"The Ravine" Book Talk with Wendy Lower and Paul Salmons

In 2009, Dr. Wendy Lower, the acclaimed author of Hitler’s Furies and chair of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Academic Council, was shown a photograph just brought to the Museum. The image—a rare “action shot” documenting the horrific final moment of a family’s murder—drove her to conduct years of forensic and archival detective work in Ukraine, Germany, Slovakia, Israel, and the United States, recovering new layers of detail about the Nazis’ open-air massacres in eastern Europe and the role of the family unit in Nazi ideology. 

In her new book The Ravine: A Family, a Photograph, a Holocaust Massacre Revealed, Lower explores the exceptional image and the new understandings it has unlocked about the Holocaust. Join Lower for a discussion about the book and her research with Paul Salmons, a Holocaust education specialist, curator of “Auschwitz. Not long ago. Not far away,” chief curator of “Seeing Auschwitz,” and consultant to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.