- In 2009, an acclaimed historian of the Holocaust was shown a picture of one family's execution by Ukrainian allies of the Nazis some 70 years earlier.

In the years that followed, her research couldn't identify the victims, but it did name their killers and lays bare the horror of the Holocaust on an intimate level.

She's Dr. Wendy Lower, this week on "Story in The Public Square."

(bright music) Hello and welcome to the "Story in the Public Square," where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from the Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

Joining me from his home in Rhode Island is my friend and cohost G. Wayne Miller of "The Providence Journal."

Each week, we talk about big issues with great guests, authors, journalists, scholars and more to make sense of the stories that shape public life in the United States today.

This week, we're joined by an acclaimed historian of the Holocaust.

Dr. Wendy Lower holds the John K. Roth chair at Claremont McKenna college in Claremont, California, and is the author of a powerful new book, "The Ravine, A Family, A Photograph, A Holocaust Massacre Revealed."

Wendy, thank you so much for being with us.

- [Wendy] Thank you for having me today.

- Your scholarship is tremendously powerful and shines some light into some of the darkest history of humanity.

I'm curious though, what drew you to scholarship of the Holocaust?

- I don't have a personal connection to the history as far as any kind of family connection.

I'm not the descendant of victims or perpetrators or witnesses.

I had a relative who fought in the war, an uncle who was a pilot.

But this history speaks to me in a different way, not in that kind of a personal family way of confrontation, but in a more academic, but even a kind of a universal understanding of this problem of genocide, as not strictly one of an ethnic group or ethnic legacy, but one that we all have to encounter and grapple with and hopefully try to prevent.

- Do you find, in teaching this to students, how receptive are they to both the overall history, but even just their level of awareness before they come into your class?

- Thank you, that's such a great question 'cause that's one of the issues that's underlying "The Ravine" and that is that students as, with the passage of time and the passing of survivors and eye witnesses, we have to rely more and more on the source material from this history and study it more closely and interrogate it more seriously because we don't have those folks to talk to to kind of fill in the gaps or open up new lines of inquiry.

We're really gonna be relying more and more on kind of the physical remains of that history of the documentation and of these mass murder sites.

That's still really proliferate, you know, have proliferated in the second world war that are all over places like Ukraine, which is, geographically, the focus of the book.

So, there's a lot more educating that needs to happen as we move farther away from this time period and students who come into the classroom, I observed, think they know the history when they see an image that's prevalent on the internet, for instance, like iconic images of the entry gates of Auschwitz-Birkenau or deportations or Jews in ghettos, certain things that are commonly displayed in museums with often sometimes not very detailed captions or captions at all.

And their sense of history becomes a kind of visual recall without the critical academic inquiry that is important for understanding the history, understanding what happened.

- So, do you find this as also true of students regarding other genocides, I'm thinking of native Americans in this hemisphere, particularly in the United States.

I'm also thinking of the history of the treatment of Black people years ago and really continuing in some sense until today.

Do you find that that also is something that is eyeopening for young kids today?

- Absolutely, I mean, two things you raise in posing that question, firstly, there is a long history of genocide going back to ancient times, which predated the invention of the handheld camera, which is why we have this photograph at the center of my book that I can study.

Our witness was able to take those pictures of the kind of the ultimate act of evil of the murder of that Jewish family.

So, for other cases of genocide, we don't have that visual record.

We have some murals and paintings, say from Central American cases, but we don't have that wealth of material that would then draw more attention to that case and more inquiry and understanding of it.

So, we have to remember that the lack of that material doesn't mean that that history didn't happen.

Because we live in such a visual age, we tend to associate kind of reality with that visual evidence.

And, you know, secondly, the importance of the visual in this case is not only as evidence, but also in shaping our memory or our perceptions of what happened.

When we find a photo like the one that is in "The Ravine," much like if one were to uncover, and I pose this question in the beginning of the book, an image of murder, a lynching.

We have an incredibly pretty sizeable record of photos on lynching and several books have been written about that.

And I would encourage more people to look into that and to delve into all of the people portrayed in those images, those witnesses.

There are often very disturbing showing dead Black men mostly who were hanged and crowds of people even kind of gleefully smiling and gesturing around them and "Who are those people," in that photograph that participated in that public event of murder.

So, at the beginning of the book, I say when you find something like this, documentation of murder, historical documentation of a crime, isn't one compelled to look more deeply into that and to try to in some ways kind of solve that crime or at least understand that event?

- So, I recall with great clarity reading a few weeks ago a review of "The Ravine" in "The New York Times" and it was a glowing review as well should have been.

It was Sunday, I was sitting in my living room couch thumbing through as I always do.

I usually start with the best sellers 'cause I have an interest in that.

But then I started leafing through it and when I saw that photograph, I was stunned and I have remained haunted by it.

And so, this might be a good time for you to describe that photo in some detail, particularly for those in our audience who are just listening and not watching this show.

- Absolutely.

I've been working in this field for decades.

My first trip to Ukraine, which I started to conduct field research was the summer of 1992.

I worked in the Holocaust Museum for many years and surrounded by a lot of this visual evidence.

And one of the scholars of Atrocity Photography, probably the most famous is Susan Sontag, who argued that one over time can become desensitized or nearer to these kinds of images.

And she backed off on that argument in her later work because the reality is that we don't.

We don't become a nerd, we don't become desensitized.

A photo like this still has the power to stop us in our tracks and force us to look more closely.

That's really what I think is important argument in the book.

In the image we see, for those of you who are listening and who can't see it, a family, a Jewish family, standing woman kind of standing in a perpendicular position, kind of bending over, right at the center of the photograph, holding the little boy's hand.

He's probably like three or five years old, he's barefoot, he's kneeling.

There is, as I looked at this more closely with the advantage of digital technology, I could zoom in and out, ultimately, I also identified another child on the lap of the woman kind of slipping from her knees.

And they are at the precipice at the edge of a large pit that looks like a ravine and they are being shot.

And it is a kind of an action shot, the act of murder.

The smoke is billowing and hallowing above their heads.

The killers are very close to them, a few feet.

It looks like one of the killers, the two Germans in their official uniforms and caps with shiny visors, one seems to even have his hand placed on the woman's back.

Maybe he's going to actually push her into the ravine.

And one of the collaborators are two Ukrainians in woolen coats, red army repurposed coats with armbands holding rifles, doing the shooting.

They're grimacing, their expression and their posture is showing us that they're actually pulling the trigger and responding to that blast.

In the foreground, we see shoes, empty shoes that belong to a man, probably a male Jewish victim, perhaps the father or an uncle, a family member who was killed shortly before them.

His coat is lying on the ground, kind of crumpled and empty.

There are papers strewn about, there's bullet casings, what I call the litter of mass murder, also strewn there.

And we can also see a man in a cap in the background, an onlooker, an eye witness, and it's happening in broad daylight.

The light is passing through the trees in the background.

- It's incredible.

And I will say, I have visited Dachau and that of course is a very sobering experience, but this photograph has just that additional quality that connects emotionally in a very dark level.

So, you set off to find out who the people were in the photograph.

Tell us about that search.

- Absolutely, initially when I saw this, when it was brought to my attention in 2009, my first inclination was to pursue the killers.

I was actually working on a case against a high ranking SS man in Frankfurt and I had flown back to Washington from Germany.

I was living in Germany doing more research and writing and interviewing perpetrators and witnesses.

And I was in the archives and these Czech journalists came in from Prague with this photograph they had found in the archive in Prague and wanted to know more about it.

And it was just by chance that I was there and I have done a lot of work on Ukraine.

And they knew that the photograph had been taken in Ukraine.

There was information on the photograph.

It was taken October 13th, 1941, in this town, Miropol, by a Slovakian photographer who was a guard, member of a guard unit.

So, this came to my attention and set me on this journey of inquiry.

And I started with the killers because at the time I thought, well, obviously these victims cannot be rescued.

I can try to restore their dignity through their identity and try to tell their stories.

This is not how they wanted to be photographed at the final moments of their lives.

So, it was very important for me to pursue their stories.

But as far as the sense of justice, I started with the killers because I realized that some of these killers had not been apprehended and could still be at large.

And so, that's really where I began, the inquiry.

And I ultimately was not able to identify the victims by name.

That was a really frustrating endeavor.

It took years and it just made me realize that all the work that we've done in the memorial culture and in genocide studies, that there is this moment of where we can't find out everything we want to find out about the victims, that it's not...

The genocide heirs in some ways, they don't win, but they are able to suppress that because they kill these victims without any documentation, leaving any names behind.

They're so thorough that there were no family members to come forward to register them as missing.

They are kind of the missing missing as I call them in one chapter.

I was able to identify the perpetrators actually and that's another story in the book.

- Well, we wanna talk a little bit about that story, but let me ask though, how did that photograph come to be?

I think that we've all seen other imagery from the Holocaust of other executions, but I've always sort of marveled, did they know they were taking a photograph of a crime or was this... Well, let me just ask you, how did this photograph come to be?

- Well, the photographer, the Slovakian guard, was a hobby photographer.

The camera, the handheld camera, was patented, the Leica, the Zeiss Ikon, he had his Zeiss Ikon, it was patent in the 1920s and then it hit the consumer market in the 1930s.

And so, there is the widespread consumption of the camera and this culture that's emerging in the 1930s.

And that is gonna be very important for the history of the Holocaust and the evidence that we have.

So, here we have this Slovakian and this was an incredible discovery in the book.

I find anyone who could take a picture, such a stable image, it's in such a close proximity to the killing and someone in uniform was one of the collaborators.

We can see the stark depiction here of collaboration of the Germans and the Ukrainians shoulder to shoulder.

They don't speak the same language, they have a shared anti-Semitism.

They kind of know what they're gonna do and they're going to share in this horrific act of murder.

The collaborator, the Slovakian, right?

It turns out that he wasn't a collaborator in that sense.

He heard the sounds of the gunfire and the screams and the commotion and his commander said to him, his name is Lubomir Skrovina, the photographer, "Go check it out.'

And he went and he grabbed his camera because he was the company scribe and he was documenting what was happening.

But he had already seen pogroms occurring in Ukraine as his unit moved west, eastward, sorry, from Poland in towards Russia.

He knew that the Holocaust as we know today was part of this Nazi campaign.

And he found it absolutely abhorrent.

He was writing letters to his wife, just disgusted by it all, talking about his hair turning gray and the blackness kind of seeping in his brain.

So, he was incredibly traumatized and distressed by what he was seeing.

So, he grabbed his camera, not to humiliate the victims, but to document what was happening as an act of resistance.

So, he took these pictures, he hid them, brought them back to his hometown in Banská Bystrica, which was a center of resistance in Slovakia during the second world war and share these images with a Jewish doctor, Jewish leaders who were in Bratislava and said this is what's going to happen to you if you answer the call to be deported or show up at the train station.

This is what's going on in the east.

And he ended up hiding some Jewish Slovakian Jews into the attic of his house.

And one of them actually, the doctor actually delivered his son, Lubomir Jr., in their home in 1943.

- [Jim] My goodness.

- That's an incredible story.

Was he alive when you found this photograph?

Did you get to interview him?

Did you interview family members?

How did you put that story together?

It's just extraordinary that you were able to do it, however you did it.

- Yeah, I mean, Lubomir, he died, úkrovina died in 2005.

So unfortunately, I wasn't able to meet him.

He was born in 1916 and I always remind my students, he's born in 1916.

He's a young man, you know, like college age and thrust into this campaign.

Identified himself as completely apolitical, hated to put on a uniform.

So, it's also a good reminder as far as just what young men are forced to in war, what they're forced to experience and witness and that not all men in uniform who go to war are pro-war in that way or pro-genocide for that matter.

So, what happened was with that information of his, having his name, of course I started to go through Facebook.

I went to Prague, I was trying to find him.

I ultimately was able to find his son, Lubomir Jr..

I had the photographer's home address in Banská Bystrica and they still had that home and they still had his radio shop, he was a technician.

And so, I was able to go and meet his son and meet his daughter.

And then they shared more materials with me.

They shared the letters that he had written to his wife and how much his wife participated with him, they were together, they were in the resistance movement.

- So Wendy, what can you tell us about the men who pulled the triggers?

- Okay, well, that was not what I expected either.

First of all, the men, the German men in the photograph, I started to study their uniforms very closely.

And while the German documentation had put so-called Einsatzgruppen, some of these expeditionary kind of killing forces in that area, they had put the order police.

In perpetrator studies, in the world of Holocaust history, we tend to focus on the main units under Himmler and under the army, these militarized units that participated in the mass murder.

In one act, we call the Holocaust by bullets outside the camp system.

This is representative of more than a million, maybe as many as 2 million Jews, who were gunned down near their hometowns, not gassed in Auschwitz-Birkenau and Treblinka and Sobibor and those centers.

So, this is a depiction of that.

Once, I had to go into these military records because it was not happening in the camp system.

So, I'm not looking at records of Auschwitz-Birkenau, I'm looking at actual security units in a military campaign.

I noticed that the units that were located there on record, their uniforms, I had to match their uniforms to the uniforms in the photo, they weren't matching up.

The insignia were different.

The markings on the cuffs, the markings on the sleeves.

And so, I finally determined after close analysis that these guys were customs units.

And my photographer actually testified at one point, he said these German killers were finance guards, finance guards, what is that?

So, these guys were supposed to be checking packages at the local train station or in the post office and this is an all volunteer killing squad because the two Ukrainians stayed behind when the red army evacuated and volunteered to be part of the militia.

For them, it was about opportunism, social mobility, access to plunder and goods and anti-Semitism.

So, these were kind of some of the local Ukrainian, some of them were thugs, they were pretty notorious in their communities.

They were prosecuted after the war for their sadism.

And then there were these German kind of customs guards who were as cruel and as sadistic.

Don't be fooled just because they're in uniform that they're somehow more civilized because the two men here, Kuska and Vogt, those are their names, the documentation that I uncovered about them was pretty startling as far as their eagerness to participate in this and going back to the barracks and reenacting what they had done and how they had dulled out shots to the back of the neck to these Jewish victims.

- And this all took place in or near Miropol, am I pronouncing that correctly?

I looked that up online and it doesn't appear to be very large, at least population-wise, today.

But back then, it was I guess, sort of a thriving community and what was so horrifying about what you're just describing is these people knew many of their victims, maybe not intimately in the sense of having them over for dinner, but they knew them through their dentist's office, they knew them as shopkeepers.

They were members of the community, they were fellow members of this community.

Can you even possibly explain how such evil can come from such circumstances where you know, at least to some degree, the people that you're killing and you're killing them only because they are Jewish?

- This is something that my colleague, Jan Gross, was manifested in his study called "Neighbors" about a community called Jedwabne in Poland in which the Polish part of the town, I mean, just obliterated murdered in the most vicious way, putting them in barns and burning them and pitchforks, I mean, just horrific.

So, half of the population of Poles murdering the other half of the population roughly of Jews.

And that book came out in 2000.

So, we've been really puzzled by, there's no easy answer to this reality.

It's dumbfounding to think of the intimacy of that violence of the communities living together and that can turn in that radical way whereby another part of your community is just considered unworthy of life, of living.

And then, it's carried out by that cross cut of society, again, not in uniform, but by the local mayor, the local teachers, the local priests, and this is a kind of collective violence carried out in more of a social historical way.

And the same thing happened in Miropol.

And this is an old town, part of the Pale of Settlement in Ukraine which was established by Catherine the Great in the 18th century where we had high concentrations of Jews.

These are the shtetls that are depicted in a lot of the stories like "Fiddler On The Roof."

And Miropol also is part of that, is the heartland of this Jewish life in the Pale of Settlement and was depicted in Yiddish literature by Anski, a playwright and ethnographer.

The play, "The Dybbuk" was set in the town of Miropol.

Was a thriving, religious and secular community of about 4,000 Jews and had been reduced to about 1200 by the time the Nazis arrived and it was completely wiped out.

I know of one survivor from these massacres and she died in 2015 and I really had to rely a lot on her testimony as far as what happened.

She actually crawled out of the pit.

- Wendy, you know, we've got about three and a half minutes left here and I think we could talk to you for three more days, but we'd be remiss if we didn't talk about your 2013 book, "Hitler's Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields."

One of the things that strikes me from your scholarship is the ordinary every day normal, I'm using air quotes, participants in these atrocities.

Can you tell us, tell the audience a little bit about the role that women played in the Holocaust as perpetrators?

- Sure.

You're getting at an issue that is really one of the main themes in Holocaust and genocide studies, the assumption that, because of the scale of killing in the 20th century including the Holocaust, one just assumes that this is a modern chapter in history.

If you have the mechanisms of the modern state and all of its resources, whether it's train cars or guns and gas chemicals, then genocide is a modern phenomenon.

And in fact, it's not.

There's something fundamental about it in the way that we have evolved and the way that we treat one another and the very various ideologies that we attach ourselves to and become so passionate about that can turn extremely violent.

And that means that it happens outside of the kind of halls of government and of the ministries.

That means that ordinary men and women and even children and societies participate in this and that the scale of destruction is possible as much because we have those modern means, as well because we have the participation of people like the women in "Hitler's Furies" that act independently because they can be as anti-Semitic and as nationalistic or, in a pre-modern case, be as Catholic or as Protestant, whatever the idea is, they can also adopt it and act out on it in the most violent way, they have that capacity.

They don't typically or historically lead or populate kind of the community of perpetrators, but they're really necessary for it because the men often commit these crimes to safeguard their women and children or in the name of their women and children.

So, there's a dynamic between the men and women that escalates this and that aggravates it as far as how they legitimize and how they carry it out.

And in "Hitler's Furies," there are several cases of women acting with men as like partners in crime, but they're socialized in the same way as the men.

And so, that capability is there and that's something I wanted to put on record and also be aware of as we look into the future and think about women in our leadership, in government and just in all walks of life, in medicine.

All of the types of perpetrators that Holocaust studies has brought out in a nuanced way, whether they're technocrats or they're doctors or they're SS men or commandants, we have female versions of all of them, maybe not as many, but they're all there.

- This is a remarkable conversation.

And unfortunately, we're just out of time.

I hope that you'll come back and join us again.

She's Dr. Wendy Lower.

The book is "The Ravine," it's remarkable.

That's all the time we have this week, but if you wanna know more about "Story In The Public Square," you can find us on Facebook and Twitter or visit Pellcenter.org where you can always catch up on previous episodes.

For G. Wayne Miller, I'm Jim Ludes asking you to join us next time for more "Story In The Public Square."

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