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.
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We would like to express our appreciation to the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (Claims Conference) for supporting this public program. Through recovering the assets of the victims of the Holocaust, the Claims Conference enables organizations around the world to provide education about the Shoah and to preserve the memory of those who perished.
Public programming at the Museum of Jewish Heritage – A Living Memorial to the Holocaust is made possible, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council; the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature; a Humanities New York CARES Grant with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the federal CARES Act; and other generous donors.
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