We have mostly become immune to harrowing photos of mass murder. With repetition, the horror is rendered somehow mundane. Wendy Lower in The Ravine: A Family, a Photograph, a Holocaust Massacre Revealed, sets out to contextualize a photograph of Jewish woman being killed by German border police and Ukrainian militia. The photo catches the moment the woman is shot; her head is haloed by smoke, her two children, one not completely visible, the other holding her hand.
Lower sets out to put the photo in the context of the war,
the Ukraine, the Jewish community where this mass murder occurred, and even the
people in the photo. She finds the identity of some of the shooters. She valiantly attempts
to identify the victims and perhaps she does.
This humanizes mass-murder by treating the photo as an piece
of evidence of a crime – and trying to piece together the circumstances of this
murder from every available source.
I hope Lower and others set out do this with other holocaust
photos – both well-known and lesser known examples.
This is a fruitful area of study.
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