Looking more closely at the photograph, I Without a precise combination of temperature, agitation, and time, Processing the prints taken that day in Miropol was a delicate operation in theĮarly 1940s. Murdered child came to being erased entirely, with no record of her existence. Suddenly into my view came the existence of another person, a child.

I started to see the faint lines of an elbow and a small head covered in a scarf.

I could make out a pair of bent knees and the translucent fabric of a dress. It was a hazy, curved form light was not passing through what should have been an empty space. And then I saw something resting on the woman’s lap or being held in her right arm. My eyes were always drawn back to the center, to the crouching woman, and I began to wonder why she was bent over in a perpendicular angle, not buckling under or kneeling forward. Publishing catalogs are awash with titles about the events of the Nazi era, but I cannot think of another in recent years as powerful. There are moments in The Ravine that hit me with such force that I could only put the book down and walk away-sometimes for days. Lower simply shows us what she saw and lets us feel the weight of it it’s almost too much to bear. Lower’s research for The Ravine was prodigious (her notes stretch over sixty-two pages), but she is also a riveting storyteller, and she has carved away virtually all unnecessary linguistic adornment, leaving a succinct, precise account that is nonetheless gripping. Her narrative begins in the present day in a Shoah archive, then knits that moment with the past events she explores in the book. Its many readers will find the basic structure of that earlier book unchanged in The Ravine. Lower was already known for her scholarly work on the Holocaust in Ukraine when her previous book, Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields, was published in 2013 to wide acclaim. Škrovina, that reveal why and how he came under scrutiny for taking this photo,

Paper, records of an interrogation of the photographer, a man named Lubomir Service,” part of the flood of World War II war crimes documentation thatĮmerged after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. Photograph, was found in the Prague headquarters of a Soviet-era “security Us she can describe them all in less than a single page. There are “not many more than a dozen” like it in existence, Lower tells Still image that captures Jews precisely at the moment in which Nazis murdered But the photo at the center of The Ravine is uniquely terrible, a We, too, have seen Holocaust photographs, perhaps too Of the scene, gauging the way the sunlight throws shadows and the sharpĬontrasts between light and dark, between “the boy’s neatly cut dark hair and “It must have been mid-morning,” Lower writes Ravine four detail photos, cropped from the original photo and enlarged,įollow over the next few pages. The image is reproduced on the third page of The Bent over at the waist, she holds the boy’s hand, her

Wearing Nazi uniforms, but others are in civilian clothes. Standing at the edge of a ravine, surrounded by a forest. It shows a group of men (five are visible), a woman, and a small boy They also broughtĭocumentation that said it had been taken in Miropol, Ukraine, on October 13,ġ941. The museum by two journalists from the Czech Republic. German guards and Ukrainian militia shooting a Jewish family, Miropol, Ukraine, October 13, 1941.

Shamash and son forest fabric