The Ravine

This remarkable book shows how it is possible to encapsulate the history of the mass murder of the Jews in the former Soviet Union in a single object, in this case, a photograph that documents the horrific final moments in the life of a Jewish family, one of the nearly 1.5 million Jews shot by the Germans and their collaborators after the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union.

Wendy Lower was able to locate the killing site and find the identities of the mother and her children and of the killers. I was deeply moved by the way it enables… show more.

Historian Wendy Lower focuses on a single photograph taken in October 1941 that shows a group of soldiers shooting a woman who clutches the hand of a little boy just before they fall into a mass grave in Miropol, Ukraine.

This is a gripping and impeccably researched account of the killers, the victims, and the photographer who took the haunting image. Lower combs through public records and archives, and relies on interviews with local residents to reconstruct mass atrocities. Lower’s descriptions of her dogged determination to reconstruct the scene of the crime reads like a thriller.

In an attempt to name the people in a single photograph, Lower demonstrates how intimate and participatory the Nazi killing process was in the Soviet Union. The photo itself is disturbing, and Lower’s investigation into its origins shows how much more chilling the story behind it actually was. Written in riveting prose, Lower leads her readers through her own discovery process, demystifying academic research. 

This book, just published in February 2021, makes my list. Readers may think – not again, another Holocaust history.  But this is far more than that. In Wendy Lower’s gifted hands, we learn of how she spent nearly a decade “reading” one single, horrific image—the murder of a woman and her family. Lower not only uncovers the murderers and the photographer, but this slim, riveting tale morphs into memoir as she narrates how, in archives, cities, and villages, across three continents, she discovered what she needed to know to reconstruct the events of that single terrible moment.