Photo: A photograph taken by Faye Schulman, inside a bunker of the Molotov partisan brigade, 1942-1944, Pinsk, Belarus (c) USHMM, courtesy of Belarusian State Museum of the History of the Great Patriotic War
Faye Schulman (28 November 1919 – 24 April 2021) was a Jewish partisan photographer, and the only such photographer to photograph their struggle in Eastern Europe during the Second World War. Her full name was Faigel “Faye” Lazebnik Schulman.
Faye Schulman (then known as Faigel Lazebnik) as a member of the partisan Resistance in Eastern Poland in 1943.
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; The Germans ordered Faye to develop their photographs of the massacre – and she made copies for herself, as evidence. Schulman was spared because of her photographic skills that she had learned from her brother Moishe. She was recruited to work as a photographer for the Nazis.
On Aug. 14, 1942, a year after German troops invaded Soviet-occupied Poland, they massacred the last 1,850 Jews from a shtetl named Lenin near the Sluch River. Only 27 were spared, their skills deemed essential by the invaders.
The survivors included shoemakers, tailors, carpenters, blacksmiths, a barber and a young novice photographer named Faigel Lazebnik, who later in marriage would become known as Faye Schulman.
The Germans enlisted her to take commemorative photographs of them and, in some cases, their newly acquired mistresses. (“It better be good, or else you’ll be kaput,” she recalled a Gestapo commander warning her before, trembling, she asked him to smile.) They thus spared her from the firing squad because of their vanity and their obsession with bureaucratic record-keeping — two weaknesses that she would ultimately wield against them.
At one point the Germans witlessly gave her film to develop that contained pictures they had taken of the three trenches into which they, their Lithuanian collaborators and the local Polish police had machine-gunned Lenin’s remaining Jews, including her parents, sisters and younger brother.
She developed the photograph which she saw depicted her family dead in a mass grave, and this convinced her to join the resistance.
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. She also took over 100 photographs after getting her photographic equipment back in a raid .She developed the negatives under blankets and made “sun prints” during the day.
She recently celebrated her 101st birthday. Mazal tov!