When the Nazis murdered Faye Schulman's family, she survived because she could use a camera

Most of Faye Schulman's family was murdered by the Nazis. She was captured but survived — because she was a photographer. She escaped and spent the rest of the war documenting life as a resistance fighter. The Photographer, a new film from CBC Short Docs, tells Schulman's story.

By Emily Pasternak, director, The Photographer

I came across Faye Schulman's remarkable story while researching my own family history.

My paternal grandfather was born in the town of Grajewo, Poland — one of about 3,500 Jews in a population of almost 9,200. Weeks before the Second World War began, he and his parents escaped to Barbados; he was just an infant.

Every single one of his remaining relatives were slaughtered. Most of Grajewo's Jews were transported via a transit camp in Bogusze to the Treblinka and Auschwitz concentration camps, where they were gassed, shot or worked to death.

There were very few survivors.

Researching my grandfather's story was difficult: I was devastated to find very little information. Other than a few desperate personal accounts from the likes of my grandfather and great-aunt, the Jews of Grajewo have been essentially wiped from history — and so have the Jews of their neighbouring shtetls (Yiddish for "small Jewish villages").

Meanwhile, just 457 kilometres away lies the town of Lenin, where a young Faye Schulman trained as a photographer. 

In 1942, the Nazis murdered 1,850 Jews from Lenin, including most of Schulman's family. Her two older brothers were shipped to a labour camp. But Schulman survived because she knew how to operate a camera.

The Nazis were obsessed with keeping records, and Schulman became one of their photographers until she escaped and joined a group of Russian partisans.

Schulman's photos and personal accounts detail the state of eastern Polish Jewry before the war, as well as the struggles of the Jewish partisan resistance fighters. She photographed the partisans' activities and showed that they were active in the fight against the Nazis, disrupting communications, transportation and the flow of munitions to the front lines. 

Her work discounts the all-too-common belief that Jews did not resist. 

Schulman survived the massacre of Jews from her town, part of the "Holocaust by Bullets," the Nazis' initial drive to wipe out Europe's Jews before the construction of gas chambers. And she not only fought back, but also lived to tell the tale. 

Our film, The Photographer, is an effort to share Schulman's story and her legacy.

Schulman buried her equipment and photographs in the woods to keep them safe

Incredibly, Schulman managed to preserve a wealth of photos. During the two years she lived in the woods with the partisans, she buried her equipment and photographs to keep them safe.

Schulman's work, and indeed her survival, are nothing short of a miracle. When I first read about her story, I was overcome by the urge to share it. I discovered that her grandson, Michael Tward, lives in Toronto — both of us had grown up steeped in the history of the Holocaust, grappling with a level of devastation we are blessed to find incomprehensible. We soon began making The Photographer.

The Nazis systemically murdered 6 million Jews, including 1.5 million children

The goal of the Holocaust was the annihilation of the Jewish people and other groups.

We know the total number of Jewish victims: approximately six million. As many as 1.5 million were children, who were targeted because of their "alleged membership in dangerous racial, biological or political groups," according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.  

Over the course of the war, the Nazis systemically murdered nearly two-thirds of the Jewish population in Europe (a little more than one-third of the global Jewish population), including roughly 90 per cent of all Polish Jews. And millions more died in the Holocaust, including Soviet prisoners of war, Roma, members of the LGBTQ community and political prisoners. 

The Nazis specifically targeted Jews, whom they believed to be an ethnically inferior race.

Their efforts to destroy all of European Jewry never slowed; they simply ran out of time. The Holocaust era ended when Allied forces defeated Nazi Germany in May 1945, but the global Jewish population has yet to recover the numbers lost from the Holocaust.

We often underestimate the level of antisemitism in Canada

This documentary provides us an opportunity to share Holocaust education at a time when Canadians, particularly youth, are startlingly oblivious to it. I have often encountered Holocaust denial, both from left- and right-wing peers. 

A North American study found that 33 per cent of students between grades 6 and 12, mostly Canadian, believe the Holocaust was fabricated or exaggerated or they weren't sure it happened. Forty-two per cent of students reported witnessing antisemitic incidents.

Alongside the lack of Holocaust education in Canada, the discourse often underestimates the effects of modern-day antisemitism and intergenerational trauma in the Jewish community. I have personally received death threats because of my religion and ethnicity.

Faye Schulman — who devoted most of her life to telling the story of the Holocaust, visiting schools, churches and community groups — died in 2021. In The Photographer, Tward says, "She would be disturbed by recent events related to antisemitism and Holocaust denial, and invigorated by it as well." 

Her pictures document a time and a particular experience with very little other photographic evidence; Schulman is one of the only known Jewish resistance photographers of the Second World War.

I am thankful I was able to tell Schulman's story and was blessed to work with a diverse team that recognizes the importance of stories like this. We hope this project helps viewers better understand the history of the Holocaust and equips them to identify prejudice and antisemitism when they see it.

Watch The Photographer on CBC Gem.