The raw horror you are seeing in the photograph above — if you can bear to look — is the very last moment on earth of a Jewish family, teetering on the edge of a death pit as Nazi executioners with rifles fire from behind at point-blank range.
Gun smoke billowing round her head, the mother in a polka-dot dress clasps the hand of a stumbling, barefoot boy. She stands surprisingly upright rather than slumping to her knees.
This is because — though it is difficult to spot — she is clutching in her lap another child, seemingly a little girl with a scarf round her head.
All three are about to be exterminated, put down as Untermenschen — literally, subhumans — whose lives have no value.
A split second later, we can surmise, the back of the woman’s skull explodes, shattered by a bullet, and she slumps down dead into the mass grave below with the two little ones, their bodies adding to the hundreds of her Jewish friends and neighbours already dispatched. Cartridge casings on the ground show she is not the first to die.
But no bullet is wasted on the children — that was the SS rule. They die quickly from the fall or slowly, buried alive, crushed and suffocated by the weight of corpses thrown on top of them.
Here is the Holocaust, close up and personal, as we have rarely seen it before. The despicable murder of millions takes on a powerful, more intimate dimension.
The picture shocked even experienced and expert Holocaust historian Professor Wendy Lower when she first saw it.
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