Making the Past Present

What can we learn from a photograph? The answer, Wendy Lower argues in The Ravine: A Family, A Photograph, A Holocaust Massacre Revealed, is a great deal. Presented with a photograph taken during a mass killing of Jews in Ukraine during the Holocaust, Lower set out to learn everything she could about the massacre (in a forest outside the town of Miropol), the victims (a woman and two children) pictured in the photograph, the killers (Germans and Ukrainian collaborators), and the photographer (a Slovakian guard). What she discovered is an amazing amount of information, revealing the lesser-known, but extremely significant, history behind the photograph: the history of the Holocaust by bullets.

The Holocaust by bullets refers to the mass shootings carried out by German forces (typically SS and police units) and their local collaborators in the occupied Soviet Union, Poland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. These killings began in the summer of 1941, as German forces advanced into the Soviet Union during Operation Barbarossa, and a wave of killing continued through the fall of 1941. Organized by special German killing squads (Einsatzgruppen), the Holocaust by bullets was perpetrated by the SS, Wehrmacht (German army) troops, order police units, other German forces, and local collaborators. More than 1.5 million and perhaps as many as 2 million Jews were murdered in the Soviet Union in mass shootings, the majority in Ukraine. Indeed, by current estimates (based on present-day borders), one in every four Jewish victims of the Holocaust was murdered in Ukraine.

For most people, the Holocaust is characterized by the industrialized mass murder of Jews at killing centers in German-occupied Poland, particularly Auschwitz-Birkenau. However, the mass shootings of the Holocaust by bullets were a very different kind of mass murder: intimate, up-close killings, often carried out in broad daylight. Victims were taken to forests and ravines on the outskirts of the villages, towns, and cities where they lived, and killed by German forces who were aided by local collaborators, often the neighbors of the victims.

The massacre-in-progress depicted in the photograph at the center of Lower’s investigation took place on the outskirts of the town of Miropol in central Ukraine on October 13, 1941. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, new records and witness testimonies have become available, greatly expanding historians’ knowledge of the Holocaust by bullets, although records remain sketchy, especially in smaller towns like Miropol. In the absence of Nazi records, Lower uses testimonies of Germans, Slovakians, and Ukrainians in the area at the time, and the testimony of the one known Jewish survivor to reconstruct the events that took place in Miropol on October 13, the day the photograph was taken. By comparing these testimonies with evidence from the photograph and the site of the killing itself, Lower is able to construct, as Christopher Browning put it, “a history that otherwise for lack of evidence, would not exist” (43).

Lower also uses a variety of sources, including testimonies from victims, perpetrators, and witnesses, the photograph, and German and Soviet records, to identify the killers in the photograph, as well as the man who took it. Her examination of the photograph revealed four killers pictured: two Germans and two Ukrainian collaborators. After studying the Germans’ uniforms, together with the existing German records (mainly a brief postwar investigation), Lower identified the German killers not as members of the SS, Wehrmacht, or Order Police, but as German customs guards stationed in the area, who volunteered to carry out the killing when approached by SS officers. The two Ukrainian killers, as well as others not pictured in the photograph but named in a Soviet investigation from the 1980s, were revealed to be men from Miropol, the neighbors of the Jewish victims whom they killed.

The photographer, a Slovakian guard stationed in the area who was ordered to investigate when his commander heard gunshots the morning of the massacre, was a complex figure. As a Slovakian security guard, attached to the German army, he was technically a collaborator (Slovakia was a client state of Nazi Germany during World War II), but he took the photograph as a personal act of resistance, seeking to document the atrocities that he witnessed on the Eastern Front. In fact, he would send film (though not of the Miropol massacre), back to his wife in Slovakia, who would develop the photographs and pass them along to the resistance. Returning from the Eastern Front in December 1941, the photographer joined the Slovakian resistance movement. In 1943, he was questioned by Slovakian officials, who had been tipped off that he possessed photographs of a massacre in the Soviet Union; outsmarting the officials, he avoided prosecution. After the war, he was questioned again, this time by Czechoslovakian security service officials (serving the postwar communist government), who seized his photographs and negatives. That investigation, too, was eventually dropped, but the Miropol photograph made its way into the archives of the Security Services in Prague, where it remained.

During her investigation, Lower also interviewed Ukrainians who had witnessed the Miropol massacre as children and young adults, including teenage girls who were forced to dig the mass grave. The Soviet investigation of the massacre in the 1980s also drew on witness testimony, as some people revealed that they had heard the gunfire from town or the neighboring fields, while others described secretly watching the killing from the forest.

Despite all that Lower learned about the Miropol massacre during her research, she could not answer the initial question that motivated her to undertake the investigation: who were the victims, the woman with two children, in the photograph? Using victim lists compiled during two postwar Soviet investigations, in 1944-1945 and in the 1980s, and comparing the ages of victims to the people in the photograph, Lower was able to guess who the woman with the children might have been. However, none of the Ukrainian witnesses she interviewed could definitively identify the woman, and the sole Jewish survivor of the massacre – the person who could best identify the woman in the photograph – died before Lower could interview her. The woman and the children thus remain, in Lower’s words, among the “missing missing”: Holocaust victims who are twice missing because they are dead and unidentified. Around half of the victims of the Miropol massacre remain unidentified, as no family members survived the Holocaust to report them missing. Similarly, half of the victims murdered in the Babi Yar massacre, one of the single largest mass shootings of the Holocaust (carried out on the outskirts of Kyiv in September 1941), remain unidentified.

How does the Miropol massacre fit into the larger chronology of the Holocaust? The Holocaust by bullets, of which the Miropol massacre was a part, is often described as the first phase of the Holocaust, a result of the initial radicalization of Nazi anti-Jewish policy that led to mass murder. That radicalization, and the Nazis’ seemingly-unending military success in the Soviet Union, prompted Hitler and top Nazi leaders to make two important decisions sometime in the summer or fall of 1941 (due to lack of documentation, no one knows exactly when). First, Hitler decided to kill all European Jews, not just those in the Soviet Union, and, second, Nazi leaders decided to find a new method of killing. Mass shootings were public events, even when the Nazis tried to hide them by killing people in forests and ravines and covering up the mass graves. Local witnesses heard the gunfire, they saw the killings, and they knew where the mass graves were and who the victims had been. Seeking a less public – and more efficient – method of killing, the Nazis began experimenting with killing by gas in the fall and winter of 1941, marking the beginning of the “Final Solution.”

The Holocaust by bullets is thus significant for many reasons: (1) the scale of the killing, with at least 1.5 million Jews killed in the Soviet Union; (2) as a step in the increasing radicalization of Nazi anti-Jewish policy, a bridge between earlier, “territorial,” solutions and the “Final Solution”; and (3) the intimate nature of the violence, as neighbors killed neighbors. Because of the nature of killing (there were very few survivors of mass shootings) and its location (behind the Iron Curtain for many years after the war), the Holocaust by bullets is not as well-known by the general public as other parts of the Holocaust. Books like The Ravine and organizations such as Yahad-in-Unum, which seeks to map every mass shooting site, are bringing this important part of the Holocaust to wider attention. While the “missing missing” may never been identified, this research is ensuring that the story of the Holocaust by bullets will never be forgotten.