A Lecture with Professor Wendy Lower in honor of Yom HaShoah
Tuesday, April 26th - 7:00 pm
This talk will be on Zoom. Please click here to join.

In 2009, Wendy Lower was shown a photograph just brought to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The documentation of the Holocaust is vast, but there are few known 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. The woman is bending forward, holding the hand of a barefoot boy. Wendy Lower’s detective work—in Ukraine, Germany, Slovakia, Israel, and the United States—recovers layers of detail concerning the open-air massacres in Ukraine. Her search for the identities of the victims, of the killers—and, remarkably, of the photographer who openly took the picture, as a secret act of resistance—are dramatically uncovered. Finally, in the hands of this scholar, a single image unlocks a new understanding of the place of the family unit in the history and aftermath of Nazi genocide.

Wendy Lower, Ph.D. is the John K. Roth Professor of History and George R. Roberts Fellow at Claremont McKenna College where she also directs the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights.  Lower chairs the Academic Committee of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and served as Acting Director of the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies of the USHMM (2016-2018).