Resister · 1919-2021
Faye Schulman
She was made to develop the photographs of her town's murder, and in the dark she pulled a second print and kept it.
A photographer from Lenin
Faye Schulman was born Faygel Lazebnik in 1919 in Lenin, a shtetl in the Pinsk region on the edge of the Pripyat Marshes. In her early teens she went to work in the photography studio of her older brother Moishe, and by sixteen she had all but taken it over. She learned the whole craft, including how an image waits invisibly in the chemistry until it is brought up in the dark.
14 August 1942
German forces occupied the region in the summer of 1941. On 14 August 1942 the Jewish community of Lenin was destroyed in a single day, including Faye's parents, sisters and younger brother. She was spared because she was the town's photographer. The Germans handed her their exposed film and ordered her to develop it. In the darkroom she secretly printed a second copy and hid it against her body.
Into the marshes
About a month later she escaped into the marshes and joined the Molotava Brigade, a Soviet partisan unit. She was twenty-two. Although she had no training, she served as a nurse beside the brigade's medical officer, Dr. Ivan Vasilewich, learned to fire a rifle and went on raids. On a raid toward the ruined town of Lenin, she recovered her camera equipment.
A darkroom under a blanket
In the forest there was no darkroom and no running water. She melted snow for water, used a tin cup as a developing tray and worked under a wool blanket at night. Over two years she made more than a hundred photographs of the brigade: fighters, a makeshift field hospital, her commander Misha Gerasimov, a nine-year-old girl named Raika whom she sheltered, and herself.
After the war
After liberation in the summer of 1944, Faye married the fellow partisan Morris Schulman in the Landsberg displaced persons camp. The family emigrated to Toronto in 1948 and she worked in a dress factory while hand-tinting photographs and painting. She recorded her testimony in 1981, published A Partisan's Memoir: Woman of the Holocaust in 1995 and appeared in the documentary Daring to Resist in 1999. Her photographs are now held by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Yad Vashem and the Belarusian State Museum. She died in Toronto on 24 April 2021, aged 101.
Further reading
- Schulman, Faye. A Partisan's Memoir: Woman of the Holocaust. Second Story Press, 1995.
- Tec, Nechama. Resilience and Courage: Women, Men, and the Holocaust. Yale University Press, 2003.
- Levine, Allan. Fugitives of the Forest. Stoddart, 1998.
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Faye Schulman photograph collection and oral history.
In the book
Faye Schulman is one of the 36 women whose documented stories are told in Women Without Fear, a book and documentary project of The Legacy Project. The book is being prepared for publication. You can read one full sample chapter now, on Róża Robota.