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It sounded like a holiday in Hell. Seven days touring some of the most harrowing Holocaust sites in Poland - Treblinka, Auschwitz, the Warsaw Ghetto. Names that stain our century, death camps and destroyed cities that were once crucibles of unimaginable despair. Surely this was a journey that could only end in tears? "I can't say you'll enjoy everything you see", said Captain Paul Snook, our group leader, as we assembled at Heathrow, "but we also hope to show you something of the spirit of Poland today."

Specialising in tours of historic battlefields from Hastings to Ho Chi Minh City, Holts' Tours are renown for organising things with military precision. Like some special force being prepared for a mission behind enemy lines, we were immediately presented with a dossier packed with information. Inside was a detailed itinerary, relevant city maps, a selection of useful Polish words and phrases, chronological histories of Poland and the Holocaust, photographs of "Hitler and his Henchmen", plans of the concentration camps we would visit and a copy of Himmler's chilling justification of Nazi genocide: "Our duty is to our own people and our blood. We can be indifferent to everything else...".

The grim black and white photos in this pack made a striking contrast to the country I arrived in. Poland has suffered more than its fair share of tragic history, but it is now striving to distance itself from the war and the miserable decades of Soviet domination that followed. We landed in Warsaw to find Tina Turner in concert, young Poles bungee jumping from a crane suspended over the Wisla River, and icons like Copernicus and Chopin usurped by branches of Pizza Hut and Burger King.

"We are a tough people" said Magda, the knowledgeable Polish tour guide who joined us for the week. "Throw us out of the door, and we come back by the window." The same might be said of the typical Holts tourist, many of whom are ex-service personnel who can't help marching everywhere or emitting clipped comments such as "Good pilots, Poles".

"No badge, no bites!", Stan Applin reprimanded as I walked into dinner at the Forum hotel that night. Name badges are worn with pride on a Holts holiday, along with insignia to show whether you are a member of the Black Spot, Harry, Gold Bar or 20 Clubs. These signify how many Holts tours you have previously enlisted with - of the 26 members on ours, only four were first-timers, while Stan and his wife Iris had achieved super-veteran status, for this was their 65th tour.

Many in our party had lived and fought through the war, but I was surprised how few had Jewish or Polish connections. Some were simply pursuing a general interest in the Second World War, others were here because "I wouldn't want to visit such places on my own". I came because of previous visits I had made to the battlefields and cemeteries of the First and Second World Wars. These had sparked an interest in the architecture of remembrance and a feeling that no travel is more memorable than that which contemplates the big thuds of history.

"We're off to the Ghetto now" Paul announced the next morning, "and later we'll visit Treblinka Death Camp". One of the problems of visiting Poland's Holocaust sites is that the Nazis were so thorough in their eradication of Jewish culture. The bleak squares and solemn memorials of the Warsaw Ghetto are not much of a tourist sight, while Treblinka, the camp 60 miles to its northeast where a quarter of a million Ghetto residents were deported by train in seven weeks, was demolished in 1943, its killing fields deliberately disguised as a farm.

Much is left to the imagination, which is vividly stimulated if you read the many eyewitness accounts written by Holocaust survivors. As we drove to Treblinka Paul recounted its horrific history, explaining how at the height of production the camp processed victims from cattle truck to ash pit in three hours. "There's the railway line" cried a woman in front of me, voicing our thoughts as we sped through a landscape of flat fields bordered with wildflowers and still ploughed by horse.

Paul's commentary was hard-hitting but not mawkish, and all part of the mood-setting, in-coach entertainment that is a hallmark of a Holts tour. This ranged from the screening of painful documentaries about the experiences of British POWs in the death camps to lighter interludes, such as the playing of ‘Hits of the Blitz’ music. The most moving tape was a brave memoir by Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, a cellist who survived Auschwitz by joining its orchestra and who now plays for the English Chamber Orchestra, which Paul gave to us in small doses, like children being rationed a gripping bedtime story.

Today Treblinka is a memorial park with a serenity that belies the enormous crimes committed there. 800,000 people were murdered here in 16 months, but I only saw woods full of butterflies and purple foxgloves rising through the concrete sleepers that now symbolise its railway tracks. "How can we relate to it?" an American woman had written in the visitors' book.. "I expected to see a black and white view of searchlights and barbed wire fences, but instead I saw green and blue."

Had she gone to the next camp we visited, she would have found her all the brutal scenery Hollywood had taught her to expect. Majdanek sprawls on the outskirts of Lublin like a derelict sports field, a dismal landscape of rusting barbed wire fences, satanic watchtowers and rows of creosoted wooden sheds containing educational displays that included glass cases full of toothbrushes, combs, spectacles and stopped watches that belonged to its victims.

"We are suffering" Magda observed as I emerged from the stiflingly heat of its windowless barracks, "but not like they did." I walked through Majdanek's shower rooms and gas chamber, reminiscent of the foul corners of an underground car park. I stood in the stench of a shed piled high with 800,000 pairs of dead soul's shoes, now rotting like compost in wire cages. I looked into the deranged eyes of Ehrich Muhssfeldt, overseer of its crematoria, and contemplated the heap of ash and bones, as big as a roundabout, he helped produce.

We think we know about the Holocaust, but it is only by going to the very places where it happened that we feel it. "That was Majdanek" Paul said with a sigh as we drove away clutching our thoughts, "and we've still got Auschwitz to go." Fortunately there was Krakow in between, where we lightened the mood by doing normal tourist things like shopping, sightseeing and getting deeply acquainted with Polish beer. One moment we were a band of introspective pilgrims bearing grim thoughts, the next a cheery tour group laughing at the poodle-like prostitutes perched at the hotel bar. "Why didn't the Jews fight back?" wondered a student from Havant as we tackled our stuffed dumplings. The answers came in fast - from the quantity surveyor from Sligo, the machine-setter from Herne Bay, the dame from Eton...

Unlike Warsaw, where most of the historic buildings in its Old Town are reproductions, Krakow has genuine architectural pedigree. It wants to be Prague, but terrible pollution lingers from the communist-built steelworks on its outskirts. It lacks Euro-wisdom too - we laughed for days at a shop selling sports shoes called Athlete's Foot.

Jewish culture is reviving in the city's Kazimierz district, thanks in part to the Spielberg film Schindler's List, which was shot here and recreates life in the nearby concentration camp of Plaszow. We visited some of Kazimierz's synagogues and cemeteries, and dined in candlelight to swirling Yiddish music as a way of recalling the vibrant Jewish life that existed in Krakow before the ethnic cleaners set to work.

Then it was time to tackle Auschwitz, which draws up to 3,000 tourists a day and has a hotel, cafeteria and kiosks selling arty postcards of barbed wire in the sunset. Even with such inevitable commercialism, the mounting horror of this anus mundi, as one SS doctor described the camp, has a colossal effect on most visitors. This is a factory tour where, after viewing the towering bonfires of discarded crutches, the huge thunderclouds of human hair destined for making cloth, the jumble sale heaps of 1940s baby clothes, the suitcases bearing faded labels from pre-war holidays, even the most ardent non-smoker might feel the need to light a cigarette - just as Himmler was seen doing after watching one of Auschwitz's gas chambers in action through a peephole in 1943, a rare smoker who laughed and joked and puffed "rather clumsily" afterwards.

Two miles away, Birkenau is where the Nazis took up genocide on a mindblowing industrial scale. Their snapshots taken as souvenirs now stand enlarged as evidence of their atrocities - I stood in the precise spot where a famous photo of Hungarian Jews being ushered to their deaths was taken, then lifted my eyes to the preserved landscape of Birkenau today. The grim wooden barracks and electrified fences were exactly the same.

We walked in the rain down railway tracks that once transported Jews from as far as Greece and Finland to learn the Final Solution. I looked at the ruins of the gas chambers, the tearful parties of German students, the lone figures lighting memorial candles. Then I walked back, counting the 1,400 sleepers that lead to freedom.

There is always something that gets you in such places, and for me it was a pair of brown shoes. I spotted them in a huge glass-fronted display case in Auschwitz, amid a rubble of dusty, dated footwear. They belonged to a young woman, and they stood out because, unlike most, they were firmly tied together, as you might do with shoes when undressing in a hurry, in a crowd, as you are bludgeoned into the showers.

That woman hoped to return to her shoes, but instead she perished, one in an estimated six million who died in the Holocaust. Though no one said it, that was the point of this tour. She died, but I have noticed her shoes, I have thought of her, and in this way she survives. She would have made a good Holts tourist.

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