‘The Ravine: A family, a photograph, a Holocaust massacre revealed’
For our recent ‘Dialogues in Holocaust Education’ online session we were privileged to hear from Professor Wendy Lower, John K. Roth Professor of History, George R. Roberts Fellow and Director of the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights at McKenna Claremont College in California. Professor Lower spoke about her acclaimed book ‘The Ravine: A family, a photograph, a Holocaust massacre revealed’. During the hour-long session, Wendy took us through the decade-long scholastic journey that she took to uncover the history behind a single photograph.
In this blog we briefly outline three possible ways in which Professor Lower’s research and ‘The Ravine’ might have meaningful and positive implications for how we teach young people about the Holocaust.
Professor Lower’s book is about a photograph. The image first came to Wendy’s attention in August 2009 when she was approached by two journalists who had come from Prague with the photograph which had been sitting in the archives in Czechoslovakia and then Slovakia since the 1950s. The journalists asked Professor Lower to investigate the image beyond the basic, but important, details that they already knew: that it had been taken by a Slovakian photographer, on October 13th 1941 in a town in Ukraine called Miropol.
Complicating the narrative
The narrative behind the photograph provides teachers with a meaningful complication to the narrative of the Holocaust that they may be teaching their students in the classroom. The opening of archives in eastern Europe over the last thirty years has allowed scholars to shed light on the Holocaust in the former Soviet Union, and The Ravine allows teachers to access that scholarship in a very meaningful manner. Considering that almost half the victims of the Holocaust died, outside of the mass gassing facilities, in the territory of the former Soviet Union in mass shootings (with estimates suggesting that up to one out of four victims of the Holocaust died in Ukraine) it would seem to be an important element of the Holocaust to teach our students. Similarly, the horrific nature of the killing, the mass shooting of Jews adds complexity to a narrative that might not include the ‘Holocaust by bullets’. Similarly, Professor Lower’s research highlights the part played in the Holocaust by local collaborators, in this case Ukrainians. So, The Ravine, is an invaluable tool in helping teachers open up three key aspects of the Holocaust that might not have previously featured in students’ thinking: the Holocaust in the east, the Holocaust by bullets and the role of local collaborators.
Disciplinary discourse
A key element of The Ravine chronicles Professor Lower’s disciplinary journey, her detective work in discovering the story behind the photograph. This adds a further opportunity for teachers when using the book to inspire lessons: modelling and mirroring the work of the historian in assessing the evidence will be both instructive and quite possibly, inspiring. In her presentation, Professor Lower expertly deconstructed the photograph taken in Miropol in October, 1941. Revealing separate sections of the photograph, one by one, was an invaluable way of allowing us to focus on important evidential details and to build a more comprehensive understanding of the image as a whole. The natural environment adds to our understanding of how the perpetrators used the landscape to their advantage. The iconic image of a pair of shoes points to the absence of a victim. The crumpled papers and bullet casings in the foreground might be easily missed if looking at the image as a whole but a segment by segment analysis as described by Professor Lower will enable students to consider the small but significant details. As an aside, Professor Lower mentioned the invaluable section contained within a footnote that gives an extensive guide on how to pick apart the features of a photograph.
Foregrounding of human stories
The Ravine, as related to us by Professor Lower, is a very human story. It will enable teachers to have their students look at those who we see and don’t see in the photograph in a more contextualised manner. First, there is the ensemble of perpetrators. The fact that the genocidaires were German customs guards and local Ukrainian collaborators (one only a teenager) is revealing. Similarly, the unseen role of the photographer, Skrovina, and an understanding of his role not only in taking the photograph but in using it as a form of resistance against the Nazis is instructive. Most important, is the humanity that The Ravine sheds on the identities of the victims in the photograph. The contextual details that Professor Lower was able to ascertain and the discovery of the likely identities of Khiva Vaselyuk, her nephew Boris and son Roman adds a further dimension to students’ understanding of and connection with the photograph.
Professor Lower’s presentation and her answers to questions posed afterwards was superb. Her book is a tour de force that provides teachers with the opportunity to add new, challenging and very valuable dimensions to their teaching of the Holocaust.
To learn more about Professor Wendy Lower’s ‘The Ravine: A family, a photograph, a Holocaust massacre revealed’ please take a look at a recording of the online session here:
