They Did Not Go Quietly Into The Bleak Night of Death

"She knew nothing of medicine, but quickly got over her squeamishness."

"[She performed open-air surgeries on an operating table made of tree branches and using vodka to numb pain, even lancing her own infected flesh]."

The Light of Days, The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler’s Ghettos by Judy Batalion

 

"They show the many faces of armed resistance. Those faces belonged to women and men, to Jews and non-Jews, to hardened, somber people who look older than they could possibly have been, and to attractive youths with dazzling smiles and sparkling eyes, like Faye."

"They speak to the conscious efforts of partisan resisters to create a record and communicate their message."

"Why else would a young photographer with no military training be a valued member of a partisan unit? Schulman’s photos show partisans as they wanted to be seen."

"Arranging, taking, developing, preserving, and showing this image demonstrated, or at least imagined, solidarity between Jews and non-Jews against a common enemy."

Doris Bergen, Holocaust historian, University of Toronto

 

   Faye Schulman: 1919 - 2021    Courtesy of Cassowary Colorizations

 

 

 

"I want people to know that there was resistance."

"Jews did not go like sheep to the slaughter. I was a photographer. I have pictures. I have proof."

"It [her camera] has so many memories and so many stories and so many things happened."

"This camera has seen everything."

Faye Schulman, Partisan Fighter, Photographer, Jewish Holocaust Resister

Born in 1919 in Lenin, Poland, bordering the Soviet Union, Faigel Lazebnik's family was murdered in 1942 when the ghetto was liquidated, the Nazis marching the town's Jewish population to trenches on the outskirts of the town, to be shot. A method used in the still-early days of the Holocaust when Jews populating one of the many Polish shtetls were summarily disposed of, the elderly, the children, the men and the women, in a mass eradication of Jewish life in Poland. 

The young woman escaped death because she had a skill valued by the German occupation authorities who were addicted to documenting everything they did. She was ordered to take photographs of the actions of the Nazi occupation, including the mass killings. Her job included photographing Nazi officials, developing prints for their record-keeping. Her brother had owned a photography studio in town and she took up the skills of photography and photo development.

There was one unforgettable occasion when she was developing photographs of just-murdered Jews in a mass grave. She peered closely at a processed photograph and was rewarded with the last views of her murdered family members among other Jews in a mass grave. This was a negative that she kept and preserved. She eventually escaped into a nearby forest, joining a group of partisan non-Jews, the Molotava Brigade comprised mostly of escaped Soviet Red Army POWs, among them vicious anti-Semites from whom she kept her identity as a Jew hidden.

She was accepted among the partisans who soon valued her accomplishments, training herself as a nurse. She was devoted to looking after the wounded, under primitive circumstances, even learning how to perform some basic surgery. Through her years of action with the partisans her camera was never far from her hands, and nor was the rifle she learned to value equally with her Photo Porst Nurnberg camera. By day she nursed wounded partisan soldiers, at night she developed her photographs.

While the partisan groups worked diligently to sabotage Nazi operations, she was a valued member of their company. Her photographs were of vital importance to the young woman, witness to a genocidal war, removed from the death camps while living in the forest confines and acutely aware of the Nazi campaign that focused on exterminating her people. Her photographs were proof of the savagery of mass death, and the response of the partisan groups.

Faye Schulman with her camera/Moshe Lazebnik

She was determined to use her photographs to dispel the image of Jews meekly marching to mass death like sheep to the slaughter. Not all among them were able to resist and to fight against their horrible fate, but some did, and she was among them. As a Soviet partisan she became the fighting spirit of a people denied their humanity and deprived of their lives by a vicious ideology of superiority ridding the world of the presence of a pestilence. Succeeding to the degree that six million Jews were sacrificed on the altar of Nazi supremacy.

The 1,850 Jewish inhabitants of her Polish town's Jewish ghetto were annihilated in 1942, setting her on a course to spend the following years as an outcast foraging for food in a winter forest amongst others committed to the destruction of a common enemy. She photographed primitive surgeries, she photographed makeshift burials of partisan fighters whose lives were lost in action. 

"It became so important after the war for survivors to assert the fact that we fought, we were part of partisan units." Mrs. Schulman is significant as "an embodiment, a person who both by her survival and by those photographs -- asserts there was resistance", explained Professor Doris Bergen.

Liberation came in 1944 through Soviet troops. Russia had suffered an immense loss of life when its non-aggression pact with Germany was cancelled by the unforeseen action of German troops marching into Russia. A scorched-earth combat between Russia and Germany opened an Eastern Front, when Germany was already fighting its Western Front battles and the Axis powers soon began to apprehend the first hints that the war was turning against them, finally. 

Later the same year, the 22-year-old Faigel Lazebnik met and married another Jewish member of a partisan unit, Morris Schulman. For three years following the end of the war the young couple lived in a displaced persons camp in Germany. In 1948 they moved to Canada and began a new life, where they raised a family together. The young woman who was Faigel Lazebnik died at age 101 in Toronto, on April 24. She had been one of 20,000 to 30,000 Jewish resistance fighters during the Second World War.

Photo courtesy “A Partisan’s Memoir: Woman of the Holocaust”