Wendy Lower - The Ravine: A Family, a Photograph, a Holocaust Massacre Revealed

THE
RAVINE

THE
RAVINE

A FAMILY,
A PHOTOGRAPH,
A HOLOCAUST MASSACRE
REVEALED.

W E N D Y
L O W E R

AN APOLLO BOOK

www.headofzeus.com

First published in the UK by Head of Zeus in 2021

An Apollo book

Copyright Wendy Lower, 2021

The moral right of Wendy Lower to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

The letters of Lubomir krovina are reproduced courtesy of the krovina family.

Cover photograph: Albatross / Alamy Stock Photo

ISBN (HB): 9781800246645

ISBN (E): 9781800246669

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For my parents,
James and Suzanne Lower

THE
RAVINE

I N A UGUST 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 most prominent SS officer known to be alive in Germany at that time. This last Nazi was Bernhard Frank, the former commandant of Adolf Hitlers Berghof compound in the Alps. Frank was a protg 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 fifty thousand Jewish men, women, and children in the fields, swamps, and ravines of Ukraine and Belarus.

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German guards and Ukrainian militia shooting a Jewish family, Miropol, Ukraine, October 13, 1941.

Security Services Archive, Historical Collection of the State Security Service (StB) Prague, archival no. H-770-3.

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 Pragues 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 murderliving 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 militia who committed murder against their neighbors. Today, more than seventy years later, eastern European scholars who research and publish information about such local killers in Ukraine, Poland, Hungary, and elsewhere are often 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 togetheran armed gang in loose formation. In the background, we see the two German commanders, and in the foreground and to the right, two Ukrainian auxiliaries 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 killers.

Security Services Archive, Historical Collection of the State Security Service (StB) Prague, archival no. H-770-3.

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 Ukrainians rifle is inches from the head of the woman, which is obscured in the smoke.

, the litter of the mass murder, are scattered on the ground.

The family.

Security Services Archive, Historical Collection of the State Security Service (StB) Prague, archival no. H-770-3.

The victims are at the edge of a ravine. The woman is dying from the bullet wound to the head, pulling the boywho is still alivedown 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 cameras aperture when this candid was taken, and in the developed print the contrasts are sharp: the boys neatly cut dark hair and his stark white face; the shiny leather of a German policemans visor, with silver insignias stamped on the cap; the polka dots that pop in the dark folds of the womans dress. The forest backdrop looks like a canvas curtain painted with dark vertical tree trunks and blotchy branches.