Ravine

A single photographan exceptionally rare ';action shot' documenting the horrific final moment of the murder of a familydrives a riveting process of discovery for a gifted Holocaust scholarIn 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 womans head, obscured in a cloud of smoke. She is bending forward, holding the hand of a barefooted little boy. Andonly one of the shocking revelations of Wendy Lower's brilliant ten-year investigation of this imagethe shins of another child, slipping from the woman's lap. Wendy Lower's forensic and archival detective workin Ukraine, Germany, Slovakia, Israel, and the United Statesrecovers astonishing layers of detail concerning the open-air massacres in Ukraine. The identities of mother and children, of the killersand, remarkably, of the Slovakian photographer who openly took the image, as a secret act of resistanceare 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.