and it's definitely a bonding experience." Greensboro rabbi discusses importance of Holocaust education Over the summer, the three joined dozens of other public school teachers from across North Carolina in Poland to learn the history of the Holocaust in Poland. For eight days, they stepped into their kids' shoes and became the students.  "It was a week of just intense everything," said Mortenson, who teaches AP European History and World History at Grimsley High School. "Intense emotion. Intense experiences. Intense study of this one subject." Over the course of eight days in mid-June, Mortenson, Haynes and Handy joined 33 other North Carolina public school educators in Poland to learn the history of the Holocaust. They'd all studied the subject previously but never quite like this. "The effect of being there rather than just reading about it is you can feel the heartache," Handy said. "And when you step into those spaces where people were, that energy is still there." The teachers were led by retired Rabbi Fred Guttman and Lee Holder, who is a social studies teacher at North Lenoir High School and a member of the North Carolina Council on the Holocaust. They toured the concentration camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka and Majdanek. They also visited various sites in Warsaw, Lublin and Krakow and the town of Tykocin where 3,000 Jews were shot and killed in the forest over the course of two days. They heard stories about men, women and children who lived and died in the very places where they listened and learned all these years later. They also learned about those who stood up and fought back. "Elie Wiesel the Nobel laureate said that when you hear a witness, you become a witness," Guttman said. "That was easy back in the days when we had a lot of Holocaust survivors that could speak to it … On this trip, these 36 teachers become witnesses." The teachers are determined to bring what they learned home to their classrooms.  "Something that you realize when you're there is how close to this people who weren't Nazis were. They could see it. They could hear it. They could smell it. They could sense it," Haynes said, an AP World History teacher at The Early College and Guilford. "And that's not to cast stones. It's quite the opposite. It's to help my students understand that if you find yourself in a situation like that, it's tough." Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators murdered six million Jews and millions of others across Europe. "One of the things I’m really determined to do is to not make it one flat story," Mortenson said. "To really incorporate different points of view, different experiences that changed over time based on who the person was. I think that's really important to get away from the single narrative of the Holocaust." "I don't want to equivocate the Holocaust with some of the things going on today, but some of the attitudes, the apathy. It's still there," Haynes said. "So I'm hoping to encourage them to start looking around and be aware and take action even if it's something small. What can you do as a 14 or 15-year-old to make the world a better place and maybe fend off a future atrocity?"