Faye Schulman

Faye Schulman (28 November 1919) is a Jewish partisan photographer, and the only such photographer to photograph their struggle in Eastern Europe during the Second World War.[1] Her full name is Faigel “Faye” Lazebnik Schulman.[2]

She was born in Lenin in Eastern Poland (now Western Belarus). After the Nazis invaded Belarus, her family was imprisoned in the Lenin Ghetto. On August 14, 1942, German forces killed 1,850 Jews from the ghetto, including much of Schulman's family. 26 Jews were not killed; Schulman was spared because of her photographic skills that she had learned from her brother Moishe.[3][4] She was recruited to work as a photographer for the Nazis.[5] She developed a photograph which she saw depicted her family dead in a mass grave, and this convinced her to join the resistance.[5] She joined the Molotava Brigade which was composed mostly of Soviet prisoners of war who had escaped from German captivity, and worked for them as a nurse from September 1942 to July 1944.[6] She also took over 100 photographs after getting her photographic equipment back in a raid.[4][6]

After her time in the resistance she married Morris Schulman, and they stayed in the Landsberg displaced persons camp in Germany, where they helped to smuggle weapons to support Israeli independence.[3] In 1948 they immigrated to Canada.[3][6] Faye Schulman has been decorated by the Soviet/Belorussian, American and Canadian governments. She wrote A Partisan’s Memoir: Woman of the Holocaust (1995).[5]

Faye Schulman lives in Toronto today, and has two children: Sidney and Susan, 6 grandchildren: Michael, Daniel, Nathan, Rachelle, Matthew, and Steven, and 2 great grandchildren: Imogene and Beckham.