A Partisan's Memoir: Woman of the Holocaust

J.L. Granatstein is a professor of history at York University, the
co-author of the Dictionary of Canadian Military History and Empire to
Umpire: Canada and the World to the 1990s, and the author of The Good
Fight.

Faye Schulman’s memoir of her life in Poland before 1939, and of her
service as a Soviet partisan for two years, has its salutary lessons.
The story is idealized to some extent, with ever-heroic partisans
fighting without ideology against the ever-evil Nazis; but there is more
than enough truth in the latter description, at least, to lend realism.
Schulman’s relatives, living in the town of Lenin, Poland, were, along
with virtually every other Jew in the village, murdered, but as a
photographer she was deemed useful and allowed to live. She escaped and
joined up with partisans in 1942, served as a nurse and fighter, had the
satisfaction of attacking the German garrison in Lenin, and eventually
found that several of her brothers had survived. She also married, made
her way to Canada, and had a useful, satisfying life. Her book reads
well, but it sounds practised, full of stories long told, and with the
rough edges smoothed off. Still, the broad outlines of struggle and
survival in the face of monstrous evil ring true.