Faye Schulman (née Lazebnik) was a photographer from Lenin, Poland (now Belarus). When the Nazis liquidated her town's ghetto, killing her parents and most of her family, she was spared because the Germans needed someone to process photographs—including photos documenting the massacre of her own community.
Schulman secretly made copies of these atrocity photos, hiding them as evidence. She then escaped to join the Molotava Brigade, a Soviet-affiliated partisan group operating in the forests. Among the partisans, she served as a nurse, fighter, and photographer, carrying cameras salvaged from her destroyed studio.
Her photographs are among the very few visual records of daily partisan life: men and women cleaning weapons, performing surgery in forest clearings, celebrating victories, and mourning losses. Schulman participated in combat missions and helped maintain a partisan field hospital. After the war, her photographs became invaluable historical documents—rare first-person visual testimony of Jewish armed resistance. She later immigrated to Canada and spent decades speaking about her experience, displaying her extraordinary photographs to bear witness.