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The Ravine: A Family a Photograph, a Holocaust Massacre Revealed
By Wendy Lower
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Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2021 272 pages $28.00
Reviewed by Jon M. Sands and Nickolas Smith
The murders occurred 80 years ago. The Germans occupied a small Ukrainian town, identified who was Jewish, and systematically killed them over several months. It was an act repeated throughout Eastern Europe. Countless people perished. And we would not remember or even know of them, the town, or the murders. Except for a photograph. This photograph is the subject of Wendy Lower’s book, The Ravine: A Family, a Photograph, a Holocaust Massacre Revealed.
It depicts a grisly scene at the edge of a ravine in a sun-dappled forest outside of Miropol. German officers and Ukrainian auxiliary police are executing a Jewish family. A woman, presumably the mother, buckles forward from a volley of shots at close range. She grasps the hand of a barefoot boy while she shields an infant in the cradle of her other arm—“another soul about to be extinguished,” writes Lower.
The photograph is one of only a few in existence of a Nazi execution. Nazi protocol strictly forbid photographing executions—a seemingly strange prohibition in a regime obsessed with meticulous documentation. As Lower explains, though, this prohibition was designed to keep unseemly photographs out of the hands of Reich enemies, who might use them as propaganda.
The photograph came to Lower’s attention by accident. A librarian approached her in the archives of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., and asked whether she could help identify the photograph for two journalists from Prague. This happenstance led Lower on a decade-long forensic investigation to restore forgotten lives.
The Ravine chronicles her quest. Piecing together evidence step-by-step, Lower uncovers the once-vibrant Jewish shtetl in Miropol, its rich history, and, ultimately, its obliteration. Central to this story is what historians have termed “the Holocaust by bullets.” In June 1941, Einsatzgruppen (Nazi death squads) began a brutal sweep of Eastern Europe behind the advance of the Wehrmacht (the German army). Tasked with eliminating Jews in small towns and villages, these units often conscripted local people resentful of the Jewish community to aid in the massacres. Many know of the gas chambers at Auschwitz II-Birkenau—the universal symbol of economized genocide. Most are also familiar with the Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka killing centers; “deportations to the East”; ghettos; and death marches. But few are familiar with the horrors of the satellite massacres in places like Miropol. And they are even less familiar with local collaborators, their rape of Jewish women, and their plundering of Jewish homes and businesses. Over a million Jews perished during these “Aktions.”
Building off Christopher Browning’s work in Ordinary Men, Lower’s research reveals just how voluntary collaborator participation was. In Miropol, for example, SS officers asked a unit of German custom guards for volunteers to participate in the mass shootings at the ravine. Two stepped forward. Lower names these volunteers and recounts how a conscience-stricken comrade reported them to authorities after the war. But, as was common, West Germany declined to pursue charges. The Ukrainian collaborators were not as lucky. A KGB investigator (with Jewish ancestry) made it his personal mission to bring them to justice. Two were tried, sentenced, and executed by firing squad in January 1987. One received 15 years in a Soviet prison. Lower’s chronicling of their fates reflects the different imperatives nations had in reckoning with the horror of the Holocaust; the changing attitudes towards it; the defining of perpetrators, collaborators, and victims; how history can unearth the truth and confront the reality; and whether and how justice can ever be achieved.
In her quest to identify the victims, Lower interviewed local witnesses to the Miropol pogrom. Their testimony dispels the fatalistic sheep-to-the-slaughter myth. The Jews of Miropol did not march passively to the ravine—they actively resisted. Several families stowed their children with non-Jewish neighbors, ensuring the next generation’s survival. Although many resisters were betrayed, some survived the Nazi occupation to see their murderers brought to justice. Others escaped the massacre and joined partisan resistance movements. In fact, Lower’s best lead for identifying the victims in the photograph was the only survivor of the nearly 400 murdered at the ravine. She clawed out of the pit of corpses and fled into the forest. Unfortunately, this woman did not know about the photograph and died before Lower could interview her.
Lower also spends time investigating the photographer. Her inquiry falls within a larger debate about the value of atrocity photos and the culpability of those who took them. Some photographs were born of pure evil. SS men sought to create documentary proof of what they considered a holy crusade. Other photos, however, were clandestinely taken to bear witness to the Nazi genocide. Lower accordingly explores the photographer’s role at the crime scene, traces his life thereafter, and interviews his children. Her findings aptly illustrate what Primo Levi termed the “gray zone”—a breakdown of the perpetrator-victim binary.
