The Ravine is the true story of a photograph showing the murder of a Jewish family by Nazis collaborators during World War II. The author, Wendy Lower, discovers as much as she can about the photo and the people in it. The image is shown in the book and described in detail. There is a massive trigger warning for murder, anti-Semitism, war time atrocities, and everything else associated with the Nazis. It's not for the faint of heart and I would recommend you take your time with it if you want to read it.
This book is hard to review, if I'm being honest. It's not something I can recommend for everyone, not even if you enjoy history or learning about what happened during WWII. It's a tough read, as it should be, but it is fascinating to see how this one image can mean so much. Wendy Lower goes into detail about how studying the Holocaust isn't just about a historian learning something new, but almost like forensic detective work.
There is plenty of history of the Holocaust; from how it started to how it got really going. There is also an interesting history of the city where the murders in the photo took place, Miropol in the Ukraine. It covers the Jewish history as well as the non-Jewish history of the city. There is also a biography of the man who took the photo, how it managed to save it, and what happened to him afterwards.
Wendy Lower also has a timeline of what happened the day before and the day of the mass murder. She interviewed people who are still alive from that time and even has a video of a survivor of the day. Because the government in the Ukraine doesn't want to acknowledge anything that regular people did during the war, the names of those interviewed were protected.
The only sad thing is that Wendy Lower was unable to definitively say who the people in the photograph were, but she has a good idea of who they might have been.
ARC was provided by the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.
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