The prevailing image of European Jews during the Holocaust is one of helpless victims, but in fact many Jews struggled against the terrors of the Third Reich. In Defiance, Nechama Tec offers a riveting history of one such group, a forest community in western Belorussia that would number more than 1,200 Jews by 1944--the largest armed rescue operation of Jews by Jews in World War II. Tec reveals that this extraordinary community included both men and women, some with weapons, but mostly unarmed, ranging from infants to the elderly. She reconstructs for the first time the amazing details of how these partisans and their families--hungry, exposed to the harsh winter weather--managed not only to survive, but to offer protection to all Jewish fugitives who could find their way to them. Read the Foreward
Writer and director Edward Zwick reveals the challenges and personal significance of making a film adaptation of Nechama Tec's Defiance in the excerpt below. Among his extensive film credits, Zwick is best known for his direction of Blood Diamond and The Last Samaurai.
An inevitable rite of passage in any Jewish child’s informal initiation to adulthood is to study, with grim fascination, the grainy, out-of-focus images of hollow-eyed survivors in striped pajamas, the amateur photos of corpses piled high in freshly dug pits, or possibly the 16 mm handheld GI footage of living skeletons clinging to barbed wire during the liberation of the camps. Such grisly iconography of passivity and victimization was, during my childhood, and probably is still today, not only an article of faith, but also a source of secret shame. As an assimilated suburban kid growing up in the Midwest, I had thrilled to World War II stories about John Kennedy and PT 109 (Cliff Robertson in the movie version), the leatherneck marines at Guadalcanal (John Wayne), the flying fortresses over Germany (Gregory Peck), and so many more. In feeble contrast, Jewish heroes were the ancient biblical warriors evoked by uninspired Sunday school teachers--Bar Kochba and Judah Macabee wielding spears and jawbones, or young David with his little slingshot.
So when my friend and collaborator, Clay Frohman, came to me with a book called Defiance, I was skeptical. "Not another Holocaust movie," I said. But Clay was insistent. Here, he said, was something fresh and utterly provocative. And so, somewhat grudgingly, I plunged into Nechama’s Tec’s remarkable book and found myself deeply moved. That was ten years ago. And the feelings I had upon that first reading have only grown stronger with time. To read of the Bielski brothers and their fight to create a safe haven in the midst of a hell on earth evokes in me something utterly primitive and deeply personal, a roiling wave of fear, awe, humility, and admiration. And outrage, too, that such a story was not better known. Here, clutching captured Schmeisser submachine guns and "potatomasher" grenades, were Jewish fighters whose deeds were as stirring and brave as any I had ever encountered. And what’s more, it was all true.
Indeed, as contemporary scholarship has now revealed, resistance in fact found its expression in almost every city, town, and shtetl in Eastern Europe over which the shadows of extermination had fallen. There is one caveat I feel obliged to offer by way of introduction. Anyone picking up this book in the hope of reading a tacky "novelization" of Defiance, the movie, is bound to be disappointed. This is a brilliant narrative, written with an insight and analysis that only a lifetime spent studying its subject can provide. I am grateful to Nechama Tec for her guidance, her generosity, and most of all her forbearance. From the very outset she understood the dilemma of trying to put her book on film. Even more important, she understood our intentions in trying to do so. I like to imagine a boy like myself, growing up in search of his identity and coming upon this story. And I’d like to think it is in that spirit that she has graciously forgiven us any number of exaggerations, compressions, and omissions, not to mention the limits of our imagination in capturing, on film, the extraordinary spirit of her work.
Edward Zwick
Santa Monica, California
