Andrew Shi

On Monday night, students, faculty and community members gathered in Kresge Auditorium to hear Wendy Lower, professor of history at Claremont McKenna College, speak on her most recent book, “The Ravine: A Family, a Photograph, a Holocaust Massacre Revealed,” which won the National Jewish Book Award in 2022. The talk, the latest installment in the annual Holocaust Education Lecture Series sponsored by the Gabry Family Fund, covered the research process behind Lower’s book.

Lower began her talk by noting the importance of a lecture series dedicated to Holocaust studies.

“[As] time passes and memory fades, we need to keep studying this history, learning from it, because there’s still so much to be learned,” Lower said.

Lower then contextualized the Holocaust photographs she has encountered in her work at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum as well as those she has shown in her classroom.

“Personal photographs have been taken by perpetrators, mostly, but also victims under extreme circumstances that were critical to documenting the history as well as remembering it and imagining it,” Lower said. “What are these photographs? What do they mean? How do they kind of move across time? They have a certain agency to them … and in some cases, when it’s the only object we have from an entire community…, aren’t we kind of compelled to look at that more closely?”

Lower described the ethical frameworks behind atrocity photography.

“Is there a numbing effect? How does it affect us psychologically over time? Should we be looking at these photographs, especially if they’re taken by perpetrators? Is it perpetuating the gaze of that perpetrator who’s often taking a photo of a victim shortly before the murder?” Lower said. “[This is] obviously not a consensual act on the part of the victims, but another form of humiliation.”

Lower displayed several images from the Holocaust, including photos of the Buchenwald concentration camp, the gates of Auschwitz II-Birkenau, Anne Frank and the Warsaw ghetto. She then analyzed the photo at the center of her book, which documents a Nazi massacre of Jews near a ravine in Miropol, Ukraine.

“The town had a population of about 2,000 Jews, and the majority who were killed on this day were women and children. But the last picture that the photographer took was actually looking in the grave,” Lower said.

Lower compared the photographs to collections of objects from Holocaust survivors that have been turned into memorials or museum exhibits.

“Unlike those haunting but inert objects we see today enshrined behind glass at Birkenau or bronze as a memorial alongside the Danube in Budapest, one photograph can pass across time and space from its creator to family members, prosecutors, curators, historians and the viewing public.… These images can shock and repel and seem impossible, but the afterlife of the photograph can become an ongoing story with twists and turns, like testimony given in words,” Lower said.

Attendee Elan Cohen ’28 emphasized the importance of discussions around the Holocaust.

“I think it’s more important than ever to learn about the specific stories that happened in the Holocaust … so people won’t forget,” Cohen said.