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

By Wendy Lower

Book Overview

Winner, 2022 National Jewish Book Award

Shortlist, 2022 Wingate Literary Prize

A single photograph--an exceptionally rare "action shot" documenting the horrific final moment of the murder of a family--drives a riveting process of discovery for a gifted Holocaust scholar

In 2009, the acclaimed author of Hitler's Furies was shown a photograph just brought to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The documentation of the Holocaust is vast, but there are virtually no images of a Jewish family at the actual moment of murder, in this case by German officials and Ukrainian collaborators. A Ukrainian shooter's rifle is inches from a woman's head, obscured in a cloud of smoke. She is bending forward, holding the hand of a barefooted little boy. And--only one of the shocking revelations of Wendy Lower's brilliant ten-year investigation of this image--the shins of another child, slipping from the woman's lap.

Wendy Lower's forensic and archival detective work--in Ukraine, Germany, Slovakia, Israel, and the United States--recovers astonishing layers of detail concerning the open-air massacres in Ukraine. The identities of mother and children, of the killers--and, remarkably, of the Slovakian photographer who openly took the image, as a secret act of resistance--are dramatically uncovered. Finally, in the hands of this brilliant exceptional scholar, a single image unlocks a new understanding of the place of the family unit in the ideology of Nazi genocide.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0544828690
• ISBN13: 9780544828698
• Release Date: February 2021
• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 1.07 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 6.2" x 9.1"