The Ravine: A Family, a Photograph, a Holocaust Massacre Revealed

A photograph documenting a family's murder during World War II becomes the centerpiece of a decade-long investigation by Holocaust scholar Wendy Lower. In 2009, Lower was shown a rare image brought to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum—one of virtually no photographs capturing a Jewish family at the moment of their killing by German officials and Ukrainian collaborators. The photograph shows a Ukrainian shooter's rifle inches from a woman's head, obscured by smoke, as she bends forward holding a barefoot boy's hand, with another child's shins visible slipping from her lap. Lower's archival and forensic research across Ukraine, Germany, Slovakia, Israel, and the United States uncovers the identities of the mother and children, the killers, and the Slovakian photographer who took the image as a secret act of resistance. Through this single photograph, Lower reveals new understanding of how the family unit figured in Nazi genocide ideology.