TORONTO — There was one thing that saved Faye Schulman from being killed in the Holocaust. Her camera.
Daniel Navy, 17, entered several photos in the March of the Living 2009 art exhibit.
High school students from around Toronto submitted their paintings, poems and photos to the March of the Living art exhibit, held on Jan. 14 at the Lipa Green Building.
TORONTO — There was one thing that saved Faye Schulman from being killed in the Holocaust. Her camera.
Daniel Navy, 17, entered several photos in the March of the Living 2009 art exhibit.
Schulman, a Holocaust survivor from Poland, was 16 when a group of Nazis arrived at the ghetto in Lenin, Poland, where her family had been living. Their goal was clear – to kill the entire community.
“I woke up, I heard crying, screaming. My sister was changing her children. She wanted her children to die in clean underwear,” she said. “I helped. I can still feel their skin.”
Schulman was a photographer at the time. She had taken photos for the Nazis and ran into an officer that she had photographed. He recognized the teenager and told her to follow another Nazi officer.
“He took me into the new synagogue, which was not in the ghetto. I noticed there were five families, a shoemaker, a tailor, a carpenter, someone who looked after horses,” she said. “I understood that those are people the killer picked to be alive. I didn’t want to be alive, I wanted to be killed with my mother and father.”
But Schulman wasn’t killed. And on Jan. 14, at the March of the Living photography, art and prose exhibit, the survivor shared her story with a new generation of photographers.
The exhibit, called “Reflections Through our Eyes: March of the Living 2009,” was a collection of paintings, poems and photos. The art was submitted by Toronto high school student participants of last year’s March of the Living, a two-week trip to Poland and Israel that promotes Holocaust education and a three-kilometre walk from Auschwitz to the Birkenau concentration camp.
The gallery event was organized by the Toronto March of the Living and the House, a centre for Jewish youth.
For Romy Pilarski, the co-organizer and a March of the Living participant, the artwork is a way of keeping stories like Schulman’s alive.
“Each photo or poem has its own story of a participant who was in the place where [Jews] were killed,” she said.
“It’s a very moving experience,” she said. “Hitler didn’t win. They failed and we’re here to tell the tale.”
For Pilarski, each photo, poem and painting is proof of that. In the Lipa Green Building, where the exhibit was mounted, the walls were lined with pictures of barbed wire, empty barracks, Israeli flags and, in one of Daniel Navy’s photos, the path to the gas chambers in Auschwitz.
“I’m proud of my work being displayed,” said Navy, 17, a student at the Anne and Max Tanenbaum Community Hebrew Academy of Toronto. “I just think it’s an awesome event. Having everyone’s memories, you’re taking a trip back in time. It’s a really important journey to take.”
Navy took part in the three-kilometre march. His most striking memory is stopping halfway through to look back.
“You see people for kilometres. It’s an amazing feeling to be there and say, ‘We conquered [the Holocaust].’”
