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A review by srash
The Ravine: A Family, a Photograph, a Holocaust Massacre Revealed by Wendy Lower
5.0
This is a very difficult read but one well worth reading. I'd actually balked at reading it for a while due to recent world events before realizing that was all the more reason it needed to be read.
A noted Holocaust expert and researcher attempts to piece together the story behind a chilling photograph of a slaughter of Jewish civilians that was taken in Ukraine during WWII and subsequently buried in a Czech archive for decades. Though it is an obscure town and massacre not really written about before, the details will be familiar to anyone who has read about the Holocaust by Bullets that preceded the extermination camps.
Less familiar is the painstaking illustration of how 21st century historians and researchers around the world are still working to preserve these stories and identify the victims. Lower methodically analyzes the photograph, identifies the location, reconstructs the crime, tracks down the story behind the picture, searches for information on the perpetrators (whom she knows will likely be either incredibly elderly or dead), and tries her best to identify the woman and child in the picture. She also provides some useful debunking of long-held myths about the Holocaust, including one that I have seen repeated an alarming number of times on the internet of late (that the Nazis didn't commit rape or sexual violence), and argues for not losing individual and family stories of victims of genocide amidst the overwhelming statistics of people murdered.
A heartbreaking but well-written, well-researched, and thought-provoking read. A good companion read to the Philippe Sands books I was reading a few months ago.
A noted Holocaust expert and researcher attempts to piece together the story behind a chilling photograph of a slaughter of Jewish civilians that was taken in Ukraine during WWII and subsequently buried in a Czech archive for decades. Though it is an obscure town and massacre not really written about before, the details will be familiar to anyone who has read about the Holocaust by Bullets that preceded the extermination camps.
Less familiar is the painstaking illustration of how 21st century historians and researchers around the world are still working to preserve these stories and identify the victims. Lower methodically analyzes the photograph, identifies the location, reconstructs the crime, tracks down the story behind the picture, searches for information on the perpetrators (whom she knows will likely be either incredibly elderly or dead), and tries her best to identify the woman and child in the picture. She also provides some useful debunking of long-held myths about the Holocaust, including one that I have seen repeated an alarming number of times on the internet of late (that the Nazis didn't commit rape or sexual violence), and argues for not losing individual and family stories of victims of genocide amidst the overwhelming statistics of people murdered.
A heartbreaking but well-written, well-researched, and thought-provoking read. A good companion read to the Philippe Sands books I was reading a few months ago.