The Ravine: A Family, a Photograph, a Holocaust Massacre Revealed
European history, World War II
Synthetic audio, Automated braille
Summary
A single photograph—an exceptionally rare &“action shot&” documenting the horrific final moment of the murder of a family—drives a riveting process of discovery for a gifted Holocaust scholarIn 2009, the acclaimed author of Hitler&’s Furies was shown a photograph just… brought to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The documentation of the Holocaust is vast, but there are virtually no images of a Jewish family at the actual moment of murder, in this case by German officials and Ukrainian collaborators. A Ukrainian shooter&’s rifle is inches from a woman's head, obscured in a cloud of smoke. She is bending forward, holding the hand of a barefooted little boy. And—only one of the shocking revelations of Wendy Lower&’s brilliant ten-year investigation of this image—the shins of another child, slipping from the woman&’s lap. Wendy Lower&’s forensic and archival detective work—in Ukraine, Germany, Slovakia, Israel, and the United States—recovers astonishing layers of detail concerning the open-air massacres in Ukraine. The identities of mother and children, of the killers—and, remarkably, of the Slovakian photographer who openly took the image, as a secret act of resistance—are dramatically uncovered. Finally, in the hands of this brilliant exceptional scholar, a single image unlocks a new understanding of the place of the family unit in the ideology of Nazi genocide.