49 Fall 2021 ased on a photograph taken in 1941 in Miropol, Ukraine, Wendy Lower provides a micro-history of a mass murder in what is now Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltic states. She presents a panoramic narrative of the “Holocaust by bullets,” in which more than one million Jews were murdered in ravines and fields in the outskirts of towns and villages. The book analyzes one harrowing photo from the Holocaust, highlighting “the potential of discovery that exists if we dare to look closer,”1 and asks us to ponder the role of photography in the Nazi genocide. In 2009, Wendy Lower, a prominent Holocaust historian, received an anonymous photograph. All she knew was that it was taken on October 13, 1941, in Miropol, Ukraine. The photo features several men shooting a woman who, bent over, grasps the hand of a small barefoot boy, just before they tumble into a black ravine. The photo captures the killers in the act, where smoke from their gun obscures the face of the woman, serving as incontrovertible evidence of their participation in her murder. Lower explained that she wrote this book in order to “unmask the killers and restore some kind of life and dignity to the victims.”2 The photo provides the author with a rare opportunity to overcome the gulf between historiography based on German archives and historiography based on Jewish testimonies, and to offer an “integrated history” of the Holocaust.3 Importantly, the photo captures the Ukrainians standing side by side with Germans, holding long rifles and shooting, thus shedding light on information that had been obscured during the Cold War, when access to the archives and testimonies of local people was not permitted. This book forms part of what is now known as “the material turn” in Holocaust studies, anticipating the death of the last witnesses, and turning to objects as potential witnesses.4 Lower’s goal is to identify each of the participants in the photo, to provide each with a name and tell their story. The power of photographs, as explained by historian Jan Gross, lies in the fact that “[t]hey remind us most directly of human agency in what otherwise we would know only as a numerical phenomenon. Photographers literally put a face to people – sometimes victims and sometimes perpetrators.”5 The book weaves the individual stories of the participants in the photo into the larger history of the Holocaust in East Europe. Lower’s book leads us to imagine a trial in which this photo would serve as evidence – can it rectify some of the injustice, the silencing of individuals? Can it put right past legal failures to judge and punish the people who perpetrated the Holocaust? The pictured event (the massacre in Miropol’s ravine) was the basis for several trials and legal investigations over the years, against the German perpetrators, the Ukrainian collaborators, and even against the photographer of this very photograph, a Slovakian soldier. However, the photo itself was never entered as evidence in trial. In writing her book, Lower is not limited by any statute of limitations, as 80 years have passed, nor is she limited by territorial jurisdiction or rules of B 1. Wendy Lower, THE RAVINE: A FAMILY PHOTOGRAPH, A HOLOCAUST MASSACRE REVEALED 20 (Apollo Press, 2021). 2. Ibid, p. 6. 3. The term “integrated history” was suggested by Saul Friedlander, THE YEARS OF EXTERMINATION: NAZI GERMANY ANDTHE JEWS, 1939-1945 (Harper Collins Publishers, 2007), calling to integrate the points of view of perpetrators, bystanders, and victims. 4. For elaboration on the material turn and Holocaust literature, see Bozena Shallcross, THE HOLOCAUST OBJECT IN POLISH AND POLISH-JEWISH CULTURE (Ind. Univ. Press, 2011). 5. Jan T. Gross, GOLDEN HARVEST 65 (Oxford Univ. Press, 2012). BOOK REVIEWS Reviewed by Leora Bilsky The Ravine: A Family, a Photograph, a Holocaust Massacre Revealed By Wendy Lower Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (Illustrated, 2021, 258 pp.)
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