Winner 2022 National Jewish Book Award Shortlist 2022 Wingate Literary Prize A single
photograph?an exceptionally rare ?action shot? documenting the horrific final moment of the
murder of a family?drives a riveting process of discovery for a gifted Holocaust scholar In
2009 the acclaimed author of Hitler's Furies was shown a photograph just brought to the United
States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The documentation of the Holocaust is vast but there are
virtually no images of a Jewish family at the actual moment of murder in this case by German
officials and Ukrainian collaborators. A Ukrainian shooter's rifle is inches from a woman's
head obscured in a cloud of smoke. She is bending forward holding the hand of a barefooted
little boy. And?only one of the shocking revelations of Wendy Lower's brilliant ten-year
investigation of this image?the shins of another child slipping from the woman's lap. Wendy
Lower's forensic and archival detective work?in Ukraine Germany Slovakia Israel and the
United States?recovers astonishing layers of detail concerning the open-air massacres in
Ukraine. The identities of mother and children of the killers?and remarkably of the
Slovakian photographer who openly took the image as a secret act of resistance?are
dramatically uncovered. Finally in the hands of this brilliant exceptional scholar a single
image unlocks a new understanding of the place of the family unit in the ideology of Nazi
genocide.
