THE RAVINE

The author of Hitler’s Furies returns with an account of how a disturbing Holocaust photograph turned into a humanitarian research project.

In 2009, Lower, the director of the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights at Claremont McKenna College, was on a mission to find documentation that would bring Bernhard Frank, “the highest-ranking SS officer known to be alive in Germany at that time,” to justice. During her research, she came across a photo showing a group of men executing a woman and a boy “at the edge of a ravine.” That discovery became the focal point for a seven-year investigative odyssey dedicated to tracking down and identifying the shooters as well as the photographer and, more importantly, the victims. Lower traveled to the scene of the crime, a forest on the outskirts of a Ukrainian town called Miropol. Research in Germany led her to ascertain that the victims “were the remnant of a [Jewish] community being destroyed after the first wave of [Nazi] killings in the summer of 1941.” Based on “hundreds of testimonies of Germans, Slovakians, and Ukrainians [who] passed through or resided in Miropol, and of the one Jewish survivor,” writes the author, “I was able to reconstruct events just before, during, and after the photograph was taken.” She later discovered that the photographer was a member of the Slovakian resistance and that the perpetrators were Ukrainian policemen who collaborated with the Nazis and met harsh fates. The author’s expansive research in Soviet archives and Jewish genealogical databases led her to identify and interview possible family members who had managed to escape the Holocaust. The profundity of Lower’s commitment to justice is both admirable and evident. Meticulously researched and thoughtfully written, her book is a testimonial to the power of countering ignorance with education and the importance of restoring the dignity of personhood to those erased by genocide.

An intelligent and restoratively compassionate historical excavation.