Faye Schulman: The partisan photographer who captured Jewish resistance

Books have been written about Luba Olenski's dramatic life, but they read like fiction.

In 1943, 12-year-old Luba Frank was living a precarious existence in the care of strangers in Bialystok Ghetto in northeastern Poland under Nazi occupation. She hadn't seen her family for two years. On August 16, the Nazis liquidated Bialystok, and forced the first group of thousands of ghetto residents onto cattle trains for the Treblinka extermination camp.

Somehow – somehow – five people managed to escape from the moving train as it made its passage through the Polish countryside, and roll down the steep slope beside the tracks to freedom. One of them was Luba.

Alone she wandered, terrified and starving, for weeks before stumbling into a group of Jewish partisans living in Bryansk Forest.

It's estimated that between 20,000 and 30,000 Jewish people escaped from Nazi ghettos and formed organised resistance groups during the war.

The Olenski partisans – so named for their leader David Olenski (whom the younger Luba would go on to marry seven years later) – were a rag-tag group of Jewish people who had teamed up with Soviet partisans, and lived in underground bunkers in the forest, from which they launched daring missions to destroy Nazi infrastructure.

There, Luba met her namesake, Luba Goldberg (née Wrobel), a 20-year-old woman serving with a partisan family group.

Mrs Goldberg had already been in the forest for a year, after escaping from Sokoly Ghetto with a group of others. Most, she says, perished within a week.

When the older Luba was sent to work as a cook with a fighting unit comprised only of men, she took the younger girl with her – partly to help her with her work, and partly as protection (the constant fear of rape lent another layer of threat to the existence of women during the war). The pair slept beneath the same blanket at night.

They worked to bolster the resistance against the Nazis both in support roles and in active duty.

The role of women in the Jewish partisans was small – according to one estimate they comprised about 5 per cent of the fighters. But it's thanks to one female Jewish partisan – Faye Schulman – that we know much about them at all.

Schulman was a woman with movie-star looks and a cheeky smile. During the war, she was also the only known Jewish partisan photographer.

Schulman's road to fame came from horror. In August 1942, Nazi occupiers murdered more than 1850 people in the Lenin ghetto, including Schulman's family. She was spared only because the Nazis – meticulous record keepers – valued her photographic skills.

But as she later looked at a photograph she had been forced to take of the dead in a mass grave after the slaughter, she recognised members of her family, including her parents. It was then she resolved to fight back. And part of that fight was to ensure that what happened to Jewish people during the Holocaust would never be forgotten.

"I want people to know that there was resistance," Schulman said, years later.

"Jews did not go like sheep to the slaughter. Many fought back – if there was the slightest opportunity – and thousands lost their lives fighting the enemy and working to save lives. I was a photographer. I have pictures. I have proof."