Today marks the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the concentration camp where 1.1 million people (90% of them Jews) died during the Holocaust. It is a somber day for many people, and for a lot of us, a piece of history that still has so many unanswered questions. One question that always comes up is why didn't people intervene sooner? Did they just not know about the Holocaust? Sure, the internet didn't exist yet, but people read papers and listened to the radio, so they must have understood what was going on.

The truth is, they only sort of knew.

World War II lasted from 1939 to 1945, and during that time, the Holocaust was on only 26 of the 24,000 front page stories the New York Times printed. And of those 26 stories, Jews were identified as the primary victims in only 6. Instead of Jews they were called "refugees" or "persecuted minorities" to pander to the antisemitism of the time.

Reasoning about the lack of coverage varies from being "a bad judgement call" to a more complicated fear that the paper would be seen as overly sympathetic to the Jews. It's rumored that the Jewish publisher at the time, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, was concerned that the paper would be "discredited" if the story was covered too often, or with too much emotion. He was Jewish himself, but said he did not personally identify with the Jews who were being persecuted in the Holocaust.

Even if there was an internal conspiracy at play, what we now know is that Americans were not getting the information they needed, and not knowing the whole truth may have contributed to not only the length of the war, but also the amount of lives lost.

"The Times’s judgment that the murder of millions of Jews was a relatively unimportant story also reverberated among other journalists trying to assess the news, among Jewish groups trying to arouse public opinion, and among government leaders trying to decide on an American response," writes Lauren Leff, in an essay about her book, Buried By The Times: The Holocaust And America's Most Important Newspaper. "It partly explains the general apathy and inaction that greeted the news of the Holocaust."

"Reporting On The Times" a documentary which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2013 focused on this very issue. Inspired by Leff's book, filmmaker Emily Harrold (who was only 22 at the time she made the film), sought to answer the question: Why did the most reputable paper in the world bury the story of the murder of over 6 million people?

“The most shocking thing is the fact that some people still don’t know about this,” Harrold told The Daily Beast in a 2013 interview. She found similarities between the way the media was (not) covering the genocide in Sudan and the way it had mishandled the Holocaust, and was inspired to tell this story.

“That was definitely a motivating factor for making the film,” Harrold told The Daily Beast. “History repeats itself.”

So what is the takeaway in 2015? We still live in a world where newspapers and websites get to determine what news is important, and whose voices get heard while others stay silent. It was only a few weeks ago that 2,000 Nigerians were murdered by the militant group Boko Haram, and the media was justifiably criticized for not covering the story enough.

“There are massacres and there are massacres,” Simon Allison wrote in The Daily Maverik after the attack. “It may be the 21st century, but African lives are still deemed less newsworthy – and, by implication, less valuable – than western lives."

Without a major intervention, Boko Haram has been able to continue murdering Nigerian citizens. This week it was reported that Boko Haram took the key city of Monguno, which allows them to advance closer to overtaking Maiduguri, a town in north east Nigeria that has been at the center of their reign of violence.

While it is hard to compare catastrophic events of human suffering, there is something to be learned here, especially on the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. We want to trust newspapers and reporters to give us important information, but it's impossible (for several reasons) for them to tell every story. This doesn't mean that stories that aren't covered are less valuable -- in fact, it is often quite the opposite. And looking back on history, it seems we must take it upon ourselves to seek out the truth and tell these stories. It's possible that in doing so, we might even save lives.