Faye Schulman (1919–2021)

Faye Schulman, née Faigel Lazebnik, was born to a large Jewish family in the shtetl of Lenin, Poland. She learned photography as an apprentice of her older brother Moishe and took over the village's only photography business at age 16. When the Germans invaded Poland in World War II, they, along with their Lithuanian collaborators and local Polish police, killed Faye's parents and younger siblings and the rest of the Jewish populace. Faye was spared for her photographic abilities and ordered by the Nazis to develop photos of the massacre, and she made copies. During a raid by partisans, she fled into the forest and joined the Molotov Brigade, a group made up of Soviet Army stragglers, escaped prisoners-of-war, and Jewish and non-Jewish Resistance fighters. She served the group as a nurse from 1942 to 1944, in fighting along the Russian-Polish border. During these years, she managed to take and preserve more than 100 rare photographs documenting Resistance activities. After the war, she married Morris Schulman, also a Polish Jewish partisan, with whom she would have two children. They spent three years in displaced persons camps in Germany before being allowed to emigrate to Canada in 1948, settling in Toronto. Her book, A Partisan’s Memoir: Woman of the Holocaust, was published in 1995. The photos she took during the war are featured in a traveling exhibition called "Pictures of Resistance: The Wartime Photography of Jewish Partisan Faye Schulman," which visited the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education in 2013. Her story was featured in the 1999 documentary Daring to Resist: Three Women Face the Holocaust, which aired on PBS in the USA.