A photographer become partisan fighter
speaks: “I wait in silence amongst the pine trees on the outskirts of the town.
The town is achingly familiar to me; every street, every corner brings back
memories. I hold a loaded rifle firmly in my hands” (Schulman, 1995, p. 17).
This passage is from the memoirs of
Faigel “Faye” Lazebnik Schulman, a young Jewish woman who survived World War II
while serving as a partisan fighter, a role she documented through her
photography.
“Here is my camera, the original camera
that I have since 1939,” Schulman recalls in a 2009 video for the Jewish
Partisan Educational Foundation. “This camera, I took pictures when the
Russians occupied. I took pictures when the Nazis occupied and I took pictures
in the partisans.”
Under both the Russian and Nazi
occupations, as well as with the partisans, Schulman was tasked with taking
photographs among her other duties.
“Every, every picture almost has its
story what to tell and all the stories are my memories so I cannot really
separate one from another,” Schulman says (JPEF, 2009).
There is one photograph, however, she did
not take but is forever seared in her mind. It is a photograph the JPEF has
included in a traveling exhibit of her work: Pictures of Resistance: The Wartime Photographs of Jewish Partisan Faye
Schulman.
The photograph, which was taken by the
Nazis, is of a trench filled with the bodies of Jewish men, women and children.
Ordered by the Nazis to develop their film, Schulman recognized within the
negatives the Aug. 14, 1942, massacre of her village’s Jewish population. The
photography skills for which the Nazis spared Schulman’s life that day were the
ones she used to make prints of her family’s murder for their murderers.
“The Nazis took pictures of the killing.
They later gave me the films to develop and I made copies for myself. Was this
why my life had been spared?” she asks in her 1995 book, A Partisan’s Memoir: Woman of the Holocaust.
For Schulman, that image would push her
to stay alive, not only to escape from the Nazis and go on to serve as a
partisan fighter and nurse, but also to photograph what she could of the resistance
efforts.
To this day, the ongoing effort to
educate people about the Holocaust remains important to Schulman, who told this
writer in a November 2012 interview she feels strongly that the images should
be seen and their respective stories heard. “[Educating the world] is a job
that is very important to do so this will never happen again. As long as people
will remember what happened, it won’t happen again. This is what I hope,”
Schulman says (Livingston, 2012).
The exhibit, which closed a three-month
run at the Dallas Holocaust Museum in November 2012, includes these words from
Schulman: “I want people to know that there was resistance. Jewish people
didn’t go like sheep to the slaughter. If they had the slightest opportunity to
fight back, they did and took revenge. Many lost their lives heroically. I was
a photographer. I have pictures. I have proof.”
All of Schulman’s photographs were taken
with a Doppel Anastigmat fielding camera equipped with a Zess Ikon lens; it is
a camera she still has. She was given the equipment by her brother, who had
trained her in his photography business prior to the war (Schulmann, 1995, p.
90). It was this camera she continued to use even as their village of Lenin first
went under Soviet occupation in 1939 before ending up under Nazi control in
1941.
In a 2000 video produced by Martha Lubell
for PBS, Schulman recalls working as a photographer under the Nazis and being
summoned to take a photograph of their regional commander in the weeks leading
up to the village massacre:
I looked at him and he was like an
animal. I knew he’s a killer; I knew he killed already in the thousands. I
covered myself up to look into the lens from the camera, and I saw that if I
will take this portrait, he will kill me. He looked like, scary. So can you
imagine I, a Jewish girl, said to the Gebitz Commissar, “Smile,” and I took
another picture smiling. He showed his teeth, but his eyes were still like an
animal. So he was very happy, and of course no thank you, no nothing. Who
wanted a thank you as long as he’s not killing me.
Photography was both a positive and a
negative for Schulman. On one hand, her skills allowed her to keep working and
provide for her parents and siblings in what the Nazis had set up as a ghetto inside
of her village. On the other, she was unable to use the mobility it gave her and
escape. This was because of a “collective responsibility” policy rigidly
enforced by the Nazis that stipulated, if a Jew fled, retribution would be
exacted on the family members left behind (Phillips, 2011).
Schulman was thus unable to join the
partisan effort before she did because to have done so would have been to sign
her family’s death warrants early. Even after her family was killed in the
massacre, she still hesitated to escape because there will still a few Jews in
the village.
“I could have escaped. I had the
opportunity, but if I would have escaped, the family would be killed or 50
other people would be killed,” she said (Lubell, 2000). “Was it more morally
right to leave the ghetto community and confront the enemy as a free agent or
should one stay to protect the populace? Never before had we been confronted
with moral issues of such magnitude,” she wrote in her memoirs (p. 79-80).
The fateful day of the massacre, Schulman
and a few other “useful Jews” the Nazis decided to spare were ordered into a
synagogue. From a window in the attic, she watched as the remaining Jewish
villagers – her family members among them – were marched or hauled away to the
woods, to a spot where several weeks earlier the men had been forced to dig
three long trenches. From the window she could hear the shots ring out; she
could hear the screams (Schulman, 1995, p. 87).
She was not able to see what happened,
however, until she developed the Nazis’ negatives – and that image from the
trenches spurred her drive to stay alive and, once she escaped, to join the
partisans and take her own photographs so others would know the truth.
Seventy years later, it is still that
image though that haunts her with unanswered questions. For Schulman, there is
a continued pain in wondering what transpired in the final minutes of her loved
ones’ lives: Were her father and mother shot before and in front of their
children and grandchildren? Were the children forced to witness their parents’
deaths, their grandparents’ deaths before they were tossed into the trenches?
(Livingston, 2012).
Nazis were not known to waste bullets on
children and Schulman believes her younger brother, nephew and niece were likely
buried alive (Schulman, 1995, p. 88).
“I have questions, like, when they killed
my whole family, my sister and her two babies, a 4-year-old boy and a
2-year-old girl … I have questions to myself [and] now I have nobody to even
ask,” she says (Livingston, 2012).
Several weeks after the atrocity occurred,
Schulman and the remaining Jews made their escape when the partisans launched
an attack on the Nazis stationed in Lenin. Schulman fled to the forest, where
she convinced the Molotava Brigade to let her join. In the ensuing weeks, she
and the other partisans would hear horrific details about the three trenches
where “more than 1,850 Jewish men, women and children had been murdered and
buried” (Schulman, 1995, p. 16).
“The Nazis had covered the graves with
dirt and sand, but days later the grounds still continued to shift as the
bodies settled; the top layer cracked and blood continued to seep out. Three
times they covered the graves; three times the graves opened, like a giant
bleeding wound,” Schulman wrote in her memoirs (p. 16-17).
There is pain for Schulman when explains
what was occurring: “The grounds were still moving three days after the
killing. So, you can imagine, people were shot but not everybody got shot in
the chest or in the head” (Livingston, 2012).
Instead, she reflects, it was likely
there were a number of wounded people who lay trapped amongst the dead and
dying:
Some people don’t die right away, so I
know how it is but this is what I think: How was it with my family? How did
they die? Did they scream? Because I heard that three days after the killing,
after they liquidated the ghetto and they killed my whole population, the
Jewish people … the grounds were still moving three days after the killing. So
you can imagine, people were still … they were shot but not everybody [was shot
fatally]. I hope they didn’t suffer too much. I’m talking to you and I’m crying
(Livingston, 2012).
Several weeks after joining the
partisans, Schulman would make her return to her village, this time as a fighter,
as referenced in this paper’s opening paragraph. It was then that Schulman retrieved
the camera she had left behind upon escaping, the camera she would now use over
the course of the next two-and-a-half years to document the partisans. She
talks about her camera on the JPEF video:
This very camera was buried in the ground
many times when I was on assignment with the partisans. I would take the camera
out and it still works. Always the same camera. I would never like to part, as
long as I live, with this camera. It has so many memories and stories. So many things
happened and this camera has seen everything (2009).
With the camera, Schulman made a record
of the partisans and their life in the forests, including photos that included
herself in her roles as fighter and nurse. She took photographs of her fellow
partisans to share with them and also used her camera on reconnaissance missions.
Being a photographer helped her existence among the partisans and Schulman can
be seen in many of the photos, smiling. Smiling was something she said she did
to indicate hope, whether she was showing that hope to one of her patients or to
other partisans around her (Livingston, 2012).
Dealing with the personal burden of
losing her family was just one of many challenges Schulman faced during her
service as a partisan and her work as a fighter, nurse and photographer. With
all of those duties she had to do her best and each had its own particular
obstacles.
As a partisan, Schulman chose to
participate in almost every mission for reasons that were several-fold: She
wanted to fight and the raids provided opportunities to scavenge for medical
and photography supplies.
The conditions under which Schulman had
to do her photography were more than austere. She had to make her own developer,
which she stored in empty vodka bottles. To develop her film, she had to wait
for moonless nights and find a spot by a river so as to have an ample supply of
water. She had to bury everything when she was not carrying it. There was no
darkroom to work in so she used blankets when she developed her negatives
(Vexler, 2011) and sunlight when she created prints (JPEF, 2009).
When the JPEF exhibit appeared in
Berkeley, Calif., one reviewer included an attendee’s thoughts about Schulman’s
work under such circumstances.
“She couldn’t just go to a store to buy
film to take pictures – she had extraordinary circumstances that made
photographing her experience an unbelievable challenge,” said Dave Glass, a
freelance documentary photographer who is himself the son of Holocaust
survivors. “But I understand why she did it. If you’re a photographer, it’s
just in your blood, in your soul. You have to record and document it (Palevsky,
2009).
Schulman is quoted in the JPEF exhibit as
saying, “No forests. No partisans,” in credit to those woods for their role in
aiding the partisans. Still, the conditions were harsh:
… these partisan units lived and fought
under tremendously difficult conditions. Life in the forests of Nazi-occupied
Europe meant enduring harsh winters with minimal clothing and temporary
shelters, seeking food from villages and farms or from within the forest, and
always staying one step ahead of a Nazi-German army and its collaborators that
were determined to annihilate the Jewish people. The fragility of life under
these circumstances becomes central to understanding the conditions under which
these units of armed fighters existed (Phillips, 2011).
Among Schulman’s photographs are those of
herself. In one photograph she is seen holding the automatic weapon she learned
to use that fired 60 bullets with the single pull of the trigger. There are others
of herself as nurse: one where she is assisting with a surgery and another
where she is dressing an injured partisan’s leg wound. Often, she would compose
images in the viewfinder of her camera and then step into them, directing
another partisan to trip the shutter.
On one of the partisan missions against
the Nazis in her hometown, Schulman would set a torch to her family home after
discovering it was being used by the Nazis. She would later photograph its
ruins:
We left the town, I looked back. I saw
the fire, the smoke of my house. I came back after a few weeks. We attacked
again the town and I took a picture and this was what was left from the town.
And three crosses. Three Nazis who were killed when the partisans attacked, so
they buried the three Nazis in front of our house (Lubell, 2000).
It was Schulman’s goal to take photographs
that could serve as documentation of the partisan efforts:
I was thinking that it was life, that it
was resistance. I am Jewish and there were Jewish boys and Jewish girls, but
not so many girls. [The partisans included] Russian and Jewish and other
nationalities that I had never probably heard of their existence [before the
war]. … I was thinking, if I would take the photographs, if I would be killed,
at least the pictures would tell the story for the whole world to know there
were Jewish people in the Russian partisans, and they were together with the
Russians, fighting the Nazis.
There were hundreds and hundreds of
groups. Almost every big city had a group of resistance fighters, but nobody
knew it. And, not even now, there is not much talking about it. So many are
dead. So many were killed (Livingston, 2012).
Even with her service to the partisans as
a fighter, nurse and photographer, Schulman did not take her time with the
partisans for granted because she was both Jewish and female. In her memoirs,
she provides details about the fine path she had to tread at times and how she
had to remain vigilant as to her own security.
In her Study Guide Jewish Women in the Partisans, Shana Penn writes, “[S]killed
or not, the partisans mainly regarded Jews as liabilities, not as resources,
because the presence of Jews threatened the security of the secret combat units.
The Nazis and their collaborators hunted runaway Jews tenaciously, and local
populations, though they might be loyal to the partisans, would often betray Jews
in exchange for food or other bribes. Some partisan units preferred to kill
Jews than harbor them due to their own anti-Semitic beliefs” (2012).
Many of the partisan groups were comprised
of diverse people brought together under the horrific circumstances. Schulman,
a Jew, was herself a member of a brigade led by Soviet officers who had escaped
Nazi prison camps. Still, they found unity and a common goal of fighting back
against the Nazi regime.
In a 2011 article, Carson Phillips, an
educator with the Sarah and Chaim Neuberger Holocaust Education Centre in
Toronto, wrote: “Outnumbered and against overwhelming odds, the partisans are
an element to understanding the diverse ways in which Jews resisted the
genocidal actions of the Nazis. Whether it was through physical, spiritual, or
emotional resistance, Jews defied the Nazis with whatever means they could.”
For JPEF executive director Mitch Braff,
Schulman’s work “is one of the best ways that JPEF can reach thousands of
people in communities all over the world, some of whom have never heard of the
Jewish partisan experience. … The images are a visual testament to the thousand
of Jewish boys and girls who heroically fought against the Nazis and shatters
the myth of Jewish passivity during the Holocaust” (2009).
After the war, Schulman returned to her
career as a photographer but found both herself and the world were different:
I tried. I wanted to, but it was not the
same somehow. … I didn’t find the interest in the people unless someone was
getting married or it was something like that they wanted to remember. Nobody
was interested. Besides, to tell you the truth, the Jews were murdered or
killed so who am I going to take pictures of? I wasn’t interested myself
(Livingston, 2012).
For Schulman, there are many more images
and stories from the war than just the ones she experienced. Through the years
she has continued to read others’ accounts and books, on occasion learning from
them a friend’s fate. Some of her photographs have found their way back to her,
in one case allowing her to reconnect with a fellow partisan. Although she no
longer travels, she continues to share her knowledge and experiences with those
who ask. She is proud that her memoirs are included in coursework on the
Holocaust and taught at Duke University (Livingston, 2012).
Schulman wants the world to know it was
not just the Jewish population that was targeted during World War II and recounts
the story of how the Nazis, after massacring the Jews in her village, would
later turn on its non-Jewish population:
And you know how they killed them? For
the non-Jews, there were no trenches. The 5,000 non-Jews were put in a huge
barrack, a huge, huge building, surrounded with heavy artillery. And [the
Nazis] put the building on fire and they burned the 5,000 alive. If someone
tried to escape, they were shot. People think the Nazis only killed the Jewish
people but they killed everybody. They burned them alive, can you imagine? (Livingston,
2012).
For Schulman, there continues to be grief
and mourning for the loss of her family and friends, as well as the countless
others who perished during the Holocaust.
“It’s hard for me to talk about it,” she
says. “I wish people would never forget what happened because it happened to
many religions. It was not only to the Jews, but to all religions. That was inhumane
what they did, the Nazis” (Livingston, 2012).
There is some peace for her in knowing
she took photos that serve as proof of what happened.
“It does help to have the photos. When I
speak to people and they see something is written and there are photographs …
especially with schoolchildren, when I know they are looking at life entirely
different now and they appreciate what life is all about, it makes me feel good,”
she says (Livingston, 2012).
Dr. Jill Vexler, who curated the Schulman
photo exhibit, discussed the work during a 2011 appearance at the University of
Michigan.
“We have photographs. They are unusual.
They are rare. Faye is believed to be the only known Jewish woman partisan
photographer in the world,” Vexler said.
During her presentation, Vexler
referenced an eyewitness to the atrocities who spoke during the war with upper
level British and U.S. officials – but his accounts were not believed. She
raised the question of whether photos from within the Holocaust, if those had
been seen by the international community at that time, would have helped change
the war’s course and duration.
“The anthropologist in me needs the
artifact, so the work of Faye Schulman is all the more important and will
continue to be important into the future,” Vexler said, noting that while
digital images can be manipulated, “we have Faye’s negatives and they are in
pristine condition.”
Schulman’s memoirs speak of her desire to
fight back against the Nazis, and Vexler, who spent several days with her while
working on the exhibit, recalls also:
Faye is very clear about a word … and
that is vengeance. It’s real, it’s a very powerful emotion we know and it
propelled her survival. It was her need for vengeance. … It was her camera that
saved her. She participated. … She is among many, many amazing people. I dread
the day our society no longer has these people, but we have her photographs. It
is an extraordinary, an extraordinary legacy (Vexler, 2011).
The JPEF exhibit points out that circumstances
prevented Schulman from keeping every negative and photograph she took. Quite
simply, she could not carry them all forward from her time as a partisan to her
initial relocation after the war to Russia, and from there to being married and
a move with her husband into a displaced persons camp before emigrating to
Canada. Schulman has described those she was able to retain as the “memory ones.”
Today, almost 30 of the images are on
view with the JPEF exhibit, which notes: “Still [the photos] provide invaluable
visual documentation of the partisans’ accomplishments.”
In her memoirs, Schulman writes of that
first time she returned to her village as a partisan fighter:
Not far from where I am standing are the
three trenches where members of my family and my friends were so brutally
murdered. Overwhelmed by emotion, I imagine again this picture of horror. If I
could, I would lie down on the ground, stretch out my arms and embrace the
blood-soaked earth. I want to close my eyes and fall asleep with my loved ones
forever. Instead I see their faces. I hear their voices whispering, “No! Don’t
give up. Now you have a rifle. Fight! Avenge us and defend yourself.” I am no
longer afraid. I hold my loaded rifle firmly in my hands (p. 17).
The JPEF video adds: “Joining the
partisans was Faye Schulman’s path to survival and her chance to avenge the
deaths of her family members. Being a partisan became Faye’s way of life. Her
life is representative of thousands of others, with one extraordinary
difference: Faye [also] had a camera.”
References
Braff, M.
(2009). Happy birthday! Faye turns 90! Retrieved November 25, 2012, from http://jewishpartisans.blogspot.com/2009/12/happy-birthday-faye-turns-90.html
Jewish Partisan
Educational Foundation video, biography and images: Faye Schulman. (2009).
Retrieved November 6, 2012, from http://www.jewishpartisans.org/t_switch.php?pageName=mini+bio+short+bio+1&fromSomeone=&parnum=56
Livingston,
J. A. (2012). Personal notes/interview
with Faye Schulman
Lubell, M.
(2000). Daring to resist: Three women face the Holocaust. Retrieved November
16, 2012, from http://www.pbs.org/daringtoresist/tgtranscript.html
Palevsky, S.
(2009). Rare photos show hidden life of partisans who fought Nazis. Retrieved
November 25, 2012, from
Penn, S.
(2012). Study guide Jewish women in the partisans. Retrieved November 20, 2012,
from http://www.jewishpartisans.org/t_switch.php?pageName=educator+women&gloss=false
Phillips, C.
(2011). Partisans: The unseen heroes of the Holocaust. Retrieved November 25,
2012, from http://mnjcc.wordpress.com/2011/05/20/partisans-the-unseen-heroes-of-the-holocaust/
Schulman, F.
(1995). A partisan’s memoir: Woman of the holocaust. Toronto, Ontario:
Second Story Press.
Vexler, J.
(2011). Video: Photographer as witness: Proof enough? Retrieved November 25,
2012, from http://www.jillvexler.com/exhibit_schulman.htm#
Vexler, J.
(2012). Exhibit: Pictures of resistance: The wartime photographs of Jewish
partisan Faye Schulman
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