Jan. 27 is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which this year marks the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. Remembering Auschwitz is, of course, tremendously important. It’s personal for me: I had three cousins who survived Auschwitz, one of whom used to tell me stories about his hellish years there. But the Yale historian Timothy Snyder has written, “While Auschwitz has been remembered, most of the Holocaust has been largely forgotten.” Having recently finished work on a book about my parents’ own experiences in the Shoah (Holocaust), remembering beyond Auschwitz is also personal for me. Moreover, focusing on Auschwitz, which has become a symbol of the Holocaust writ large, can distort our understanding of the Shoah.

Auschwitz is only part of the story. The Germans exterminated about a million Jews in Auschwitz-Birkenau. Approximately 5 million Jews perished otherwise. Of those, about 1.5 million died in the so-called “Holocaust by bullets,” which killed my mom’s dad. And millions were murdered in death camps whose mortality rates were far higher than that of Auschwitz. Those camps killed many members of my parents’ extended family. Over 600,000 Jews also died in ghettos scattered throughout German-occupied Eastern Europe. The Nazis regarded their ghettos as temporary concentration camps, and starving the Jews engaged in slave labor there was official policy. In 1946, a Polish commission called Nazi ghettos “the main instruments whereby the destruction of the Jewish population was carried out.” Both of my parents survived ghettos, though each lost a parent to one.

In 1942, in Poland, the Germans began terrifying “actions” in which they would round up all the Jews they could find in a ghetto and murder those they deemed “useless eaters.” In the beginning, this was done by taking Jews to mass graves and shooting them — part of the Holocaust by bullets. Then, as new killing centers came online — namely, Belzec, Treblinka and Sobibór — the Nazis sent rounded-up Jews to them for extermination by gas. Belzec was the camp to which people from Galicia, my father’s region, were sent, and about 600,000 souls perished there, including some of my relatives. Many people have never heard of it because it had a 99.99% mortality rate — unlike Auschwitz, there were virtually no eyewitness survivors. On my mother’s side, many relatives remaining in the Polish city of Radom (my mom’s family had fled east) were packed into freight cars and shipped to Treblinka. The Germans murdered about 900,000 Jews in Treblinka’s gas chambers, along with thousands of Roma (Gypsies). When the Germans liquidated ghettos in late 1942 and 1943, they often resorted to firebombs and, again, bullets. My grandfather was caught during the liquidation of his ghetto and taken to a mass grave where he most likely was forced to strip naked before being shot. My mom, aunt and grandmother then hid in forests for about 16 months.

In “Black Earth,” Snyder argues that Auschwitz, as a stand-in for the Holocaust, obscures the agency of the genocide’s many perpetrators and bystanders. He writes: “Auschwitz calls to mind mechanized killing, or ruthless bureaucracy … [making] the murder of children, women and men seem like an inhuman process in which forces larger than the human were entirely responsible.” Snyder is right. Someone looked my grandfather in the eyes before murdering him. And the Shoah wasn’t confined to one out-of-the-way place named Oswiecim, such that bystanders didn’t know what was happening.

Focusing on Auschwitz, which was manned mostly by Germans, can also leave the wrong impression that the Nazis acted without assistance in their genocidal project. Most of the guards at Belzec, Treblinka and Sobibór were Ukrainian. Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians joined German auxiliary units and killed Jews in their own countries and elsewhere. Thirty thousand Polish police took part in the murder of Jews. In the countryside, peasants participated in German-organized “Jew hunts.” On a personal note, locals robbing my grandfather’s apartment found him and turned him over to the Germans for execution.

The name “Auschwitz” may evoke images of emaciated prisoners huddled behind barbed wire; it isn’t commonly associated with resistance. As a symbol of the Shoah, Auschwitz obscures the courage of Jewish resisters. Recognizing this, Israel doesn’t commemorate Auschwitz’s liberation by the Red Army. Rather, it commemorates the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, when that ghetto’s inmates managed to hold off far-superior German forces for nearly four weeks in the spring of 1943. By doing so, Israel underscores actions taken by Jews to defend themselves. Remembering only Auschwitz also obscures the bravery of non-Jewish rescuers who risked their lives to aid Jews. My parents wouldn’t have survived without the help of some righteous Poles.

Apart from maybe the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Jewish resistance during the war generally isn’t well known. There were uprisings in other ghettos too. For example, in Bialystok, Poland, the underground staged an uprising just before the final destruction of the ghetto in September 1943. Armed with just a few guns and homemade weapons, the resistance held out for five days against the German military. While important, such efforts were usually doomed. As my dad discusses in his memoir, his own group attempt to obtain a working rifle failed. And in his ghetto (Rohatyn), the Jewish police planned a revolt when they learned the ghetto was to be liquidated. The Germans discovered the plot and hanged them all.

Jews resisted in death camps too, but the most successful resistance was outside of Auschwitz. On Oct. 14, 1943, prisoners in Sobibór killed 11 members of the camp’s SS personnel, including the camp’s deputy commandant. While close to 300 prisoners escaped, only about 50 would survive the war. In addition, in August 1943, Jewish workers at Treblinka seized weapons and set part of the facility on fire. A few dozen survived the war.

We can’t understand the Holocaust without remembering Auschwitz. But nor can we understand the Shoah by remembering only Auschwitz. As we think about Auschwitz on Jan. 27, we must also remember the Holocaust beyond that one terrible place.

Martin Kimel (mkimel26@gmail.com) is an attorney who lives in Maryland and co-author with his late father of “The Pessimist’s Son: A Holocaust Memoir of Hope” (May 2025).