Holocaust Education Month 2022 Launch Event – November 10th, 7:00 pm
By Kara Goodwin
This year’s Holocaust Education Month Launch Event, in commemoration of Kristallnacht on November 10th , will be an online presentation featuring Dr. Wendy Lower, award-winning author of Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields.
Lower is the John K. Roth Chair of History at Claremont McKenna College and research associate of the Ludwig Maximillians Universität in Munich, Germany. A historical consultant for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, she has conducted archival research and field work on the Holocaust for 20 years.
Her recent book, The Ravine: A Family, a Photograph, a Holocaust Massacre Revealed, provides unique contributions to our understanding of the Holocaust, the role of collaborators, and photographic documentation.
In 2009, a librarian at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum handed Dr. Lower a photo that would lead her on a 10-year investigative journey. The photographer had captured a horrific moment in time: a woman wearing a polka-dot dress is being shot. She is bent at the waist while leaning over what appears to be a ravine. Kneeling beside her and still holding her hand is a young child. Another child, partially obscured by her dress, is on her far side. She is flanked by German soldiers and Ukrainian militia who are literally pointing the smoking guns. This rare snapshot was dated October 1941. Given the locale and date, this photo documents what we now refer to as the Holocaust by Bullets, as named by Father Patrick Desbois’s* research and book on the subject.
Participants in Dr. Lower’s presentation about The Ravine will have a front-row seat as she explains her dogged and remarkable research journey to provide names for these victims, and to bear witness to this atrocity, uncovering in the process the names of the perpetrators. “This photo is important visual evidence of collaboration,” says Dr. Lower. By analyzing in detail this one tragic moment captured by the photo, Dr. Lower provides countless insights into the Holocaust.
The study of Holocaust photography is complex, as is the issue of using Holocaust images in education. Most photographs of the Holocaust were taken by Nazis for administrative purposes, reports, or propaganda. Rarely, images were taken secretly by Jews themselves to document atrocities, as in the case of photographers, Henryk Ross* and Mendel Grossman in the Lodz Ghetto At liberation, images taken by Allied soldiers opened the eyes of the world to previously unimaginable horrors. Some of these photos became key evidence in the prosecution of Nazis at Nuremberg.
The Ravine shows us how scholars use photographs, testimony, data, and other resources to make new contributions to our understanding of the past. “I gained a new perspective of the hidden value a single picture can hold for Holocaust research after hearing Dr. Wendy Lower’s presentation,” said CHES Chair, Mina Cohn.
Professor Jan Grabowski will participate in the program by providing an overview of Jewish existence in Ukraine and the effects of the ongoing war on the community.
Please join us for this opportunity to hear from Dr. Lower and ask questions about her research.
Register here: https://sidepony.ca/ches-november-10
*(The Jewish Photographer Henryk Ross (yadvashem.org)).
*Father Desbois and his team researched and located mass grave sites in Eastern Europe. From 1941 to 1944 it is estimated that 1.5 million Jews were shot and buried in mass graves by Nazi mobile units and local collaborators in 2,500 locations in the Ukraine. The largest of these mass killings took place at the Babi Yar (Babyn Yar) ravine near Kyiv.
