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

“Forgetting the dead would be akin to killing the victims a second time”
— Elie Wiesel

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. The mother is seen hovering on the edge of the ravine, her outstretched hand gripping the hand of her son, pulling him closer to her. Her young daughter is barely perceptible as she is curled within the folds of her mother’s dress, partially hidden by the wreath of smoke from the guns fired by the shooters at close range. The photograph seems to reveal a terrifying yet intimate moment wherein the mother, resigned to her fate at the hands of the murderers, yet fully embracing her role as mother, comforting her children, doing her best to relieve their terror and confusion as much as her own, and holding them close for the last time for the descent together into the ravine - a fleeting moment of intimacy and depthless love that she would steal from the murderers’ agenda. However comforting, this interpretation may not entirely hold against the realization that the shooters would simply not care to waste bullets on children as they would likely perish after falling into the pit, buried under lime and soil.

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 in the photograph where the massacre occurred. She would as well learn the identity of the photographer - a Slovakian in the resistance movement - and sees this photograph and possibly others that he would send to his wife who could forward them to the appropriate authorities for use as possible evidentiary material; an expression of defiance on his part. Indeed, the identities of the German and Ukrainian shooters would eventually become known, and they would receive the justice they deserved in the years after World War II. However, she was unable to find the names of the mother and her children. In such “Aktions,” the identity of most of the Jewish victims would be lost to history.

Dr. Lower describes her 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. It is impossible to read The Ravine and not recall 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.”

It is important to note that scholarly opinion varies as to whether studying such “atrocity” photos is 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 the historical context of the horror depicted and may increase awareness and promote deliberative discussion regarding what Jews were forced to endure at a time when most nations turned away and little assistance was forthcoming. Calling attention to victimization and suffering can honor victims, as well as mitigate collective amnesia and “distortions of the historical record” by antisemites, Holocaust deniers, and neo-Nazis, thereby promoting social justice.

Contextualizing such images increases awareness of what the rise of the Nazi regime and their confederate nations and other collaborators portended for the Jews of Europe. Gratuitous sadism and moral depravity toward Jews existed from the beginning of the Third Reich. Public humiliation and dehumanization of Jews was fuel for Nazis: cutting off the beards of Eastern European Jews in public displays with scissors or knives; inducing Jews to eat grass in parks; forcing old men to play “leapfrog” with one another or do calisthenics to exhaustion or perform forced labor under gruesome conditions. Multimedia advertising campaigns routinely inveighed against Jews, referring to them as subhuman Untermensch, as pedophiles and thieves poisoning the blood of Germans. The relentless rolling out of edicts and laws - nucleated by the Nuremberg race laws of 1935 - reduced Jews’ civil and political rights, depriving them of citizenship and the ability to earn a living: their property and businesses would be expropriated, sold to Germans for far less than they were worth. Crowded ghettos closed to the outside world where exposure to the elements, starvation diets, poor housing, lack of proper sanitation and medical care would only confirm the Germans' perception 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 only for their “use value” for the sole benefit of Hitler’s Germans who would endeavor to erase the nearly-4000 years of Jewish history on this earth.

--Michael D. Bulmash, K1966

Browse the Bulmash Family Holocaust Collection.