The Ravine: A Family, a Photograph, a Holocaust Massacre Revealed by Wendy Lower

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Ravine: A Family, a Photograph, a Holocaust Massacre Revealed by Wendy Lower Anika Walke Wendy Lower. The Ravine: A Family, a Photograph, a Holocaust Massacre Revealed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2021. 301 pp. In 1986, Soviet investigators examined the participation of local residents in violence orchestrated by the German occupation regime in Miropol, then UkrSSR. In the subsequent trial, three men were convicted of shooting fellow Soviet citizens. Two of the men were executed, another one, who had been seventeen years old at the time of the crime, was sentenced to lengthy imprisonment. In major parts, the trial and conviction were based on witness statements and exhumations at the murder site. Little historical research was available at the time to illuminate the situation in Miropol. There were no photos of the crime. Such evidence had not been necessary to identify the perpetrators. Rather, the diligent work of an investigator, Major Mikola Makareyvych, provided justice for the victims. Recently, historian Wendy Lower added photos to the file and thus underwrote the conviction. She also offers a new perspective on the crime that first of all concerns the victims—Jews whose collective and personal identity had remained obscure throughout. What allowed her to do so? In 2009, Lower was given the photograph of an execution and began to research its origins, with the express aim to “unmask the killers and restore some kind of life and dignity to the victims” (6). Over many years and based on research in several countries, she was able to track down the perpetrators: Ukrainian policemen, German customs guards, and members of the SS. Information about the victims, however, remains inconclusive; the names and lives of the woman and two children who are falling into the ravine at their feet are unknown. And yet, the search, as documented in the book, is not a failure. Lower is to be commended for developing a concise and accessible narrative of the Holocaust in eastern Europe, specifically in German-occupied Soviet territories, built around an in-depth study of the image. The book draws on Lower’s expertise in the subject matter and speaks to and with several strands of Holocaust research that have gained traction in recent years: the study of visual evidence; increased attention to issues of perpetration and collaboration in the German-occupied areas, especially in the East; efforts to identify the many unknown mass graves created by the Einsatzgruppen massacres of Jews, Roma, and others; attention to the spatial and environmental legacies of the genocide; and a critical examination of postwar justice and retribution. The eight chapters are not explicitly structured according to these themes, though one can identify pertinent questions as guiding the sections of the book. In the attempt to “break the frame around the crime scene” (6), Lower’s study is situated in a long line of efforts to decode and interpret photographs for their content and meaning and to use them to uncover deeper historical truths. She succeeds in doing so, developing a microhistorical study of the events of October 12, 1941, in Miropol, identifying German and Ukrainian perpetrators and the Slovakian photographer. She also offers a detailed and disturbing description of [End Page 238] the effects of mass burial on soil in forested areas that make it at once difficult and possible to identify the sites of killing. At the same time, the main conclusion of the book, that “atrocity photographs can become unifying, ethical calls to action and justice, if we choose to look” (171), seems commonplace since Susan Sontag’s ruminations in Regarding the Pain of Others (2003). Most contentious for scholars of the Holocaust and other genocides will be chapter 5, “The Search for the Family.” Lower writes, “Here we see the genocide at its extreme: the final moment when uniformed gangs of men like this one annihilate women and children” (11), and she argues that Jews were “killed in small family groups and therefore [saw] and [felt] the suffering of loved ones, including parents viewing the destruction of their own children. This is perhaps the most extreme assault that the genocidaire inflicts” (12). She rightly emphasizes the agony that family members underwent as they...