In
August 2009 I was in the archives of the United States Holocaust Memorial
Museum, searching for Nazi documentation that might lead to the prosecution of
the highest-ranking SS officer known to be alive in Germany at that time. This
“last Nazi” was Bernhard Frank, the former commandant of Adolf Hitler’s Berghof
compound in the Alps. Frank was a protégé of the SS commander in chief,
Heinrich Himmler, who was responsible for carrying out the genocide of European
Jews. In the early days of the “Holocaust by bullets,” Frank had certified
orders for the first mass shootings to include Jewish women and ensured that
the details of those operations were accurately recorded. Between July and
October 1941, Frank recorded the murder of more than 50,000 Jewish men, women,
and children in the fields, swamps, and ravines of Ukraine and Belarus.
As I was
reading microfilmed SS police reports, Vadim Altskan, the museum’s expert on
Ukraine, interrupted me and asked if I had time to take a look at something. He
introduced me to two young journalists from Prague who wanted to show me a
photograph. According to the documentation they provided, it was taken on
October 13, 1941, in Miropol, Ukraine.
At first
glance, I could see from certain details that the image originated in the
Holocaust: the Nazi uniforms, the wartime-era clothing of European civilians,
the long-barreled wooden rifles, and a woman and a boy—relatives, perhaps a
mother and son—being shot by Germans and local collaborators at the edge of a
ravine.
In my
decades of researching the Holocaust, I had seen thousands of photographs and
closely studied hundreds, looking for images that captured the killers in the
act. Too many (like Bernhard Frank, who died in 2011) had gotten away with
murder and lying about it under oath. If the perpetrators shown in a photograph
could be identified, it could serve as incontrovertible evidence of their
participation in murder. These were my impressions and thoughts within seconds
of first seeing the photograph.
Although
the documentary and photographic record of the Holocaust is greater than that
of any other genocide, incriminating photographs like this that catch the
killers in the act are rare. In fact, there are so few that I can list them
here: an SS officer aiming his rifle at a Jewish family fleeing in the fields
of Ivanograd, Ukraine; naked Jewish men and boys being forced to lie facedown
in a pit (the “sardine method”) as they are being shot in Ponary, Lithuania;
Jewish women and children, at the moment of death, falling into the sand dunes
of Liepāja, Latvia; an execution squad firing in Tiraspol, Moldova; naked
Jewish women and girls being finished off by Ukrainian militia in Mizoch; one
photograph from Ukraine with the caption “last living seconds of Jews in
Dubno,” showing men being shot execution-style against a brick wall; another,
also from Ukraine, captioned “the last Jew in Vinnytsia,” showing a man
kneeling before a pit with a pistol to the back of his head; Jews in Kovno
(Kaunas) being bludgeoned to death by Lithuanian pogromists; and a few more
without captions, apparently taken in the Baltic states or Belarus and
depicting the Holocaust by bullets.
Most of
these images have been blown up and displayed in museum exhibitions; many are
retrievable on the internet. They are few but represent the murder of millions.
These iconic snapshots of the Holocaust give the false impression that such
images are numerous, yet they number not many more than a dozen, and we know
little, if anything, about who is in them, and even less about who took them.
What
does one do upon discovering a photograph that documents a murder? Imagine, by
way of comparison, that you are rummaging around in a flea market, an antique
store, or the attic in your new home, and you find a photograph that shows a
person being killed, with the perpetrator in full view. If the crime seems
recent, occurring in your own lifetime, you would probably bring the photograph
to a police station and file a report to start an investigation. But what if
the crime depicted was a lynching from a century ago? Or a shooting in 1941?
The Ravine tells the story of one photograph and its power to hold our
attention, reveal a wealth of information about the Holocaust, and demand
action.
I asked
the journalists about the history of the photograph. Where did they find it?
They explained that this photograph from Miropol had been locked in the stacks
of Prague’s Security Service headquarters, a former KGB-like authority in
Soviet-controlled Czechoslovakia. It took the collapse of the Soviet Union in
1991 to bring to light this image of mass murder—living victims being killed
together, as a family. It is astonishing evidence, clearly showing local
militia shooting side by side with Germans in wartime Ukraine, where more than
a million Jews were murdered in broad daylight. And, the journalists revealed,
the photographer testified about this event in the 1950s, stating emphatically
that the local killers were Ukrainians who knew some of the victims.
The
Holocaust was a German-led attack against the Jews of Europe, and beyond. In
recent decades, the vast and deep involvement of non-Germans has come into
sharper relief and made collaboration a word as dirty as the mud and blood
soiling the killers’ uniforms and shoes. The collaborators pictured here were
not prominent quislings, the treasonous fascist leaders in various countries
who sided with Hitler. These were instead local police officers who committed
murder against their neighbors.
Today,
more than 70 years later, eastern European scholars who research and publish
information about such local killers in Ukraine, Poland, Hungary, and elsewhere
are silenced, threatened, and even criminalized for dredging up the dark past
of European anti-Semitism, greed, opportunism, and collective violence. The
whitewashing of this historical stain can be seen in revisionist narratives, in
state-controlled media, and in security classifications that lock records away
in secret archives. But the evidence of local collaboration seen in this vivid
crime photograph is as undeniable as the bones of murdered Jews lying in mass
graves just below the surface of these eastern European countries.
As soon
as I saw the photograph and held it in my hand, I wanted to break the frame
around the crime scene, which kept the victims frozen in that awful moment. The
photograph captures an event locked in time, but I knew it was part of a fluid
situation. What preceded that moment of death, what followed, and what happened
to each person visible there? Perhaps in finding the answers, I could unmask
the killers and restore some kind of life and dignity to the victims.
Four men
are clustered together—an armed gang in loose formation. In the background, we
see the two German commanders, and in the foreground and to the right, two
Ukrainian militiamen crowding the victims. One German, in a pressed jacket and
jodhpurs, and the Ukrainian behind him, in a heavy woolen Red Army coat, have
just pulled their triggers.
The
victims of this massacre were brought to the edge of the pit and shot so
quickly, one after another, that the multiple muzzle blasts have produced halos
of smoke that are still hovering in the atmosphere. The Ukrainian’s rifle is
inches from the head of the woman, which is obscured in the smoke.
She is
bending forward, in her polka-dot housedress, dark stockings, and Mary
Jane–style leather shoes. She is holding the hand of a barefoot boy, dressed in
a little tailored coat and pants, who is falling to his knees. In the
foreground of the photograph a pair of men’s leather booties is positioned as
if someone had just taken them off, as if he used the tip of the right shoe to
pry off the heel of the left one. Next to the shoes is an empty coat lying on
its side, like the shell of a man’s torso at rest. Fired cartridge casings, the
litter of the mass murder, are scattered on the ground.
The
victims are at the edge of a ravine. The woman is dying from the bullet wound
to the head, pulling the boy—who is still alive—down with her into the grave.
According to common Nazi protocol, bullets were not to be wasted on Jewish
children. They were instead left to be crushed by the weight of their kin and
suffocated in blood and the soil heaped over the bodies.
It must
have been mid-morning. Rays of light entered the camera’s aperture when this
candid was shot, and in the developed print the contrasts are sharp: the boy’s
neatly cut dark hair and his stark white face; the shiny leather of a German
policeman’s visor, with silver insignias stamped on the cap; the polka dots
that pop in the dark folds of the woman’s dress. The forest backdrop looks like
a canvas curtain painted with dark vertical tree trunks and blotchy branches.
This is
an action shot. There is motion in the moment, in the explosion, in the tense
postures and grimaces of the killers, in the cloud of smoke around the woman’s
head, and in the kneeling boy holding her hand. A civilian onlooker in a wool
cap stands alert, ready to assist.
Mass
murder requires a division of labor among a multitude of perpetrators, and in
the Holocaust that combined effort cut across ethno-cultural lines. I was to
learn that the photographer was a Slovakian security guard, mobilized for the
invasion and occupation of the Soviet Union in 1941 and stationed in
Nazi-occupied Ukraine. Like millions of other soldiers, he got swept up in the
camera craze of the 1920s and 30s, and when he was drafted, he packed his new
Zeiss Ikon Contax to document historic events and foreign terrain.
The
photographer stands about 20 feet from the executioners (his camera did not
have zoom or telephoto lenses), while the helper (possibly an interpreter,
gravedigger, or confiscator) walks or stands near him without any expression of
alarm; he does not look at the camera. It seems that the photographer is
permitted to be there, perhaps as part of the cordon of guards, and is openly
snapping pictures at eye level or waist level. The photographer knows what he’s
doing—the image is clear and composed. It even follows photography’s basic
“rule of thirds” in the positioning of the main panels: the ravine, the dying
victims, and the killers. If this photograph had been taken in a clandestine
manner (or snapped by an amateur), it might be off-kilter or unfocused, perhaps
showing an obstruction such as the seam of a coat pocket or a part of the
photographer’s hand.
Looking
at this picture, we take on the photographer’s view of the event as he stands
among the perpetrators, collaborators, and other onlookers, probably including
more Jewish victims waiting to be killed. We see what this close-up observer
wished to capture. He opened the lens, adjusted the dial to set the aperture,
pointed the camera, and pressed the button. The photograph encapsulates the
sensory and the documentary, the aesthetic and the evidentiary—elements
elucidated by cultural critics of photography. One might even argue that it
includes the pornographic, as the camera is aimed, like the German and
Ukrainian guns, at the woman and child.
The
photographer, along with the Germans and Ukrainians, partakes in the disturbing
intimacy of the violence. Perpetrators stand shoulder to shoulder, close to the
victims. They touch the woman with their hands and the ends of their guns. Here
we see genocide at its extreme: the final moment when paramilitary gangs of men
like this one annihilate women and children.
At the
center of the image is what is left of a Jewish family and community in
Miropol, a historic Jewish shtetl west of Kiev (now Kyiv). Perhaps the
photograph is intended to document the end of the future of Jewry as a
matrilineal “race” in Europe. The victims are clothed and will be buried en
masse, a violation of Jewish religious rites. They are killed in small family
groups and therefore see and feel the suffering of loved ones, including
parents viewing the destruction of their own children. This is perhaps the most
extreme assault that the genocidaire inflicts. What thoughts ran through this
mother’s mind as she was forced to march to this site with her child? Did the
boy try to run away, shocked and confused? Was the father killed first, before
their eyes? And what does one do with an image of the missing, whose lives and
fates have not been registered by anyone?
The
photographic documentation of the Holocaust is especially rich because the
events coincided with the mass production and consumption of the small handheld
camera. During the war, Hitler’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, embedded
15,000 photojournalists in all theaters of the conflict, producing more than
3.5 million images. The pocket snapshot was a common item in the soldier’s
knapsack. And as German soldiers seized and occupied territories formerly held
by the Soviet Union in 1941 and 1942, they photographed what they encountered.
World War II was not only the most destructive armed conflict ever; it was also
the most photographed.
Patriotism,
anti-Semitism, lurid fascination with cruelty and death, moral outrage at
witnessing genocide, and myriad other motives caused ordinary soldiers to
document the spectacles of violence inflicted on Jews, Soviet POWs, resistance
fighters, forced laborers, and Slavic “Untermenschen.” The Holocaust of the
Jews consisted of six million acts of murder, and the global archive of visual
documentation reflects both individual victims and the scale of the genocide.
It shows individuals, families, and communities in the years, months, days, and
moments leading up to their deaths, and afterward as piles of corpses. We see
the culmination of Nazi anti-Semitic policies that forced Jews to endure
conditions that necessarily caused death. Yet the act of killing is rarely
portrayed. Nazi leaders suppressed images that depicted it, confiscating the
most incriminating ones while employing euphemisms, such as the “Final
Solution” and “Special Treatment,” to allude to the brutal truth.
Photographs,
if we choose to study them, open up questions and lead us down paths of
discovery. There are details in the Miropol photograph that we were not
supposed to witness. Some postwar theorists of photography would urge us not to
look at, let alone scrutinize, the suffering of others. In 1988, when scholars
and museologists deliberated over the visual content of the United States
Holocaust Memorial’s Museum’s exhibits, they explored the “question of explicit
imagery including the ‘pornography of murder, nudity and violence in a
museum.’”
Installation
of Holocaust memorial for the murdered Jews of Miropol, Ukraine, in 1982
(public domain)
The
museum’s creators were clear that to avoid all graphic visuals—images that
elicit shock and outrage—would be to forsake the truth of Nazi evil. They did
not want to display victims in a way that would further humiliate them or
embarrass their families and descendants, or encourage voyeurism. They feared
that images of sexual violence and nude corpses might excite erotic fantasies.
Depictions of death “precisely because its meaning eludes us and because it is
universal and ineluctable titillate, fascinate, and compel attention.” Viewers
should not “lose sight of the fact that each of the corpses in a pile was a
single, complex, multi-faceted human being with parents, families, loved ones,
personal dreams and expectations and thwarted aspirations.”
The
cultural critic Susan Sontag argued that the shock of atrocity photography
“wears off with repeated viewings.” I disagree. The risk of desensitization to
such images exists when we have no knowledge of their history and content. The
more I learned, the more the Miropol image came to life.
One such
moment occurred in October 2014. I had asked the technical support services
staff at my college to create high-resolution images of the Miropol photograph.
We created cutouts from it, like five puzzle pieces, each one containing a
feature of the story. One showed the Germans’ faces, one showed the Germans
shoulder to shoulder with the Ukrainians, one showed the landscape, one the
victims, and one the empty shoes.
I
enlarged the cutouts and printed them to study them more closely. I was looking
for clues, things to place alongside postwar witness statements about the
Miropol massacre in order to put these statements to the tests of veracity,
probability, and logic. I focused on each piece. Did the shadows indicate the
time of day? Did the clothes, such as the heavy overcoats, suggest a season?
What insignia could I identify on the Germans’ uniforms? Were more onlookers
hidden behind the figures in the foreground or among the trees? Were the items
on the ground papers or leaves? Were the victims holding anything, such as a
Bible, or wearing anything of importance, such as a wedding ring?
My eyes
were always drawn back to the center, to the crouching woman, and I began to
wonder why she was bent over in a perpendicular angle, not buckling under or
kneeling forward. And then I saw something resting on the woman’s lap or being
held in her right arm. It was a hazy, curved form; light was not passing
through what should have been an empty space. I could make out a pair of bent
knees and the translucent fabric of a dress. I started to see the faint lines
of an elbow and a small head covered in a scarf. Suddenly into my view came the
existence of another person, a child. I had found another soul about to be
extinguished, another nameless victim of the Holocaust who was meant to be lost
to us. These faint contours were the only trace of this child.
Most
Holocaust photographs taken by Germans and their collaborators triumphantly
document victory over Judeo-Bolshevism. These images show the victims on their
way to death—waiting at deportation sites, sitting or standing solemnly among
piles of clothes, being selected at the arrival ramp at Birkenau. The
photographers leer sadistically at women undressing or standing in the nude.
But, as the scholar Ulrich Baer astutely argues, we should not remain locked in
the gaze of the onlookers. Rather, we must try our best to restore the victims
as subjects, not objects, of history. In the same way, we should interrogate
the motive of the photographer, the grimaces of the killers, and the forces of
anti-Semitic hate that are being expelled from the ends of their guns and
pistols. These things need to be investigated, exposed, and explained.
Only
after the collapse of the Soviet Union was it possible to situate this Miropol
image within the tens of thousands of pages of investigative material about the
mass shooting and to gather dozens of accounts from those in Miropol who had
access to the view we see here. They included the villagers who dug the pits,
the police officers who drove this family to the edge of the pit, the
perpetrators who pulled the triggers, the laborers who covered the mass grave,
the forensic investigators who exhumed it in 1986, and the photographer who was
haunted by this image until his death, in 2005.
In this
postmodern era of research, with its millions of cataloged and digitized
documents and the accessibility of sites related to historical events, I was
able to draw on every possible remnant of evidence—the written, the visual, and
the artifactual records of the perpetrators and their regime; the environmental
and architectural landscape of the places where the victims lived and were
murdered; and the generations of storytellers from Miropol and around the globe
whose family trees contain severed branches dating from the Holocaust. This single
photograph of the murdering of a family took me to archives, museums, living
rooms, peasant huts, fields, and parks in Europe, America, and Israel.
My book,
The Ravine, 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 erase the victims from written
records, and even from memory. When we find one trace, we must pursue it, to
prevent the intended extinction by countering it with research, education, and
memorialization.
Adapted
from The Ravine: A Family, a Photograph, a Holocaust Massacre Revealed.
To Catch
a Killer: Uncovering the Massacre of a Jewish Family in
Nazi
Europe. By Wendy Lower. LitHub, February 16, 2021.
In this
episode, Andrew Keen is joined by Wendy
Lower, author of The Ravine, to dive into some of the stories of the millions
of individuals who were killed during the Holocaust, as well as to discuss how
photography helps us confront the atrocities of the past.
Wendy
Lower: If we make the connections to the power of photography today, it can be
a kind of roadmap, as it were. One of the other things I mentioned the
introduction, is if we uncover photos from lynchings, if we can really
investigate those and investigate what happened and who’s in those photographs,
it can tell us a lot about the history of racism here in the United States and
of the collective violence, the kind of pogrom-type of violence, that was
inflicted on Black communities across the US, especially in the southern
states.
One of
the photographs that I mentioned in this report that’s recycled all the time as
a kind of go-to Holocaust photograph in museums is the man in Vinnytsia,
Ukraine, kneeling before a pit, wearing a crumpled jacket, being shot in the
back of the neck. People have seen this. They’ve asked me about it. If you look
into the footnotes, you’ll see that there are more stories about these
photographs. And the one from Vinnytsia, I found out, had been reproduced on
T-shirts and commercialized on mugs. So the other message is that these photos,
we should look at them, but again handle with care and not commercialize them
in this way, but understand the power of these photographs to actually effect
change and understanding about racism and anti-Semitism.
Wendy
Lower on the Political Power of Photography.
In Conversation with Andrew Keen on the Keen On Podcast. LitHub, March 18, 2021.
The Ravine
: A Family, a Photograph, a Holocaust
Massacre Revealed.
By Wendy Lower
“What does one
do upon discovering a photograph that documents a murder?” Wendy Lower asks in
her new book, “The Ravine.” Lower, a historian of the Holocaust who has worked
with Nazi hunters, ponders a photograph, taken in October 1941, in the once
thriving, now desolate Ukrainian town of Miropol. It shows several men —
Ukrainians and Germans — shooting a woman who, bent over, holds the hand of a
small, barefoot boy just before they tumble into a death pit. (The boy would be
buried alive, not shot, since Nazi protocol forbade wasting bullets on Jewish
children.) Smoke from the gun blasts obscures the face of the woman, who wears
a polka-dot housedress; later, on closer inspection, Lower will discover
another child nestled in the woman’s lap. The photograph reveals the “Holocaust
by bullets” in Ukraine, where more than one million Jews were murdered not in
terrifying death camps but in prosaic “fields, swamps and ravines.” The Jews’
tormentors were, very often, their lifelong Ukrainian neighbors.
The scene was
not unusual; neither was the photograph. During the war, German soldiers took
troves of photographs — perhaps hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions — some
of which memorialized, indeed celebrated, their cruelties, tortures and crimes.
Nazi authorities forbade these unofficial images, but to little avail; they
circulated widely to friends and families back home. These celebrations of
sadism — which shake our ideas about an innate human capacity for either shame
or guilt — are sometimes referred to as “trophy photos,” though I think
“atrocity selfies” is a better term. (Lower claims that, in showing the actual
moment of death, the Miropol photograph is rare, though there is no way that
she — or anyone else — could know this: For obvious reasons, many of these
amateur photographs have never surfaced.)
Lower wants to
do several things with this image. She hopes to discover who, exactly, the
Jewish victims were: to say their names. Though she is an admirably dogged
researcher — she uses, among other sources, live and videotaped witness
testimonies, legal documents and grave excavations — in this she fails; their
names are lost to history.
She also hopes
to recreate the details of that day in Miropol and thus reveal the networks of
complicity that made the Holocaust possible. Here, she succeeds with a
vengeance: Her chapter “The Aktion” is devastating. Finally, she wants to
expose the killers.
Knowing how an
event occurred removes it from the realm of abstraction — and genocide has,
unfortunately, become an almost abstract term. Photographs are particularly
good at piercing haziness, since they often capture individuals taking action,
not so-called cogs in a machine. As the historian Jan Tomasz Gross wrote in
“Golden Harvest” (2012), his own book about a Holocaust image, photographs
“remind us most directly of human agency in what otherwise we would know only
as a numerical phenomenon.”
Lower shows
that it takes a lot of people to kill a lot of people. There are the Ukrainian
teenage girls forced to dig the mass graves; the Nazi customs guards (including
volunteers) and Ukrainian policemen who rounded up the Jews and forced them to
the death site; the Ukrainian neighbors who plundered their homes and
“assaulted them — throwing stones and bottles.” Then there are the Ukrainian
militia who, “armed with clubs, tools and Russian rifles, chased Jews, bludgeoning
some to death. … They chased young Jewish women, ripped off their clothes and
raped them.”
The town rang
out — who could miss this? — with gunshots, “yelling, screaming and howling.”
This was not the bureaucratic killing many associate with the Holocaust. This
was mass murder at its most intimate: The Ukrainians “taunted the victims by
name. … The victims were known to them from the dentist’s office, the cobbler’s
shop, the soda fountain and the collective farm. They grabbed small children
and babies by the legs and smashed their heads against the trees.”
There is a
vociferous debate among historians and photography critics about whether
“perpetrator photographs,” especially from the Nazi era, should be viewed. Some
argue that they revictimize the victims. Lower, rightly, disputes this, though
in a sparse and not especially illuminating way. Yet her book is a refutation
of those who urge us not to look. Indeed, the big surprise of “The Ravine” is
the identity of the Miropol image’s photographer: a Slovakian soldier named
Lubomir Skrovina. He took the photograph with the full knowledge of his German
superiors, but he did not take it in service to their aims. In fact, Skrovina
was, or at least became, a member of the Resistance. He smuggled atrocity images
to his wife back home as possible material for anti-Nazi forces; wrangled out
of further military duty; hid Jews in his home and helped some escape; and
joined the antifascist Slovakian uprising of 1944. Lower describes Skrovina’s
photograph as “an expression of defiance.”
Though the
Jews in the photograph remained anonymous, the names of their killers were
known. West German authorities opened an inquiry in 1969, then quickly dropped
it. But a Soviet K.G.B. major named Mikola Makareyvych was more determined. In
1986, his investigation yielded convictions for three of the Ukrainians in the
photograph. Two were executed, one sentenced to prison. I oppose the death
penalty. But I read this chapter of Lower’s book — entitled “Justice” — with
deep and unshakable satisfaction.
When Genocide
Is Caught on Film. By By Susie Linfield.
The New York Times, February 16, 2021
Massacre
of Jews in Chernihiv, Ukraine, October 1941 (public domain)
"The
Ravine: A Family, A Photograph, A Holocaust Memory" with Wendy Lower.
Award-winning
historian Wendy Lower discussed her new book, "The Ravine, A Family, A
Photograph, A Holocaust Memory" with Professor Pamela Nadell, Director of
the Jewish Studies Program.
American University College, March 11, 2021.
Nazi
German ‘Einsatzgruppen’ massacre of Jews in Lubny, Ukraine, 1941 (public
domain)
Harvard
Book Store's virtual event series welcomes Wedny Lower—the John K. Roth
Professor in History at Claremont McKenna College and author of Hitler's
Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields—for a discussion of her latest
book, The Ravine: A Family, a Photograph, a Holocaust Massacre Revealed. She
will be joined in conversation by Joshua Rubenstein, associate, Harvard
University's Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies.
Security
guard Lubomir Skrovina (centre) took the photographs
One day in
2009, Wendy Lower, historian of Nazism and the Shoah, was hard at work in the
archives of the U.S. Holocaust Museum when a librarian handed her a photograph
dated Oct. 13, 1941, depicting the deaths of Jews in Miropol, Ukraine, a shtetl
near Kiev.
The photo
Lower saw that day is shocking. A woman in a polka dot dress is leaning over
from the waist, her head wreathed in smoke from the rifle blasts that are
killing her. She is holding the hand of a small boy, who leans backward, his
face turned slightly away from her, as if he can’t bear to look into her dying
face. The woman grasps his hand tightly. She cannot calm his terror, but she
won’t ever let go of him. She is pulling the boy forward with her into the mass
grave, along with another child hidden in her lap.
We may feel
guilty about looking at an image like this, worried that our gaze strips the
victims of their humanity. But we are not guilty: It is our duty to look. The
photograph that spurred Lower’s search is not mere “atrocity porn,” satisfying
an appetite for horrors. Instead, such a photograph wants us to be troubled by
the terror it depicts, and to inquire further. The crumpled bodies bend away
from the viewer, their pain hidden along with their faces.
The shooters
in the photo are a German and a Ukrainian—we can see this from their
uniforms—and the Ukrainian’s rifle is just a few inches from the woman’s head.
Another Ukrainian in the foreground has a rifle in his hands, and there is
another German in the back. There is someone else too. “A civilian onlooker in
a wool cap stands alert, ready to assist,” Lower notes in The Ravine, the book
she has written about the photo and her efforts to find the story behind it.
Lower writes
that during each interview she conducted with Miropol’s elderly Ukrainian
citizens she showed them Škrovina’s photograph of the mother being shot. Did
they recognize anyone? Every time, she says, when she “presented the photograph
at the end of an interview, the subject looked and, with a shake of the head,
turned away.”
The photograph
depicts only the instant of death. Soon neighbors will come to strip the
corpses, carrying away clothes, gold teeth, and other valuables. They will cart
away furniture from the Jews’ houses. Some will remember how the Germans came
looking for Ukrainian volunteers; how the Jews screamed when they were marched
off to the killing site; how the shots rang out for hours. Others will pretend
that the Jews simply disappeared one day, and that the lives and deaths of Jews
and Ukrainians had nothing at all to do with each other.
Surprisingly,
only a handful of photos from the Holocaust show Jews being murdered. There are
many images of skeletal corpses in the death camps, emaciated prisoners, and
humiliated ghetto Jews. But very few reveal the Nazis and their local
collaborators pulling the trigger on their victims.
There were
four more photos in the portfolio that Lower saw that day in 2009, all of them
showing the massacre in Miropol. Here was a visual record of the so-called
Holocaust by bullets that reigned across Eastern Europe in 1941 and 1942. The
most lethal two days of that slaughter were in Kiev on Sept. 29 and 30, 1941,
when 33,771 Jews were murdered at the ravine of Babi Yar. Mass killing also
occurred day after day at Ponary, near Vilna, and many other places in the
Baltic states and Belarus, around the same time that the Nazis were trying to
perfect a new, better means of extermination by poison gas.
Lower traveled
to Slovakia, Israel, and America looking for clues to the family in the
photograph she found. While she still isn’t sure who they are (she has a
hunch), she learned much about what happened in Miropol in October 1941. In
2014 and 2016 she interviewed 16 of Miropol’s Ukrainian citizens who remembered
the October pogrom from their childhood 75 years earlier. Some recalled peeking
through their windows at the Jews being rounded up; others, who were gathering
wood in the forest, witnessed the Jews standing at the edge of the pit and
being shot from behind.
Lower tells us
that two Miropol women born in 1926 “remembered the names of their Jewish
classmates and friends who had invited them for Passover meals and treats.”
Others recalled “playing hopscotch and hide-and-seek with their Jewish
friends.” A few, she adds, “openly displayed their anti-Semitism, scoffing at
the rich Jews and Bolshevik Jews from those days.”
Skrovina’s
Zeiss Ikon Contax camera
The biggest
surprise in The Ravine is the identity of the photographer behind the image. “I
had assumed that anyone who took such close-up action shots of a murder must be
complicit,” Lower said in an interview. In fact the photographer, Lubomir
Škrovina—a soldier in the Slovakian army, allied with Germany—was a member of
an anti-Nazi resistance group from 1942 on. His photographs were intended to
expose Nazi barbarity. Before he came to Miropol, he had taken snapshots of
Jews lying in the streets covered in blood while German and Slovakian soldiers
posed over them.
Škrovina’s
letters to his wife from the front are full of despair. “If I described to you
some of the other grotesque images in my mind, you would be horrified,” he
wrote to her in August 1941. “My thoughts are quite black.” After Škrovina
returned home in December 1941, he hid Jews in his house and helped them escape
to the woods. Škrovina was anti-Soviet as well as anti-Nazi, a man without an
ideological home. Instead he had the capacity for humane response and, much
more rare, the courage to act.
Lower’s
earlier book Hitler’s Furies, about women Nazis, explored the mystery of human
motivation. The same person, she found, could both help Jews and murder them.
In The Ravine there is no mystery. Lower simply describes the range of roles
needed to kill a town’s Jews. Some will volunteer to commit murder, others will
rape and hound the victims, one or two will shelter, at great personal risk,
the tiny handful of Jews who manage to escape death for a few more days or
weeks.
Lower’s book
is called The Ravine after the place where the remainder of Miropol’s Jews were
murdered in early 1942. Those killed were “specialists” who were still needed
by the Germans, like cobblers, carpenters, and the town dentist, months after
the massacre depicted in the photo. Lower’s title also suggests the ravine at
Babi Yar, the most notorious Ukrainian killing site. The ravine is an emblem,
too, of the enormous absence that still haunts us.
The Holocaust
is the best-documented genocide in history, but vast gaps remain. Half of the
Jews murdered in Ukraine, some 500,000 people, remain unidentified. Holocaust
research is a losing race against time, as memories fade and death claims more
witnesses every year. Soon there will be none left. So the detective work is
urgent, but the chances of closing any given case are few. Every detail wrested
from the past becomes a statement against the genocidal killers, and a way to
honor the dead.
Ludmilla
Blekhman was, as far as we know, the only survivor of the Oct. 13 massacre in
Miropol. She crawled out of the pit, from beneath the dead bodies of her
family, ran into the woods, and found shelter with the Ukrainian forester. The
14-year-old girl spent more than two years, Lower writes, “living like an animal
in the woods, hiding in fields and forests, fending off rats.” Blekhman was
tortured by the Gestapo, and survived by swearing she was a Ukrainian peasant
girl. In 1944 she returned to Miropol to see that her house had been physically
torn apart by Ukrainian neighbors, who had used its wooden planks for firewood.
Blekhman died
in Israel before Lower could interview her, but her video testimony reveals
many details of the Miropol pogrom. Blekhman recalled that the night before the
massacre (as Lower writes),
“The Jewish elders gathered to devise
a plan of escape. They determined that “the children must survive!” Each family
was asked to identify a sympathetic and bribable Ukrainian who might hide the
children. The adults would then attack the police and go down fighting. They
attempted this during the Aktion, but nearly all their Ukrainian neighbors
betrayed them.”
The Ravine is
an elegantly structured book, as strange as it may be to use these words about
a study of genocide. This compact book implies that the Miropol pogrom can
stand for the whole of the Shoah, even though there is nothing here about gas
chambers and sealed railroad cars. The mechanisms of mass death are secondary
to the point of the genocide, as Lower sees it: the decimation of the Jewish
family.
The Nazis were
intent, above all, on murdering Jewish women and children. In towns like
Miropol, most adult Jewish men had fled to the East with the Red Army before
the Nazis arrived. Imagining themselves to be useful to the Soviet war effort,
they never thought that their families would be slaughtered in their absence.
In similar circumstances, the great Yiddish novelist Chaim Grade left Vilna
before the German assault, and returned after the war to find his wife and
mother dead, as described in his memoir, My Mother’s Sabbath Days.
The Germans
did not waste bullets on children. They were most often smothered to death,
covered in blood, dead bodies, and dirt. Lower notes that Jewish babies and
toddlers in wartime Eastern Europe had less than a 1% chance of survival;
Jewish children born after 1930 throughout Europe had less than a 2% chance.
These are the lowest survival rates in history.
Most Jewish
children died alongside their parents or other relatives. At Treblinka mothers
gripped the hands of their shaking, naked children, whose feet froze to the
ground on the way to the gas chamber—the Himmelstrasse (path to heaven), the
Nazis jokingly called it.
“Nazi policy
was two-pronged: family welfare and family destruction,” Lower notes. Nazi
sentimental kitsch centered on the Aryan family, the wholesome pillar of the
nation. But the Jewish family had to be exterminated. The Germans wanted to
erase every vestige of Jewish memory, and children are memory bearers.
There was
another reason, too. In the case of the Jews, the most tender human bond, the
one between mother and child, had to be denied. Jewish women and children were
killed together without pity to prove that Jewish families had nothing at all
in common with Aryan ones.
The most
heart-stopping of Lower’s chapters is “The Aktion,” which describes the pogrom
in Miropol. First, the Germans commanded teenage Ukrainian peasant girls to dig
a pit. Elderly Jewish men then continued the digging until the pit was one and
a half meters deep, at which point they were shot and tossed into it. Then the
Nazis recruited volunteers from the German customs guards in town to do the
killing. Two men stepped forward, Erich Kuska and Hans Vogt.
Twenty
Ukrainian policemen sealed off Miropol to prevent Jews from escaping.
Ukrainians then rounded up the Jews, clubbing and chasing them and raping the
Jewish women. After spending the night in the marketplace, the Jews were led to
the pit and murdered. Later, Lower writes, “The Ukrainian girls who had assisted
as gravediggers were ordered to cover up the mass grave with soil and lime. The
ground was moving.”
Two years and
two months after the murders in Miropol, Russia retook Ukraine, driving the
German army back to the Polish border. The Red Army arrived in Miropol in
January 1944, shortly after the bloody battle of Kiev. A number of the Nazis’
Ukrainian henchmen—the ones who had not fled or changed their identities—were
executed on the spot. “A makeshift gallows was erected, and the police were
noosed and made to stand on top of a truck, which then moved slowly away as a
Soviet official pronounced the men ‘traitors to the homeland,’” Lower writes.
During a
Soviet trial in the 1980s headed by a KGB investigator, Mikola Makareyvych,
three more Ukrainian killers were tried and sentenced, and two of them were
given the death penalty. Erich Kuska, one of the German customs men who had
volunteered to murder Jews, was interrogated in Bremen in 1969, but he denied
his guilt, and the German police dropped the charges. The other German shooter,
Hans Vogt, was never found.
A
Fierce, Brief Book About the Holocaust. By David Mikics. Tablet, April 5, 2021.
Lower believes
the victims may have been Khiva Vaselyuk (far right), her nephew Boris and her
son, Roman – but surviving relative Svetlana Budnitskaya was unable to make a
positive identification.
No comments:
Post a Comment