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On August 14, 1942, the fucking Nazis massacred 1,850 Jews in a small town in eastern Poland called Lenin (which was not named for the commie revolutionary). Only 27 were permitted to live, being in possession of skills deemed useful to the fucking Nazi war effort. One of those spared was a young woman named Faigel Lazebnik, an amateur photographer. She learned that her family was among the slain when she was told to develop a photograph that showed them in a mass grave.
--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: August 14, 1942--
She later married and became Faye Shulman. Prior to the massacre the fucking Nazis pulled aside carpenters, blacksmiths, and tailors and put them to work. Faye was tasked with taking photos of the fucking Nazis to commemorate their genocidal invasion. She recalled one Gestapo commander saying to her, “It better be good, or else you’ll be kaput.” The dumbfuck Nazis cockknockers didn’t even know or care that they gave her a photo to develop that revealed to her the machine-gunned bodies of her family. It showed her parents, her sisters, and her brother. At that point she said fuck this and joined the resistance.
She kept the photo as evidence of the Nazi war crimes, and joined the Molotov Brigade, a resistance group made up mostly of Soviet POWs who had escaped from the Germans. And she continued her photography in order to chronicle the Eastern European resistance to the fucking Nazis. It was important for her to combat the myth that Eastern European Jews willingly went to their deaths without a fight. “Jews did not go like sheep to the slaughter,” Shulman said. “There was resistance.” Approximately 30,000 Jews joined resistance groups in Eastern Europe.
Facing hunger and cold and the constant threat of capture, torture, and death, Faye kept a record of the Eastern resistance while also working for them as a nurse. She said, “My bed would be the grass, my roof the sky, and my walls the trees.” When the Soviets liberated the region, she was reunited with her two surviving brothers and was reintroduced to Morris Schulman, a fellow resistance fighter who she had known before the war, and they married.
After the war, she and her husband helped to smuggle people and guns to Israel in its fight to become an independent nation. They had planned to emigrate to British-controlled Palestine, but upon learning she was pregnant decided to move to Canada instead. She spent the rest of her life in Toronto, publishing a memoir in 1995 containing her photographs of her time in the resistance. Her exact birthdate is unknown; Faye Shulman died in the spring of 2021 at the age of approximately 100.
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