Due to a sudden, unexpected passing in the family a few years ago and another more recently and my subsequent (mental) health issues stemming from that, I was unable to download this book in time to review it before it was archived as I did not visit this site for several years after the bereavements. This meant I didn't read or venture onto netgalley for years as not only did it remind me of that person as they shared my passion for reading, but I also struggled to maintain interest in anything due to overwhelming depression. I was therefore unable to download this title in time and so I couldn't give a review as it wasn't successfully acquired before it was archived. The second issue that has happened with some of my other books is that I had them downloaded to one particular device and said device is now defunct, so I have no access to those books anymore, sadly.

This means I can't leave an accurate reflection of my feelings towards the book as I am unable to read it now and so I am leaving a message of explanation instead. I am now back to reading and reviewing full time as once considerable time had passed I have found that books have been helping me significantly in terms of my mindset and mental health - this was after having no interest in anything for quite a number of years after the passings. Anything requested and approved will be read and a review written and posted to Amazon (where I am a Hall of Famer & Top Reviewer), Goodreads (where I have several thousand friends and the same amount who follow my reviews) and Waterstones (or Barnes & Noble if the publisher is American based). Thank you for the opportunity and apologies for the inconvenience.

A shocking photograph taken during the brutality Nazi regime provides the basis for this excellent piece of detective work by Wendy Lower. I am definitely searching for a copy of this author's previous work Hitler's Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields. Outstanding writing!

In 2009, Wendy Lower (author of Hitler’s Furies , another worthy book to add to your TBR list) comes across a photo from Miropol, Ukraine: a woman, toddler in her arms, baby at her feet, being shot by a Ukrainian collaborator during operations in that country during WWII. The title refers to the ravine into which people fell after being executed for no reason other than they were not part of the so-called "master race".

What follows is an excellent, although horrifying read, of Lower's investigation into this photo. This entails records retrieved in various countries - the US, Ukraine, Germany, and Israel - talking with people and/or potential witnesses, and eventually spans ten years to finally identify the doomed family as well as the Slovakian photographer who was not supposed to be taking pictures of these operations.

If you're at all interested in the Holocaust or the European Theater of Operations during WWII, you'll likely be as engrossed in this book as I was, even given - or especially because of the book's subject, something no one should ever forget.

Five out of five stars.

Thanks to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and NetGalley for the review copy.

Images of holocaust atrocities actually being committed and pretty few and far between, so when an image of the murder of a Jewish mother and her children in a Ukrainian massacre was brought to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, it resulted in a ten year investigation by Wendy Lower to discover the truth behind the photo. "The Ravine" documents her research, as she travels from the US to the Ukraine, Germany, Israel and Slovakia on her quest for the identities of the victims and perpetrators of the atrocity.
Lower provides a fascinating insight into the challenges faced by researchers of the holocaust - the lack of any real documentation, the mass burial sites, the families wiped out with no one to really attest they even ever existed.... As you progress through the book, the overwhelming sense that this was one in millions of events that happened is always in the back of your head. Yet the power of personalising the millions dead through one awful act, really speaks to the horror of what happened - the numbers are almost too big to comprehend, yet sharing the story of one family adds a tangible point of focus.
Lower's writing does initially tend to focus overly on the photographic elements, rather than the story documented in the photo, but that's a small complaint. This is an incredibly moving and thought-provoking read.

We have all seen photos from World War II but very few actually capture the atrocities mid act. After the fall of the USSR documents came to light regarding what the Nazis did. One of these was a photo of the shooting of a mother during a mass execution in Ukraine in October 1941. Wendy Lower goes on a search to find out who the woman was and who the Ukrainian and Nazi men were that committed this crime. Lower focused on where this shooting took place and who took the photo. She also talks about the investigations that the Nazi's did into the photo, the post war German's did into the Nazis, and the Communists Ukrainians did into the local police from the town.

It was an interesting story but just like most things from that time it is so difficult to truly find the answers you want. While I found some of the outcomes disappointing (although not unexpected) I enjoyed learning the history of post war investigations especially by the Soviets. So often we think of Nuremberg trials but the Soviets had their own reasons for looking into events like this.

This book is hard to review, if I'm being honest. It's not something I can recommend for everyone, not even if you enjoy history or learning about what happened during WWII. It's a tough read, as it should be, but it is fascinating to see how this one image can mean so much. Wendy Lower goes into detail about how studying the Holocaust isn't just about a historian learning something new, but almost like forensic detective work.

There is plenty of history of the Holocaust; from how it started to how it got really going. There is also an interesting history of the city where the murders in the photo took place, Miropol in the Ukraine. It covers the Jewish history as well as the non-Jewish history of the city. There is also a biography of the man who took the photo, how it managed to save it, and what happened to him afterwards.

Wendy Lower also has a timeline of what happened the day before and the day of the mass murder. She interviewed people who are still alive from that time and even has a video of a survivor of the day. Because the government in the Ukraine doesn't want to acknowledge anything that regular people did during the war, the names of those interviewed were protected.

The only sad thing is that Wendy Lower was unable to definitively say who the people in the photograph were, but she has a good idea of who they might have been.

“What does one do upon discovering a photograph that documents a murder?”

In 2009, Wendy Lower was shown a photograph taken in Ukraine during the Holocaust. It depicted a scene of a horrific murder—a woman, holding onto a young boy’s hand, being shot and pushed down into a ravine. Upon seeing this photo, Lower embarked on a journey to uncover the identity of the innocent victims in the photo, their murderers, and the onlookers.

This photo was so special because of its rarity. While the Nazis are known for taking detailed written records of their atrocities, photographic records were strictly forbidden. There are only about a dozen known photographs of Holocaust murders.

“This book is about the potential of discovery that exists if we choose to delve in. It is also about the voids that exist in the history of genocide. Its perpetrators not only kill but also seek to eras the victims from written records, and even from memory.”

Lower weaves important questions about memory, historical record, and respect for the dead while recounting her historical quest. Despite the necessity of respecting those who lost their lives and their descendants, Lower underlines the importance of bearing witness to the horrors of the Nazis’s actions, especially given Hitler’s insistence on preventing the existence of photographs such as this one.

I learned so much in the course of reading this novel. It always surprises me that no matter how much I read about the Holocaust, there are still new perspectives and new facts that I have not yet come across. Lower is an amazing writer and historian. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in reading more about this era of history.

In her new book The Ravine: A Family, a Photograph, a Holocaust Massacre Revealed, Wendy Lower, a historian with extensive work around the Holocaust, is put onto an intriguing research journey: Lower encountered an extremely rare photograph depicting the murder of a Jewish woman and young boy at the edge of a ravine in Ukraine, part of the SS Einsatzgruppen’s vicious campaign of mass killings in Eastern Europe.

We know that these mass murders happened — the graves have been found, there are numerous witness accounts and some remaining official records. Some, like the multi-day massacre at Babi Yar, have become infamous, immortalized in poetry by Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Erica Jong, and literature like D.M. Thomas’s The White Hotel (a deeply weird novel but one of my favorites).

And yet, despite all this — the elimination of 50,000 lives, according to Lower’s estimates — there are very few photographs. So the mere existence of this one, clearly depicting a Nazi officer and a Ukrainian police collaborator engaging in the murder, is rather incredible. Lower sets out to learn everything she can about the circumstances around the photograph, the Slovakian photographer and his motivation for capturing it, and the identities of those depicted.

It’s fascinating to see so many of Lower’s initial assumptions, based on established historical precedence as they are, get challenged and disproven. The Ravine is a significant document just for its demonstration that despite the massive breadth of research and literature on the Holocaust, we still don’t know it all. Lower is surprised several times during her detective work, and her writing around genocide and the circumstances that the photographer, in particular, were operating under are the strongest elements.

It goes without saying that this is disturbing material, but Lower makes an eloquent, informed argument for investigating and preserving this history and for not shying away from what the reality of genocide looks like. Still, it was at times hard to sit with.

There’s also a certain distance evident in the author’s voice and structure, and although I understand the necessity, it does read a bit drily because of it. Almost report-like. It’s valuable for the new information it reveals, for its ability to put faces to numbers almost too massive and overwhelming to comprehend, and at times for the stark, straightforward way Lower presents unsettling truths.

I've read quite a bit of books about the Holocaust. But the basis of The Ravine immediately interested me. It seemed to be a more intimate exploration of a small portion of the atrocity- a single photograph of a single Jewish family at the moment of this murder. As Lower discusses in this book, we often discuss the Holocaust in large terms- six million dead, x number of shoes, y number of glasses, etc. We rarely take it to the more intimate level of tragedy when we discuss it- discussing it at a family level instead of a national or municipal level. This is the task that Lower takes on when she begins to investigate this photograph.

The photograph itself depicts a massacre in Ukraine in 1941, and shows a Jewish women and two children as well as their Nazi and Ukranian collaborator murderers. Lower goes on a quest to contextualize this photograph, give a voice to the family depicted and the photographer who took the photograph (it was a crime in Nazi Germany to take unsanctioned photographs of these massacres and, as such, few of these atrocity images exist). She also researches the Nazis in the photograph, naming them and thus making them face some sort of judgement for their crime.

It was, in all, an interesting book. It was also terribly quick (the version I read only had about 125 pages, excluding the notes, indexes, etc.). I wish, however, that Lower had spent less time discussing the aspects of photography (which is not my area of interest), and more on the historical context of the image and some more interesting parts of the investigation (such as the excavations done at the mass grave). Those who enjoy art and art history would really, really enjoy this book. Alas, I am not an art history buff. History-fiends will enjoy, but art history fiends will love.

A non fiction deep dive into a photo that is so disturbing as it recounts a firing squad in Ukraine as they kill their fellow men, women and children who are Jewish as they were advised that they needed to be eliminated so they can create the utopia they dream of.

As Wendy Lower takes a deep dive behind this photo to find out who is in it, who took it and if there can be resolution to these heinous acts. It was interesting to read a book (a shorter one, but a full one) that solely focused on one photograph and how these pieces of evidence were crucial when it came to finding justice for those who survived World War II.

Although a little dry at times, I would recommend this book to those who have read all of the historical fiction books to see a different side of this moment in time and to find out how those who were left were able to find an ounce of justice.

I previously read Wendy Lower’s Hitler’s Furies, an impressive study of how hundreds of thousands of German became willing accomplices in the bureaucracy of genocide. Now Lower turns to a painstaking study of a single photograph of a murderous incident in Ukraine, in the early, Holocaust-by-gun phase of the war.

The Nazi government and military authorities forbade photographing of their murderous attacks on civilians. They knew that these could outrage the general population. Still, cameras had become available and affordable for large swathes of the population, including soldiers, and many brought cameras to the front with them. One of them, a man in the Nazi-affiliated Slovak forces, took a some photographs of Ukrainians, under the supervision of Germans, killing women and children.

Lower manages to identify several of the perpetrators. She learns how they came to volunteer to become murderers and what happened to them after the war. This massacre was not supervised or carried out by the SS, the Gestapo or even Germany army combatants. The shooters were Ukrainian neighbors of the victims, organized into a Nazi-friendly militia and supervised by volunteers from a non-combat unit of the German military.

Obviously, this is not a heartening story, but once again Lower fills in the background details that aid in our knowledge of how large numbers of people can come to see their neighbors as no longer individuals but as part of an enemy body needing to be exterminated. Secondarily, it shows how valuable pictorial evidence is in revealing the truth.

I’ve been interested in the history of World War II and the Holocaust for a long time. I never thought that it would become as relevant to contemporary life as it is now. Maybe all books like Lower’s should be subtitled “A Warning.”

A short, readable history that is well worth your time, along with Lower’s earlier Hitler’s Furies.

This was a very interesting read. The author attempted to trace the origin and history of a photograph showing a murder that happen d during the Holocaust. The narrative style switched between Lower’s firsthand account and general Holocaust information. At times, it felt like the voiceover of a detective movie. Overall, this book as informative and emotional.

This was mostly a good read. Very interesting. I think what it set out to do, which was to discover the mystery of the family in the photograph, largely failed. But I think the author is aware of that.
What it does do is force the reader to examine the Holocaust at the micro level versus the macro level. When we think of the Holocaust, I think most of us look at large groups: 6 million European Jews killed, how many victims killed at Auschwitz, other populations targeted. But this book puts a magnifying glass on the individual, and shines a spotlight on how difficult full justice could be for these atrocities.

Books about the Holocaust often tend to be about the same subject matter so I was interested with the premise of this nonfiction book. Historian Wendy Lower discovered a photograph during her research of a family that is in the midst of being murdered by Nazis in Ukraine in 1941. There is very little photographic evidence of Nazis actually committing their crimes - just a lot of proof after the horrible deeds had been done. Lower decided to dig into the massacre that had taken place on the same day as the photo (where victims were disposed of in a ravine) and tried to discover who the family might have been.

This book was painstakingly researched, which was both an asset and a detriment to the story at times. It was obvious how many long hours were spent trying to unravel the mystery of the photograph (especially since there are few records from the time and even fewer survivors now). This attention to detail and the recounting of the facts showed how thoughtful Lower was about her research. However, the data also made the book feel a little stiff and dry at times. I understand the tendency for writers to do this when talking about the Holocaust - it can be incredibly painful to recount the many horrors committed by the Nazis, so some distance is required to write about it in a subjective way. But the book did feel a little too much like reading a textbook at times.

Overall, I appreciated that the book was on the shorter side. It would have been harder to take in the information without feeling extremely drained otherwise. I did feel like this was a unique lens in which to look at the murders of millions of Jews, and Lower's passion for the project did ring true throughout the entire thing. I would probably only recommend this to people who are really interested in history books or in Holocaust research.

**I received and voluntarily read an e-ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. All thoughts and opinions are my own.**

Well researched and incredibly informative. The holocaust and WW2 are always difficult to write and read about, but the author does a good job of getting the details across without bogging the story down with unnecessary information. At times the writing feels a little stiff, but this may be on purpose for the author to distance herself from the subject material.

This memoir follows the work of the author in seeking out more information about a devastating photograph of the murder of Jews in Ukraine during the Second World War. The author's explanations and descriptions of the war and its various entities is often simplistic, and while her writing about the power of photography and its use during the war and after is more engaging and informative, she remains at a distance in the narrative, even as she sifts fragments of human bone from a mass grave. The writing is often stilted and in the passive voice. I don't know if this is to make the work seem more scholarly--it is non-fiction, but not scholarly at all--or because of her own lack of ease with the subject matter. Unfortunately, the book ends with tepid platitudes and is, as a whole, unsatisfying.

This is a carefully researched microhistory; one that takes a single photograph of an atrocity and uses it to discuss both the relative paucity of such images in general and the specific circumstances around the photograph itself. Here is history in a grain of sand: the documentary ability to potentially put names and faces to the blurred images of the family being executed, the history of the photographer, the history of something I was rather less aware of, prosecutions of Nazis continuing in the USSR throughout the Cold War. Lower is very thorough and draws clear connections with previous historians like Christopher Browning and the ongoing work of Debois and the reestablishment in cultural memory of the 'Holocaust by Bullets'. In a time when believe in the Holocaust has come under pressure, this is a book that does much to show how much documentary evidence there was and is, and how much can be learned or recovered through a single photograph, a single testimonial. There's also, I think, something to be said for the recoverability of such narratives even now: in the memory of the villages where it happened and the girls who were drafted to dig the pits, in the Soviet records that were closed to the West for so long, in photographs like this still coming to light. (I'm fascinated by the missing negatives, lost in the archives - hopefully not forever). These traces are both intensely fragile and unexpectedly persistent, which makes this, too, a meditation upon the work of the historian.

The author gives the reader a very clear image of events. This clarity is confronting due to the tragic nature of the story and extremely impressive in terms of the author’s skills. Obviously well researched, this book offers a new and interesting perspective of one of history’s greatest evils.

A meticulous excavation of one atrocity within the many atrocities of the Holocaust.

After Lowry is shown a photograph that depicts the execution of a woman and children from a Ukrainian Jewish community, she uses this rare photograph to examine the familial wounds created by genocide; examine the dichotomy of exhuming mass graves and honoring the dead; understanding the agenda of the photographer; and identifying both the victims and the perpetrators. Lowry’s writing is clear and focused, and each chapter brings the reader into a clearer, more painful understanding of the Holocaust in Ukraine. This is painstakingly researched and respectfully recorded.
Highly recommended; it’s also an important meditation on the reader and the historian’s duty to serve as witnesses.
Netgalley review.