The millions of Jews murdered during the Holocaust are often depicted as going to their deaths without the opportunity to struggle for their lives. However, some were able to fight back. One of them, Faye Schulman, fought with a camera as well as a rifle. The pictures she took are at the heart of an exhibition at the Jewish Museum Milwaukee—“Pictures of Resistance: The Wartime Photographs of Jewish Partisan Faye Schulman”—through May 26.
Schulman was a teenager when World War II began. In 1939, her Polish village fell to the Soviets and in 1941, it was overrun by the Nazis. Schulman worked for her brother, who owned the town’s only photo studio, and as a result, the Nazis deemed her as being useful. They preserved her life, tasking her with documenting their reign of terror in her district of Poland. Among other things, Schulman was forced to photograph the mass graves filled with friends and relatives outside her village.
She eventually escaped to the forest and joined a Soviet-led partisan brigade fighting the Germans from behind the lines. Women constituted a small minority among the partisans. According to Molly Dubin, curator at the Jewish Museum, the men “often thought that women were not able to handle rifles.” But proving herself as a woman soldier wasn’t the most dangerous challenge Schulman faced.
Many of her partisan comrades were almost as anti-Semitic as their Nazi foes and spoke openly of killing Jews. She hid her ethnicity and observed Passover quietly. “For many Jewish partisans, there was the risk that you might be killed by the person you were fighting alongside almost as much as being killed by the enemy,” Dubin says.
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Several of the black-and-white photographs in “Pictures of Resistance” feature a striking woman in a leopard-skin coat with matching pillbox hat, often brandishing an assault rifle. That woman was Schulman, the photos taken with a timer on her German Roll-Film camera, a device easily cradled in the palms of both hands. Photographic supplies, along with food and arms, were secured in night raids on German-held villages. Schulman developed her photos in any available dark spot.
Her work has gritty authority as well as an eye for composition. Combat shots were virtually impossible under the circumstances; instead, she documented her brigade in group and individual portraits and shed light onto life in the forest camps from which the partisans operated. One picture (taken at a discreet distance) shows surgery in progress, the patient stretched out on an operating table improvised from tree branches. A particularly beautiful photograph shows Schulman and a comrade in a long canoe, reflected along with the forest on the shore behind them on the still waters of a river.
“Pictures of Resistance” includes a 40-minute interview video with Schulman and an eye-catching touch-screen interactive panel—designed by MSOE students—that allows viewers to follow the shifting borders and frontlines of World War II on a map of Europe. Schulman, now in her 90s and living in Toronto, Canada, is unable to attend the exhibition.
Says Dubin: “Her attitude was, ‘If I’m going to die, I’ll die fighting.’” “Pictures of Resistance” is a unique visual document of a theatre in the struggle against Nazism that remains under-recognized.
For more information, call 414-390-5730 or visit jewishmuseummilwaukee.org.
