Faye Schulman (1919-2021)

 

[In my recent post “Latter-Day Esthers & Women Maccabees” (Rick On Theater, 24 April 2021), one if the articles in the compilation mentioned in passing that “a 19-year-old photographer named Faye Schulman joined the partisans, participated in combat missions and performed surgery.”  As it happens, the post date for that article (“The Nazi-Fighting Women of the Jewish Resistance” by Judy Batalion, published in the New York Times on 21 March 2021) was the day Schulman died in Toronto at 101 years of age. 

[Schulman’s obituary, written by Sam Roberts, appeared in the Times on 2 June (the online version was posted on the Times’ website on 28 May).  Upon doing a little cursory research on the ’Net, I’ve decided to read some additional articles on this Nazi-fighter for a supplemental post.  

[Coincidentally, I’m currently working on a post based on my travel journal for a trip to Israel and Egypt.  I’ve just finished the section covering my visit to Yad Vashem, Israel’s official memorial to the victims of the Holocaust in the outskirts of Jerusalem.  A feature of the memorial site is the Pillar of Heroism (Buky Schwartz, sculptor; 1970), honoring Jews who fought the Nazis.  Faye Schulman is one of those.]

Faigel Lazebnik was born in Sosnkowicze in eastern Poland (renamed Lenin after 1939, and now located in western Belarus) on 28 November 1919.  She was known as Faye (and became Schulman when she married Morris Schulman, an accountant she knew from before the war, in 1944).  

Germany invaded Poland from the west on 1 September 1939, triggering the outbreak of World War II in Europe, and almost immediately afterwards, on 17 September, the Soviet Union invaded from the east.  Schulman’s native country was once again partitioned and remained split between the Nazis and the Soviets until 22 June 1941.

That was the start of Operation Barbarossa, the name of the Axis’s invasion of the Soviet Union.  Germany and its allies planned to get to the USSR through Byelorussia (now called Belarus); to get into Byelorussia, the Wehrmacht had to cross soviet-occupied eastern Poland.  The Red Army accommodated the Germans in their initial gambit by collapsing quickly and the Poles exchanged occupying Russians for occupying Germans.

After the Nazis invaded eastern Poland, Schulman’s Orthodox Jewish family was imprisoned in a ghetto along with the rest of the Jews of Lenin (as the town was now known, named for Lena, the daughter of a local aristocrat, not Vladimir Lenin, the communist leader).  On 14 August 1942, German soldiers killed 1,850 Jews, the last living in the town, including much of Schulman’s family: her parents, her sisters, and her younger brother.  26 Jews were reprieved because their skills might be “useful”: shoemakers, tailors, carpenters, blacksmiths, a printer, and a barber.

And one photographer: Faye Schulman.  She was also spared because her photographic skills might come in handy.  Her older brother Moishe had a photography studio in Lenin and Schulman had been his apprentice since she was 10.   Schulman had taken over the studio when she was 16.

Faye Shulman was recruited to take portrait photos of the German officers—and often their new Polish mistresses—and documentational photographs of the Nazis at their activities.  She also processed pictures taken by others, and on one roll, she developed a photograph which showed a mass grave of Jews who’d been executed.  She recognized her own family dead in the trench, and this convinced her, at 22, to join the resistance.  

The young photographer started surreptitiously making copies of the photos she was printing for the Nazis, keeping photographic documentation of their atrocities and war crimes.  The Germans had spared her a firing squad mostly out of their own vanity, but their obsession for record-keeping would help Schulman and others like her win the battle after the war—the battle to remember, to bear witness.

Shulman joined the Moltova Brigade which was composed mostly of Soviet prisoners of war who had escaped German captivity, and worked for them as a nurse from September 1942 to July 1944.  She had learned a little about medicine from her brother-in-law who was a doctor, but her real training came from the unit’s medic who’d been a veterinarian in peacetime.  She once had to bite off a fighter’s wounded finger after anesthetizing him with vodka.  

At the same time, Schulman fought beside her resistance comrades in the forests of Eastern Europe.  She even slept with a rifle.  In the earlier post, Schulman is quoted as lamenting: “When it was time to hug a boyfriend, I was hugging a rifle.” 

Along with caring for the wounded, she foraged for food and sabotaged Wehrmacht facilities and harassed Nazi soldiers in the marshes and woods of Byelorussia. 

When her partisan unit raided her hometown, she retrieved her camera and processing equipment.  She began documenting the life of the resistance fighters.  She also took over 100 photographs after getting her photographic equipment back.  Her pictures documented German atrocities and resistance activities. 

Schulman was one of the only known Jewish partisan photographers.  Her goal, she has said, was to show that “Jews did not go like sheep to the slaughter.  I was a photographer.  I have pictures.  I have proof.”  According to the Jewish Partisan Educational Foundation (JPEF), there were 20,000 to 30,000 Jewish men and women who fought against the Nazis and their collaborators as partisans in World War II.

As a member of the Moltova Brigade, Schulman had to keep her Jewish identity secret.  The Russian fighters had little use for her as a woman, but discovering she was a Jew would have led to her expulsion from the group—or worse.  Despite her service as both a nurse and a fighter, the anti-Semitism of her fellow partisans was intense.  At Passover time, when her Orthodox faith forbade her to eat many foods, especially leavened bread, she ate only potatoes without explaining the reason.

In July 1944, when the Soviet army liberated Byelorussia, Schulman left the partisans.  She found that her brother Moishe had also escaped Poland and, with a second brother, Kopel, joined another resistance group.  With them, she met another Jewish fighter, a friend and comrade of Moishe’s whom she’d known at home—Morris Schulman.  They were married in December.

After the war, the Schulmans lived in Pinsk, then a city in Soviet Byelorussia.  (Until 1939, when the USSR annexed the eastern part of Poland, Pinsk had been a Polish city.)  They lived well enough as decorated Soviet and Byelorussian heroes, and Faye Schulman worked for a while as a photographer.  But Faye and Morris said Pinsk reminded them of a “graveyard” and they wanted to emigrate to Palestine, which was still under the British Mandate in 1945.

They left Byelorussia and the Soviet east for a displaced persons camp in U.S.-occupied Germany.  The Landsberg DP Camp was in southwest Bavaria, west of Munich and the Schulmans spent three years here, trying to gain admission to Palestine.  During that time, they worked with an underground organization that smuggled Jews into Palestine.

In 1948, Faye gave birth to her daughter, Susan, and she and Morris decided to emigrate to Canada for the stability and quieter life.  After moving to Toronto, where they spent the rest of their lives, Faye Schulman worked in a dress factory and later hand-tinted photographs and painted.  

Morris was employed as a laborer and then worked in the dress factory as a cutter.  The couple eventually opened a successful hardware store.  Morris Schulman died on 22 March 1992 at 81 and, this past 24 April, Faye Schulman passed away at 101.

In addition to the honors from Byelorussia and the USSR, the two were also decorated by Canada and the United States.  Faye was survived by a brother, a rabbi, and the pair left behind a daughter and a son, six grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren. 

Faye Schulman also left for posterity over a hundred of the photos she took during the war and preserved. 

She also preserved the camera she used back then, the old-fashioned kind with the fold-out bellows.  She treasured it . . . but she never took another picture with it.

[Faye Schulman published a 1995 autobiography titled A Partisan’s Memoir: Woman of the Holocaust (Second Story Press) and appeared in a 1999 PBS documentary, Daring to Resist: Three Women Face the Holocaust, which aired on 24 September 2000 on WNET, Channel 13 in New York City.

[Pictures of Resistance: The Wartime Photography of Jewish Partisan Faye Schulman is a traveling exhibit of Schulman’s wartime photos that’s been displayed in more than 30 cities in the United States, Canada, Israel, Poland, South Africa, and Switzerland.  The exhibit is organized by the JPEF, a nonprofit organization based in San Francisco, California, that produces short films and other educational materials on the history and life lessons of the Jewish partisans.]