Faye Schulman

Faye Schulman (b.1919) is a Jewish partisan photographer, and the only such photographer to photograph their struggle in Eastern Europe during the Second World War.

She was born in Eastern Poland (now Western Belarus), and after the Nazis 1941 invaded Belarus her family was imprisoned in a ghetto and most of the people in the ghetto were killed, but she was spared because of her photographic skills. She was recruited to work as a photographer for the Nazis. She took a photograph which she saw depicted her family dead in a mass grave, and this convinced her to join the resistance. She joined a group which was composed mostly of prisoners of war who had escaped from the German captivity, and worked for them as a nurse from September 1942 to July 1944. She also took photographs after getting her photographic equipment back in a raid.

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. In 1948 they immigrated to Canada. Faye Schulman has been decorated by the Soviet/Belorussian, American and Canadian governments.

She wrote A Partisan’s Memoir: Woman of the Holocaust (1995).