Faye Schulman

Schulman has been decorated by the Soviet/Belorussian, American and Canadian governments. In 1995, she wrote A Partisan's Memoir: Woman of the Holocaust. She was later featured in a 1999 PBS documentary, “Daring to Resist: Three Women Face the Holocaust.”

In 1948, Schulman immigrated to Toronto. She is survived by two children (Sidney and Susan), six grandchildren (Michael, Daniel, Nathan, Rachelle, Matthew, and Steven), and three great grandchildren (Imogene, Beckham, and Lila).

In 1944, Faye wed Morris Schulman and lived in Pinsk, Belarus. After the war, the couple 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 where she worked in a dress factory and later hand-tinted photographs and painted in oils.

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 her family. 26 Jews were not killed, and Schulman was spared because of her photographic skills. She was recruited to work as a photographer for the Nazis. She developed a 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. After a raid of Lenin, she obtained her photography equipment, taking over 100 photographs of the Resistance. When the Red Army liberated Belarus in July 1944, she was reunited with two of her brothers and left the brigade after being introduced to her future husband, Morris Schulman.

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 World War II. Her full name was Faigel "Faye" Lazebnik Schulman.

Faigel Lazebnik was born on November 28, 1919, in Sosnkowicze, Eastern Poland (now Lenin in Western Belarus) as the fifth of seven children born to Yakov and Rayzel (Migdalovich) Lazebnik. The family were Orthodox Jews and at age 10, Faye was apprenticed to the village photographer and brother Moishe, later taking over his studio at age 16.