Polish partisan kept historic photos of Jewish resistance during Holocaust
Faye Schulman, who has died aged 101, was a partisan resistance fighter in the forests of Eastern Europe during World War II, sabotaging Nazis, tending to wounded comrades and foraging for food.
Throughout, she was armed with two weapons. One was her rifle, the other a PhotoPorst Nurnberg camera, which would serve in battles to come, against forgetting.
Schulman – then Faigel Lazebnik – joined a brigade of Soviet partisans in 1942 after the Nazis murdered 1850 inhabitants of the Jewish ghetto in her town in eastern Poland. At 22, she found herself with a tailor, a shoemaker, a carpenter, a blacksmith and a printer, among few other survivors, all spared because they practised a useful trade. Photography, which she had learned as an apprentice to an older brother, became her salvation.
Once ensconced with the partisans, she worked by day as a nurse. By night, she would drape herself in blankets to block out the moonlight, creating an open-air darkroom where she developed her photographs chronicling their life.
Schulman was not the only partisan photographer during World War II, but she amassed a collection – reproduced in her book A Partisan’s Memoir – that became ‘‘extremely important in documenting the history of the resistance’’, said Michael Berkowitz, a professor of modern Jewish history at University College London.
Her photographs reveal the primitive surgeries conducted on operating tables fashioned from tree limbs, the makeshift burial of fighters killed in action, the joyful reunion of friends who had been dispersed amid the chaos of war and their youthful camaraderie in a cherished cause.
Faigel Lazebnik was born to an Orthodox Jewish family in Lenin, a shtetl on what was then the Polish border with the Soviet Union. (The town was not named for the communist revolutionary, but rather for a woman named Lena, daughter of a local aristocrat.)
Schulman’s father was the administrator at the synagogue, and her mother was a cook. Both parents and four of her six siblings would perish in the Holocaust.
The Germans occupied eastern Poland in 1941, and by May 1942 the Jews of Lenin were placed in a ghetto. On August 14, 1942, the Nazis liquidated the ghetto, marching all but roughly two dozen of its residents to trenches where they were shot. Schulman and the others were held in the synagogue.
‘‘I heard the Nazis open fire with their machineguns,’’ she wrote in her 1995 memoir. ‘‘The trenches were far away, but I heard the cries of my people, cries that still echo in my ears. I am still filled with indescribable sorrow when I think of how they came to their end. I flinch even today whenever I hear the roar of a crowd at an outdoor sports arena, sounds that reverberate.’’
The Nazis put Schulman to work photographing German officials and developing prints they deemed necessary for record-keeping. Among the photographs she processed was one depicting a trench full of corpses, including those of her family members. She clandestinely made a second copy for herself, to document the atrocity.
She escaped into the surrounding forests and – despite a fear of weapons and blood – joined a partisan brigade. ‘‘This was the only way I could fight back and avenge my family,’’ she said.
She was one of the few Jews in the group, which consisted mainly of escaped Soviet prisoners of war, and said she concealed her Jewish identity because of pervasive antisemitism. She was also the only woman in her detachment. The group accepted her, she said, because they needed medics and because they hoped she might have gleaned some medical knowledge from her brother-in-law, a doctor.
Often washing and reusing bandages, she helped repair gunshot and other wounds, perform surgeries with vodka as anaesthetic, and treat conditions such as gangrene and typhoid fever. She also took photographs, burying her camera and developing solution for safekeeping during partisan forays.
She would sometimes direct another partisan to release the camera’s shutter, allowing her to appear in her own images. They reveal her caring for the sick or wounded, her medical inexperience belied by her seriousness of purpose.
In December 1944, soon after Soviet troops liberated her territory, she married Morris Schulman, a fellow partisan. She worked for a period as a photographer in Pinsk, in what is now Belarus, before the couple decided to seek entry into Palestine. They spent several years in a displaced persons camp in Germany and, when she gave birth to a daughter, they decided to migrate to the relative stability of Canada, where she remained until her death.
Morris Schulman died in 1992. Survivors include their two children, six grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren.
Until the end of her life, Schulman kept her wartime camera. ‘‘I would never like to part [with it] as long as I live,’’ she said, remarking that the camera had ‘‘seen everything’’. –