Faye Schulman is our ‘Mensch Of The Week’ and here’s why.

Schulman was just 22-years old in the late summer of 1942 when Nazi troops who were occupying her town in Poland, massacred its 1,850 Jewish residents. Schulman, a photographer, was among the 27 Jews who were spared because of their deemed usefulness to the Nazis. Schulman died this past April a the age of 101.

Schulman’s Amazing Story

Schulman was born in Lenin, Poland, a town that bordered the Soviet Union. Her family was killed in 1942 when the Nazis liquidated the ghetto there, marching most of the town’s Jews to trenches outside the town and shooting them. Schulman was saved due to her occupation — she was put to work photographing Nazi officials and developing prints for records.

She joined the partisans after escaping to the forests and became a nurse to wounded partisan soldiers. She developed her photographs by night.

She was liberated by Soviet troops in 1944 and later that year married a fellow Jewish member of the partisans, Morris Schulman. They lived in a German displaced person camp after the war until moving to Canada in 1948, where Schulman lived until her death.

In 1995, Schulman published a book, “A Partisan’s Memoir: Woman of the Holocaust,” that included many of her photographs.