"Atrocity" Photography and the Holocaust: Wendy Lower’s Quest for Justice

Holocaust historian Wendy Lower's The Ravine: A Family, A Photograph, A Holocaust Massacre Revealed describes her search to discover the identities of a Jewish mother and her two children, photographed at the edge of a ravine during a mass execution of Jews on the outskirts of the Ukrainian town of Miropol in 1941. The shooters were German officers and Ukrainian militia, seen holding their rifles in position, and the mother - hovering at the edge of the ravine, holding the hand of her son, his sister barely perceptible as she is curled within the folds of mother’s dress, partially hidden by the wreath of smoke from the guns fired by the shooters at close range.

Dr. Lower’s quest to find the names of this mother and children would take ten years with travels to several countries, employing her expertise in archival and forensic research; utilizing surveys of mass gravesites and Yad Vashem’s Pages of Testimony; and gathering witness testimony and oral history. She would find the precise location of the ravine (a pit) in the photograph where the massacre occurred. She would as well learn the identity of the photographer - a Slovakian in the resistance movement - and the identities of the German and Ukrainian shooters. She was, however, unable to find the names of the victims. In such “Aktions,” the identity of most of the Jewish victims would be lost to history.

Dr. Lower describes this photograph as an expression of defiance on the part of the Slovakian photographer who witnessed this murder as a member of the resistance (unbeknown to the shooters) and passed this photograph and probably others to his wife who in turn could send them on to authorities for use as possible evidentiary material against the Nazis.

Dr. Lower also sees her own work as a form of defiance, a seeking after “historical justice” for the victims of the Holocaust, a personal war against the Nazi agenda to not only murder Jews, but to obliterate Jewish history and Jewish memory. Her heartfelt desire to discover the identities of this family recalls the Old Testament Book of Isaiah (56:5): “I will give a memorial and an everlasting name” to those Jewish martyrs who have no one to carry their names after death. This passage was the inspiration for the creation of the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Israel.

Scholarly opinion varies as to whether studying such “atrocity” photos is even appropriate. Jewish families of loved ones murdered by the Nazis might not wish them to be seen in this light, believing it a desecration of memory, and thus a perpetuation of victimization.

Dr. Lower argues, however, that her work is morally and ethically grounded, and that far from displaying irreverence or disrespect by making such “atrocity" photographs public, researching these photographs can provide historical context of the horror depicted and increase awareness and promote deliberative discussion regarding what Jews were forced to endure while most nations turned away and little assistance was forthcoming.

Moreover, Dr. Lower believes that calling attention to victimization and suffering can be a means of honoring victims’ memories, mitigating collective amnesia or “distortions of the historical record” and promoting social justice.

Contextualizing such images increases awareness of what the rise of the Nazi regime, their confederate nations, and other collaborators portended for the Jews of Europe. The gratuitous sadism and depravity existed from the beginning of the Third Reich: the need to humiliate and dehumanize Jews, whether cutting off beards of Eastern European Jews in public displays with scissors or knives; forcing them to eat grass in parks; making old men play leap frog with one another or do calisthenics to exhaustion or perform forced labor under gruesome conditions; slowly rolling out laws and edicts that inexorably reduced Jews’ civil and political rights, depriving them of citizenship and the ability to earn a living. Property and businesses would be expropriated. Multi-media advertising campaigns inveighed against them, referring to them as subhuman Untermenschen, as pedophiles and thieves poisoning the blood of Germans. Crowded ghettos closed to the outside world where exposure to the elements, starvation diets, poor housing, lack of proper sanitation and medical care would confirm the Germans' expectations of Jews as disease-ridden vermin. By the time Jews were placed in concentration camps they no longer had names - only numbers. This slow, deliberate, systematic objectification of Jews - treating them as “things,” mere objects of the Nazi will without inherent dignity or agency, deployed for their “use value” for the sole benefit of Germans - was a major hallmark of the Third Reich.

This photographic image of the Miropol mother and her two children would take on a life of its own, becoming instrumental in the indictment of the perpetrators of the murder of Jews at Miropol, who would receive the justice they deserved in the years after World War II.

Dr. Lower asks us to look, but seeing is in the eyes of the beholder who organizes the elements of the picture to create meaning. The photograph itself appears to reveal a terrifying yet intimate moment, however brief, wherein the mother seems to embrace her fate and her role as mother comforting her two children, holding the hand of one and settling the other into her lap, doing her best to relieve the terror and confusion and hold them close for the last time, a fleeting moment of intimacy and caring transcending time and place that she would steal from the murderers’ agenda. However comforting, this interpretation may not entirely hold against the realization that the shooters would not care to waste bullets on children, most of whom would perish after falling into the pit.

Hitler’s obsessive crusade against Jews, from his derisive screeds to his sanctioning their mass murder, his profound need to extinguish their 3500-year-old history, necessitates a struggle against collective amnesia. Turning away from these images leads to ignorance of historical truth against the fictions and distortions of Holocaust deniers and neo-Nazis.

As time passes, Holocaust history becomes ossified and sedimented into a few abstract categories: statistics (six million Jews), names (Auschwitz, gas chambers) or tropes ("great replacement theory," "blood libel," “like sheep to the slaughter"). As remaining survivors die, and we are no longer able to listen to survivors sharing their oral histories of the Holocaust, or absorb the emotionally challenging exhibits housed in Holocaust memorials, we cease to comprehend or even care about what is at stake. Abstractions may be glibly produced but may be inaccurate and incapable of evoking an appropriate emotional or intellectual response. For example, the efficient, industrialized murder of Jews (and others) at Auschwitz has become over time a metonym for the Holocaust, ignoring the intimacy in the murder of Jewish families at close range by Einsatzkommandos and their collaborators, including their neighbors.

Over-rehearsed tropes such as “like sheep to the slaughter” to describe Jews’ alleged passivity in the face of death are not only inaccurate, they also lose the capacity to help us emotionally engage with the Holocaust and its complexities, making it difficult, for example, to see Fascism’s potential for reemerging. Or recognizing it when some of its elements- resentment, intolerance, xenophobia, racism- are just waiting for a catalyst like a "strongman" and his coterie of willing intellectuals and elites to set them in motion and give direction to the simmering rage energizing it.