51 Fall 2021 give testimony in trial.11 Thus, the introduction of the film as witness contributed ironically to the continued silencing of the living survivors. In contrast, the Eichmann trial in 1961 relied on the testimony of more than 100 Holocaust survivors. Similarly, when it came to photos taken by the perpetrators, the prosecution in the Eichmann trial summoned Jewish victims forward to testify to their veracity, thus giving the final word to the survivors.12 Lower adopts Friedlander’s approach of integrated history by devoting each chapter of the book to a different viewpoint: German perpetrators, Ukrainian collaborators, Slovakian photographer, Jewish victims, and even the grounds of Miropol that divulge their secrets. The most surprising chapter deals with the Slovakian photographer, Lubomir Skrovina. Following extensive research, Lower discovered that the picture was no ordinary trophy photo. Although Skrovina took the photo with full knowledge of his German supervisors, he later used it as an act of resistance – documenting the crimes by creating a photo-narrative and delivering the photos to the underground as proof of the mass murders. The attempt to use the photo as conclusive evidence proved to be tricky. Ironically, the photo was used against the photographer himself in two separate legal proceedings, one by the Slovakians and the other by the Soviets to prove the exact opposite. In 1943, the Slovakian authorities investigated whether the photographer captured “illegal photos” during his army service (as evidence of resistance). Again in 1958, Soviet authorities investigated whether the photograph was evidence of the photographer’s collaboration with the Nazis. While the investigations were eventually dropped, Lower concluded that ultimately, the photo indeed was an act of resistance,13 leaving her readers with the question of how to use similar photos taken by Nazi perpetrators and their collaborators. Lower mentions that Skrovina cut the faces of his fellow Slovakians out of the picture, leaving only images of Germans and Ukrainians in the shot, in his attempt to protect the Slovakian collaborators who were caught on his camera. The most difficult challenge in treating the photo as a privileged witness to the Holocaust concerns the Jewish victims. Can the photo help to “save” them from their anonymous deaths? Can it give them back their voice? Notwithstanding Lower’s impressive investigation, which leads her to the sole Jewish survivor of the massacre, Ludmila Blekham, the author is unable to conclusively identify the family in the photo. Upon closer examination of the photo, she discovers the shadow of another child, near the lap of the mother, however even by the end of the book, we still do not know to whom the empty shoes in the photo belonged, nor the identities of the mother and her two children. Nevertheless, Lower recognizes the value of the photo as providing a concrete image of genocide – of the murder of entire families. She dedicates a chapter, “The Missing Missing,” to this subject, and concludes, despairingly: “The missing as subjects of history will elude us. Try as I did, with all the advantages of modern technology and access, I could not identify the family with certainty.” 14 It is possible that Lower successfully uncovered all that can be revealed from this photo. Some parts of the photo, however, simply cannot be uncovered. Her heroic attempt to defy the Nazi atrocities that sought to obliterate an entire people, including all traces of these crimes, by identifying and telling the stories of each of the individuals in the photo, as well as the ravaged grounds, masks the historical, social, and psychological context that lies behind such crimes. The individuating power of the photo obscures the collective aspects of the mass-killing. Genocide is a collective crime that requires not only the participation of many people over time, but also the fundamental transformation of social norms. How do ordinary people become complicit in mass murder? What makes them agree to pose for the camera as they shoot fellow human beings? Photos do not unmask these aspects of genocide. I conclude with a reference to another book that also follows a single photo, yet is done through a different 11. Although three Jewish survivors gave testimonies in the IMT, they were summoned by the Russian and British, and encountered obstacles during their testimonies. The most famous Jewish witness, the acclaimed intellectual andYiddish-poet Abraham Sutzkever, wanted to describe in more detail the genocide of the Jews, and especially the destruction and looting of cultural Jewish property inVilna, but the USSR prosecutor refrained from asking questions on that. See Leora Bilsky,“Cultural Genocide and Restitution: The Early Wave of Jewish Cultural Restitution in the Aftermath of World War II,”27 INT'L J. OF CULTURAL PROPERTY 354-55 (2020). 12. Leora Bilsky and Rachel Auerbach “Re-imagining the Victim as ‘EyeWitness’ to the Nazi Camera,”JEWISH ÉMIGRÉ LAWYERS (L. Bilsky & A. Weinke, eds., forthcoming). 13. Supra note 1, pp. 66-67. 14. Supra note 1, p. 151.
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