What Nobody Teaches You About the Holocaust

CULTURE

How you would have died in Europe

By Barry Weiss · July 20, 2026 · 20 min read

In 2006, I attended a small Shabbat dinner at a synagogue in Yonkers. Twelve guys ranging in age from me, 22, to R. Riskin, a 5’4”, 78-year-old ophthalmologist with an Eastern European accent. Zaro’s challah, Yarden red wine, Sabra hummus, and rubbery, over-salted chicken. Out of nowhere, Dr. Riskin decided to tell his story.

I thought I'd heard these stories before. You hear them all through childhood if you grow up in Jewish America — at school assemblies, at the museums, at services. You know how it goes: the trains, the camps, the selections, the gas chambers, the liberation. Auschwitz, maybe a little Dachau, maybe a little Buchenwald, maybe a little Treblinka, but always Auschwitz. The story has a geography and a grammar we all know by heart.

But Dr. Riskin told a completely different story.

He was thirteen years old, living in a small town east of Vilnius, when Barbarossa kicked off in June of 1941. The Wehrmacht rolled through his town. They came, they confiscated some things—food, fuel, etc—and they left. They were well dressed, well organized, and in a tremendous hurry, because they were trying to destroy the largest army in the history of the world before winter arrived. They did not have time to linger in every random Lithuanian village along the way.

A few days later, the Lithuanian neighbors a town over came. And they were not in a hurry at all.

The pogrom started in the afternoon. Dr. Riskin, along with many of the younger, able-bodied Jews, ran. Most were not so lucky. Some were locked in the synagogue and it was set on fire. Hundreds of others were shot where they stood. A few dozen who tried to hide nearby were found and shot too. The thirteen-year-old Dr. Riskin saw all of this.

He escaped to the woods. He moved eastward for two years with his brother, who was fourteen, and his sister, who was nine. His sister died during the war from disease. He doesn’t know what happened to his brother.

I had heard hundreds of “Holocaust Survivor’s Stories,” but never one like this. And the reason is brutally simple: almost none of them survived. Auschwitz was a horror—no sane person disputes this—but Jews could survive Auschwitz. Thousands did. They lived to write memoirs and testify at trials and speak at Shabbat dinners and fill the halls of dozens of museums across the Western world. You have never met a survivor from Sobibor because there were practically none. You have never met a survivor who fled to the woods of Belarus because there were almost none of those either.

The story we tell ourselves about the Holocaust is the story of the survivors, which means it is the story of the camps, which means it is overwhelmingly the story of Germans killing Jews through an industrialized system of extermination. This is not false. But it is not how most Jews died. I’m not going to engage in concrete numbers because it’s definitionally impossible to come up with anything concrete, but I will roughly estimate upwards of 75% of the Jews that died in the Holocaust didn’t die in camps or ghettos. And the real story—the story of who actually killed the majority of European Jewry, and how, and when—is one that almost nobody in polite company, Jewish or otherwise, has any interest in telling.

THE PROBLEM OF THE TRAINS

Americans do not think about logistics or supply chains so the camps narrative feels perfectly natural to us. The Nazis rounded up the Jews, put them on trains, shipped them to camps, killed them. Simple, neat, mechanistic - very German.

Now think about this logistically and logically: there were six extermination camps: Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, Chelmno, and Majdanek. They were all located in occupied Poland and most were not fully operational until 1943. The Final Solution was formalized in 1942.

Now consider where the Jews in Europe actually lived. The vast majority of European Jews, millions, didn’t live in Berlin or Amsterdam or even Warsaw but in the small towns and cities of eastern Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Belarus, and Ukraine. The shtetls. The Pale of Settlement and its successor communities. Many in places like Vilnius, Kaunas, Riga, Minsk, Brest, Lviv, and even more scattered in ten thousand smaller towns.

Here is a fact that is well-known to railroad historians and almost completely absent from the popular narrative: German and Russian rail gauges were different. The Russian Empire used a broader gauge—1,520 millimeters versus the European standard of 1,435 millimeters. This was, incidentally, partly a deliberate strategic choice. It made invasion by rail harder. The Germans did regauge significant stretches of track in the occupied East, but this was an enormous engineering effort, undertaken primarily for one purpose: moving men and matériel toward the front. Toward Leningrad. Toward Moscow. Toward Stalingrad. Toward Kursk.

The Wehrmacht was not regauging rail to reach a village thirty-five kilometers outside of Poltava so it could transport a few hundred Jews to a camp in Poland that hadn't been built yet. The Wehrmacht was trying not to freeze to death.

The timeline makes the camps-centric narrative even more untenable for the eastern Jews. By the time Treblinka was operational in July 1942, by the time the extermination infrastructure was running at anything like capacity, the majority of Jews east of the Molotov-Ribbentrop line were already dead. They were not gassed. They were not transported anywhere. They died where they lived and they were killed overwhelmingly not by Germans but by their neighbors.

TWO DIFFERENT WARS

Americans conflate the Eastern and Western fronts of World War II into a single conflict, which is a bit like conflating a Roman era bar fight with the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. They were two categorically different phenomena sharing a date range.

The Western front, the one Americans know from movies, from Band of Brothers and Saving Private Ryan, was a conventional war fought between professional armies that broadly observed the laws of armed conflict. Prisoners were taken. Civilians were generally not massacred. The Geneva Conventions, while imperfect, functioned. When it was over, the Americans and British occupied Germany and everyone more or less went home.

The Eastern front was the largest and most savage military confrontation in human history. It was a war of annihilation between two totalitarian empires, each of which regarded the other as a civilizational enemy to be destroyed root and branch. Thirty million people died. The combat was merciless; the treatment of prisoners was medieval; the civilian toll was apocalyptic. Entire cities were reduced to rubble. Entire populations were displaced, starved, frozen, slaughtered. The rules of war did not apply because neither side acknowledged that rules existed.

In this hell lived several million Jews, in thousands of small communities from St. Petersburg to Zagreb. What happened to them was medieval and within the context of civilizational collapse that was the Eastern front. This was not the part of the orderly, bureaucratic horror show of the Western European deportations in Vienna, Budapest, Krakow, and Metz.

The Wehrmacht was busy. It was fighting for its life against the Red Army in the most consuming military campaign ever conducted. It was losing millions of men. Its supply lines were overextended. Its soldiers were freezing. The German army's relationship to the Jews of the East was not, primarily, one of genocidal intent. It was one of terrifying indifference because they had somewhere else to be.

As a Jew, this is a hard thing to say, and a harder thing to feel. You want your murderer to care enough to murder you. The reality is in some ways worse: the Wehrmacht rolled through these towns, sometimes confiscated supplies, occasionally issued anti-Jewish decrees or assisted the Einsatzgruppen (German mobile killing units), and then moved on to the real war. They left the Jews to the locals. And the locals were hungry.

GEOGRAPHY OF THE DEAD

LITHUANIA AND LATVIA

The Baltic states may be the single most devastating case. Before the war, they were the home to about 300,000 Jews. Only about one in 20 would survive the war. Think of this: your whole family, your siblings, parents, grandparents. One in twenty survive. The Germans were not primarily responsible. The Wehrmacht passed through the Baltics in late June and early July of 1941 in its drive toward Leningrad. The Einsatzgruppen numbered less than 3,000 men for the entire Eastern front, they followed behind and initiated a couple hundred thousand killings, but the scale of the Baltic slaughter was made possible only by local participation.

Lithuanian nationalist partisans, many of whom had spent the previous year under brutal Soviet occupation and blamed the Jews for collaboration with the Communists, launched pogroms almost immediately. The most infamous is the Kaunas pogrom of June 25-29, 1941, where Lithuanian civilians beat dozens of Jews to death in a public garage with iron bars while a crowd watched and applauded. But Kaunas was merely the most photographed. Across the country, in town after town, Lithuanian auxiliaries and ordinary civilians rounded up, shot, burned, and bludgeoned their Jewish neighbors with an enthusiasm that startled even the Germans.

Next door in Latvia, the same story at a smaller scale. A Latvian auxiliary police unit led by Viktors Arājs, participated in the murder of an estimated 26,000 Jews — roughly a third of Latvia's total Jews — largely through mass shootings. Latvian participation in the killing was so extensive that the German authorities scarcely needed to dirty their own hands.

The killing across both countries (and Estonia) was substantially complete by the end of 1941 — well before the Final Solution had been formalized, well before the death camps were operational, well before any train had carried any Baltic Jew anywhere. The Jews of Lithuania and Latvia were killed at home, by their neighbors, in ditches and forests and burning synagogues, with rifles and axes and fire.

Dr. Riskin's story was the Lithuanian story.

UKRAINE

The camp-centric narrative’s tracks get bombed when you study Ukraine. Before the war, the territory of modern Ukraine held about 2.7 million Jews, the largest single concentration of Jewish population in Europe.

The killing in Ukraine was conducted by a shifting coalition of forces: it is well documented the Einsatzgruppen units, Wehrmacht rear-area security forces, German Order Police battalions, and Romanian army units killed hundreds of thousands of Jews. But, again, ordinary Ukrainian civilians took on the bulk of the atrocities. Arson, Rape, Murder. The Wehrmacht wasn’t allowed to rape Jewish women. It was against the Nuremberg laws. And that was not how a German soldier comported themselves in the early days of the war. But a Ukrainian peasant? No hesitation.

Babi Yar is the event Americans are most familiar with. 33,771 Jews shot over two days in September 1941 in a ravine outside Kyiv, by Einsatzgruppe C and “Ukrainian auxiliary police, ”remembered because of its scale and its documentation. But Babi Yar was one of hundreds of mass shootings across Ukraine. In town after town, Jews were marched to pits, ravines, and ditches and shot, hacked, or bludgeoned to death. The killers were sometimes German, sometimes Romanian, but most frequently Ukrainian.

The narrative of Nazis sending Jews to death camps years later does hold in central and western Poland. But in the former Polish territories of now western Ukraine, the arrival of the Germans in the summer of 1941 triggered immediate pogroms by Ukrainian nationalists, some organized by the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, others spontaneous. In Lviv alone, several thousand Jews were killed in pogroms in late June and early July 1941, beaten and shot in the streets by Ukrainian mobs.

The rural killing was even less documented but no less complete. In thousands of small towns and villages across Ukraine, Jews were gathered, marched to the outskirts, beaten to death with pipes, hacked to death with axes, and shot. No trains. No camps. No gas chambers. Just bullets and ditches.

ROMANIA

Romania deserves special and deeply uncomfortable attention. Romania was an Axis ally, not an occupied country. Its government and people carried out its own independent program of mass murder against Jews and Roma with minimal German involvement.

The Romanian army and civilians killed somewhere between 280,000 and 380,000 Jews. But the anecdote that captures the Romanian situation better than any statistic:

After the fall of the Soviet Union, when the archives opened and Western historians could finally travel freely in Romania, an American historian from US Army War College went to Romania and began interviewing elderly Romanians who had been adults during the war. What he found was that dozens of old Romanian men, in town after town, openly and without a shred of shame admitted to killing Jews during the war. One had killed three. Another had killed a family of five. Another had killed a dozen or so teenagers. Another had killed a couple of elderly Jews. They spoke about it the way you might speak about a difficult but necessary chore. There was certainly no sense that anyone was going to hold them accountable for it.

And the Romanians were, by the consensus of historians who study these things, far better than the Lithuanians or the Ukrainians.

BELARUS

Belarus is perhaps the darkest, craziest chapter and the least told.

Before the war, Belarus had a Jewish population of approximately 750,000. By 1945, virtually all of them were dead.

Belarus was the epicenter of the Eastern front's chaos. It was not a neat division of German territory here, Soviet territory there. It was an all-out maelstrom - a swirling, multi-sided civil war layered on top of the German-Soviet conflict. You had the Wehrmacht, the SS, the Einsatzgruppen, Belarusian collaborationist police, Soviet partisans, nationalist partisans, criminal gangs, and various local militias all operating in the same territory, often simultaneously, with allegiances shifting by the week. The Pripyat Marshes, the vast swamplands of Polesia, and the endless forests in Belarus became a lawless no-man's-land where every armed group was a law unto itself.

Jews who escaped the initial roundups and shootings in the towns fled into these forests and swamps. This is what every post-war Jew swears they would have done — "I would have run to the woods and become a fighting partisan." And many did. Probably a million or more Jews across the East attempted to survive in the wilderness.

Here is what the wilderness did to them:

Jews were, by and large, a people of towns. Merchants, craftsmen, scholars, professionals. They were not woodsmen. They were not hunters. They did not know how to build shelters in a swamp or find food in a frozen forest. They fled into the Belarusian wilderness in the summer and fall of 1941, often with nothing but the clothes on their backs, and they ran headlong into two of the most brutal winters Eastern Europe had seen in a century, the same winters that were destroying the Wehrmacht, the best-equipped army in the world.

They froze. They starved. They died of typhus, dysentery, and pneumonia. Those who managed to survive the elements were often found by locals, Belarusian peasants who killed them for their shoes, or for the bounty the Germans offered, or simply because they could. Some encountered Soviet partisan groups, some of whom accepted Jewish fighters, many of whom did not, and some of whom actively murdered Jews.

You may know about the Bielski brothers who led a group of Jewish partisans in the Naliboki Forest and managed to shelter over a thousand Jews through the war. This is a famous story. It was made into a movie. It is famous because it is the exception that illuminates the rule. For every Jew in the Bielski camp, there were hundreds who perished alone in the cold, unnamed and unremembered, their bodies rotting in swamps that no one would ever search.

And for those who survived the cold, the disease, the locals, and the Germans—those who held on long enough to see the Red Army push back westward—there was one final betrayal. Soviet military doctrine called for the liquidation on sight of all non-Communist partisans. Jewish family groups, self-defense bands, and unaffiliated survivors hiding in the forests were not Communist partisans. They were, in the Soviet calculus, unauthorized armed formations at best and enemy combatants at worst. Tens of thousands of Jewish survivors across the East who had endured years in the wilderness were killed by the Soviets as the front rolled back over them. They survived everything except liberation.

THE TIMELINE PROBLEM

Here is the fact that most completely demolishes the popular narrative: the majority of Holocaust victims in the East were already dead before the extermination camps were fully operational.

The Wannsee Conference took place in January 1942. Treblinka opened in July 1942. Sobibor in May 1942. Belzec in March 1942. Chelmno, the earliest, began operations in December 1941. Auschwitz-Birkenau's gas chambers became operational in early 1942 and reached full killing capacity later that year.

The mass shootings in Lithuania were substantially complete by December 1941. The Babi Yar massacre occurred in September 1941. The Romanian massacres in Bessarabia and Bukovina took place in the summer and fall of 1941. The initial sweep of killings across Ukraine and Belarus occurred between June 1941 and early 1942. So when you talk about the Holocaust, this is actually what you’re referring to more so than camps.

There is, in fact, a documented moment that captures this timeline perfectly. In Fall of 1941 reports reached Hitler that the locals in the occupied territories were killing Jews on a massive scale. His response was not to order it stopped. It was not to order it accelerated. It was something closer to a shrug. The Jews were dying, the locals were handling it, and he had a war to fight. The formalization of the Final Solution, the bureaucratic machinery, the camps, the deportation schedules, came after the spontaneous genocide in the East was already well underway. It was, in a horrible sense, an attempt to systematize and extend to Western Europe a process that had already consumed the Jews of the East.

This does not make the camps less evil. It does not make the gas chambers less horrific. It does not exonerate Germany or diminish German responsibility for creating the conditions under which the killing occurred. But it fundamentally changes the story from one of German industrial genocide carried out primarily in camps, to one of a continent-wide eruption of murderous violence carried out primarily by local populations against their own neighbors, facilitated and encouraged by a German occupation that was too busy fighting the largest war in history to do most of the killing itself.

WHY THE TRUE STORY ISN’T TOLD

You might reasonably ask: if all of this is historically documented (and it is, in enormous detail, by historians like Timothy Snyder, Raul Hilberg, Christopher Browning, and many others) why is it not the dominant narrative? Why does the American Jew who visits the Holocaust Museum in Washington come away with a story about German camps rather than Lithuanian pogroms and Belarusian swamps?

Several reasons, none of them flattering.

First, the survivor effect. The people who lived to tell their stories were disproportionately camp survivors from Western and Central Europe and the larger Polish cities. The Jews of the shtetls, the Jews of the Baltic states, and the Jews of the Belarusian forests did not survive to tell their stories because almost all of them are dead. A ninety-five percent kill rate does not produce a robust oral history tradition.

Second, the clean enemy. The story of German industrial genocide gives you a clear villain: the Nazi state, the SS, the machinery of death. This is morally satisfying. The villain is identifiable, defeatable, and, crucially, defeated. The real story gives you a much more disturbing villain: your neighbors. Ordinary people. Farmers and shopkeepers and schoolteachers who picked up rifles, axes, and iron pipes and killed the Jews down the street. This is not a story that anyone wants to hear, because it suggests something about human nature that we would all rather not contemplate.

Third, Cold War politics. After 1945, the Soviet Union had every incentive to suppress the history of local collaboration in the territories it controlled. The Lithuanians, Latvians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians who had participated in the killing were now Soviet citizens, and the official Soviet narrative was one of universal anti-fascist resistance. The specific Jewish dimension of the killing was deliberately erased. Babi Yar's memorial, for decades, commemorated "Soviet citizens" rather than Jews. The local collaboration was buried along with it. And the Soviets had their own complicity to bury: the Red Army's standing orders to execute non-Communist partisans on sight meant that Soviet forces themselves had murdered hundreds of thousands of Jewish survivors as they recaptured the East. That is not a fact any Soviet historiographer was eager to publish.

Fourth, and most uncomfortably: the story implicates peoples who are now, in the post-Cold War era, either allies of the West (the Baltic states, Ukraine, Croatia) or sympathetic nations struggling against Russian aggression. Victoria Nuland and Anne Applebaum do not want to dwell on the fact that Ukraine—“heroic,” “democratic,” “besieged” Ukraine—has a history of enthusiastic participation in the mass murder of Jews. This is not a conversation that serves any current geopolitical purpose, and so it is not had.

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None of this is obscure or revisionist. It is all sitting there in the academic literature, documented in excruciating detail, waiting for someone to synthesize it into a story that doesn't flatter anyone. The story we have, the one with the trains and the camps and the clear German villain, is the story we want, not the story that happened. What happened is worse, and more complicated, and far less useful for funding $200 million dollar Holocaust museums.

The Holocaust is primarily a story of neighbors and ditches and bullets and fire and cold. Of neighbors turning on neighbors in an instant. It happened not in a handful of purpose-built facilities in Poland but in ten thousand towns and villages and forests and swamps across a thousand miles of Eastern Europe. A horror story carried out not mainly by Germans but by Lithuanians, Latvians, Ukrainians, Romanians, and Croats.

The Jews who died in the forests, anonymous and uncounted, have a half dozen plaques dedicated to them at most. There is no museum for the million who froze in the marshes of Belarus. There is no museum for Dr. Riskin's sister, who died of disease somewhere in the wilderness outside Vilnius.