June 12, 2942: Jewish babies, children, and elderly of Khmel'nik, Ukraine, are shot in a nearby forest.

 

June 13, 1942: Three thousand Jews are deported from the Theresienstadt, Czechoslovakia camp/ghetto to their deaths. 

British Ambassador to the Vatican Frances d'Arcy Osborne observes about Pope Pius XII that his 'moral leadership is not assured by the unapplied recital of the Commandments'. 

 

June 14, 1942: Two thousand Jews break out of Dzisna, Belorussia.

 

June 15, 1942: Authorities in Riga, Latvia request a second gassing van.

Charge d'affaires in the Vatican, Harold Tittmann, reports to the State Department that Pope Pius XII is adopting 'an ostrich-like policy towards atrocities that were obvious to everyone'. 

 

June 18, 1942: Jozef Gabcik and Jan Kubis, British-trained Czech partisans who mortally wounded Reinhard Heydrich on May 27, are discovered with several other partisans inside Prague's Sts. Cyril and Methodius Church. The church is besieged by German troops and SS. All partisans perish.

 

June 19, 1942: Jews revolt at Glebokie, Belorussia: 2500 are murdered in the Borek Forest.

 

 

 

Spain and the Holocaust: The fall of France in 1940 unleashed a flood of refugees seeking entry into Spain. Initially, the Spanish government willingly granted transit visas, but then authorities became more hesitant to open frontiers. Still, many refugees slipped across the northern border illegally, trekking over hazardous mountain routes. By the summer of 1942, Jewish aid organizations helped an estimated 7500 pass through Spain to continue their journeys.

Spanish authorities worked to discourage refugees from remaining in the country, and established internment camps for those who did. When border crossings increased again in 1943, refugees were permitted to live in Spanish cities. 

Franco frustrated the SS by declaring descendants of Sephardic Jews eligible for Spanish citizenship, and thus entitled to asylum in Spanish embassies. Spain consequently became a main avenue of escape for Europe's Jews. Some hoped to find asylum within the country, but most intended to embark from Spanish ports for sanctuary overseas. 

 

November 5, 1942: An SS man in Ciechanow, Poland, politely asks a Jewish woman to hand him her baby. When she complies the trooper smashes the baby to the street headfirst, killing it.

Jewish men from Stopnica, Poland, are sent to a slave-labor camp at Skarzysko0Kamienna, while 400 old people and children are shot in the town cemetery.

Three thousand others are put on a forced march: many are shot along the way, and survivors are sent to Treblinka.

Peasants in Siedliszcze, Poland, gather scythes in anticipation of the day's roundup of Jews, for which they'll be paid for each Jew caught.

Six hundred Jews from Borislav, Poland, are deported naked to prevent resistance.

745 Jews, including 35 residents of the Rothschild Old Age Home, are deported from Paris to Auschwitz. After arrival, Jews awaiting entry into the gas chamber spy a truck loaded with corpses but continue on to their deaths.

 

August 7, 1943: The last trainload of Jews from Salonika, Greece, leaves for Auschwitz with 1800 detainees. Most will be killed at the camp. By this date, most of Salonika's prewar Jewish population estimated at 56,000 has been murdered.

 

December 1945: Antisemitic Poles murder 11 Jews in the town of Kosow-Lacki, Poland, which is located less than six miles from the site of the Treblinka extermination camp.

Oliver Cox, an American sociologist, concludes that Christians in the United States regard the Jew as 'our irreconcilable enemy within the gates, the antithesis of our God, the disturber of our way of life and of our social aspirations'. 

 

1945-1950: Between 250,000 and 300,000 Jews survive German concentration-camp incarceration. About six million Jews have perished. About 1.5 million nonincarcerated European Jews also survive. During this period, Jews emigrate from Europe en masse; 142,000 to Palestine/Israel; 72,000 to the U.S.; 16,000 to Canada, 8000 to Belgium; and about 10,000 to other countries.

Reactions of governments to the illegal, 1945-47 emigrations vary; the Soviets are mainly disinterested; Great Britain, irrationally jealous of its Palestine Mandate remains fiercely negative; the U.S. armed forces, mindful that pro-Jewish sentiment is taking hold at home, allow the illegal emigration to go forward unhindered. 

 

 

 

"There is no doubt that this is probably the greatest and most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world." Winston Churchill 

 

"Yet we, the survivors, are not only responsible toward the dead, but also toward the coming generations: We must pass on our experiences to them so that they might learn from them. Information is resistance"

"It is not enough to preserve everything in books, because a book can by contrast to a person not be interrogated. A witness must be a “living” witness. This is why I always admonished at survivors meetings at which I spoke: “You have children, you have grandchildren, your neighbours have children – you must speak with them. You must tell them everything that you experienced, and provoke their questions, so that they can in turn tell of these experiences. It is only in verbal narration that memory stays alive.”"   Simon Wiesenthal 

 

 

THE HOLOCAUST CHRONICLE

Publications International, Ltd.

Lincolnwood Illinois

Louis Weber, C.E.O. 

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”