Out of the Fire: Faye Schulman's partisan photographs and Holocaust memory

A great many of the photographs that survive from the Holocaust in Eastern Europe were taken by the people carrying it out, or by soldiers who arrived afterwards. The pictures Faye Schulman made in the forests of what is now Belarus belong to a far smaller group: images of Jews fighting back, taken by one of them. That alone would justify a documentary. Shelley Saywell's Out of the Fire, made around 2000 and running roughly an hour, is that documentary, and at its centre is a journey back to the town where Schulman's family was murdered.

The film is worth seeing for her story. It is worth thinking about afterwards for a harder reason, because it raises the question that runs under almost every film about genocide: who held the camera, and what did they want the picture to do?

Lenin, 1942

Faye Schulman was born Faigel Lazebnik in 1919 in Lenin, a small town that lay inside Poland between the wars and belongs to Belarus today. Photography came to her through her family's studio work, and she learned the trade young: how to make a portrait, and how to develop and print it.

In August 1942 the Germans murdered most of the town's Jews, around 1,850 people. They spared a small number whose skills they needed, and Faye, as a photographer, was one of them. She was ordered to develop photographs, among them images connected to the massacre. It is hard to imagine a crueller use of a craft. A darkroom is a place of patience and small chemistry, of waiting for a print to come up in the tray, and she was made to stand in one and process a record of her own community's destruction.

She escaped and joined a Soviet partisan unit operating in the forests, the Molotov Brigade. A story that might have ended in August 1942 turned instead toward resistance, and her craft went with it.

A camera among the partisans

With the brigade, Schulman served as a nurse and as a fighter. She also went on taking pictures. In the months and years that followed she made hundreds of photographs of partisan life, and she developed the film in the forest by whatever methods she could improvise.

Anyone who has developed film by hand knows what a darkroom asks for: real darkness, clean water, chemistry held near the right temperature, a flat surface and time. A partisan camp offered none of those reliably, and it added risks no studio photographer ever faces. Film had to be kept dry and safe while the unit moved, and a camera was one more thing to carry and one more thing that could be found. That the pictures survived the war at all says a good deal about her persistence.

The double role matters to how the photographs should be read. A photographer attached to a unit for a few weeks makes one kind of record; a member of the unit who also nurses its wounded and fights alongside it makes another. Schulman knew the people in her pictures as patients and comrades before she ever framed them. That closeness cannot be manufactured after the fact, and any documentary that draws on her work inherits it.

The result has almost no parallel. Her photographs are among the very few images of Jewish partisans taken by a partisan. Other Jewish photographers documented the period from the inside, notably Mendel Grossman and Henryk Ross in the Lodz ghetto, who photographed ghetto life at great personal risk. Schulman's position was different again. She was not recording confinement but armed resistance, among comrades, under open sky.

Who held the camera

The question of authorship sits close to the centre of Holocaust visual history. Photographs made by perpetrators show victims through the eyes of the people who meant to destroy them, with the framing, the moment and often the humiliation chosen by the photographer. Historians, curators and filmmakers have argued for decades about whether such images can be shown at all without repeating that gaze.

Documentary has answered in sharply different ways. Alain Resnais's Night and Fog (1956) built its argument from archival footage and photographs set against new colour images of the camp sites. Claude Lanzmann's Shoah (1985) went the other way, refusing archival imagery entirely and relying on testimony and on the places as they looked when he filmed them. Both positions are serious, and both are partly responses to the same problem: so much of the visual archive was made by the wrong hands.

Schulman's photographs sidestep much of that dilemma. They are archival images, but they were made by someone with every right to make them, a survivor and fighter photographing her own side. A film that draws on them does not have to borrow the perpetrators' eyes, and an audience looking at them is not being asked to look the way a killer looked.

The return to Lenin

The present-day thread of Out of the Fire follows Schulman back to Lenin about fifty-five years after the war. She goes to pray for her murdered family at the site, and to meet partisan comrades who survived. The film caught her at around eighty, with two more decades of life still ahead of her.

Return journeys became a familiar shape for Holocaust documentary as survivors aged; Shoah itself opens with one, bringing Simon Srebnik back to Chelmno. The form carries real risks. It can turn a survivor into a tour guide to her own grief, and it can ask for tears on cue. Filming someone at the place where her family was killed raises questions of consent, pacing and restraint that apply to any documentary made with survivors, and they are taken up at length in Consent, safety and anonymity when filming survivors.

In Schulman's case the return supplies a counterweight. Her photographs come from the forest, from the living and the armed. The return goes to the place of the dead. Any honest account of her war needs both (the pictures she took, the ground she came back to), and the journey to Lenin gives the second its due.

The meeting with surviving comrades matters for a different reason. Popular memory of the partisan war, on screen at least, has tended to gather around a few famous units and commanders, and the rank and file disappear. A meeting of rank-and-file fighters, decades later, insists on the human scale of resistance: people who lived through it, went home or abroad, and grew old.

Partisans and the Holocaust on screen

Placing Out of the Fire beside a few better-known films shows how differently filmmakers have treated images of the period. None of these approaches cancels the others.

Defiance brought the Bielski partisans, who sheltered Jews in the Belarusian forests, to a mass audience, with all the compression and invention a studio feature involves. Schulman's photographs make a useful companion to it. They show partisan life as one participant chose to frame it, with her own sense of what mattered, rather than as a production designer imagined it.

How to look at her photographs

Her pictures reward slow attention wherever you meet them. A few questions help.

1. Who is the photographer to the people in the frame? Here, a comrade, not a visitor or an enemy. Ask what that relationship allowed her to see.
2. Where a picture is posed, who chose the pose? Posed wartime photographs are often read as less truthful than candid ones, but in a fighting unit a posed portrait can be a deliberate statement of presence.
3. What could not be photographed at all? Combat, night movement, cold and hunger mostly escape the lens, and that absence is part of the record.
4. What does the caption add, or leave out? Names, dates and places carry enormous weight with images like these, and so does knowing who made them.
5. How did the picture travel? Every step from an occupied forest to a printed page or a screen depended on someone choosing to keep it, and the route is part of what the picture means.

Questions like these are also the working questions of any documentary maker licensing historical photographs, and the practical side is covered in the guide to archive footage and rights. The ethics and the paperwork turn out to be closely linked, since knowing who made a picture is the first step in both.

After the forest

After the war she married Morris Schulman. The couple emigrated to Canada in 1948 and made their life in Toronto. In 1995 she published A Partisan's Memoir: Woman of the Holocaust, setting her own account down in print, and she died in 2021 at the age of 101.

For Canadian viewers there is a further layer. Like Kim Phuc, the subject of Saywell's earlier Kim's Story, Schulman came to the Toronto area carrying a war that most of her neighbours knew only from pictures. The difference lies in which side of the camera each woman stood on: one spent her adult life stepping out from a famous frame, the other spent a war making frames almost no one else could have made.

Programme the two films together and show Out of the Fire second. Then leave the lights down for a moment after the credits. Somewhere behind both documentaries is a tray of developer in a dark room, and a picture slowly coming up out of nothing.