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By
Published: 2008
Category: Non Fiction [4]
Defiance: The Bielski Partisans
Nechama Tec
Video
Movie Trailer [6]
In January, a movie called Defiance opens. The director is Edward Zwick, who did Glory, Blood Diamond and The Last Samurai; back in the day, he was one of the creators of thirtysomething.
Zwick likes big heroic themes, and he has one here, with two heroic actors --- Daniel Craig and Liev Schreiber --- in the leading roles. I've read the book that best tells the story behind the film. I've watched the preview. And although this movie has been much postponed and is finally coming out in a season when studios dump their most troubled product, I fully expect to endure two hours of convulsive sobbing on opening day.
Why the extreme emotion? This is a Holocaust story --- and what's more extreme than a madman killing six million Jews, gypsies, Catholics and homosexuals? But we've endured so many Holocaust stories, we're drained. What could possibly grab us by the lapels and wring out fresh tears?
Jews saving themselves.
Jews saving themselves? No way. Weren't the only significant efforts to save Jews led by one bad Christian --- the story told in Steven Spielberg's film, Schindler's List [7] --- and by many better ones, like the French villagers in Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed [8]? With the exception of rare individuals like Viktor Frankl --- who survived the concentration camps to write Man's Search for Meaning [9] --- I'm sure I'm not the only one here who has long believed that almost all the Jews killed by Hitler went meekly to their deaths. And that's not to call them cowards. It was folly to resist, so very few did. Nobility lay in a scrap of bread saved for a child, a prayer on the way to the gas chamber. It did not consist of a martyrdom that inflamed the Germans and caused more Jews to die.
Well, get this: Tuvia Bielski and his brothers saved 1,200 Jews by leading them into the Belorussian forest. When the war ended, only 49 had died. That's an attrition rate of less than 5%. In comparison, of the 4,000 Jews who escaped the Polish ghettos and tried to survive by themselves in the forest, only two hundred survived. That's an attrition rate of 95%.
Defiance [5] tells two linked and equally compelling stories: the superhuman leadership of young Tuvia Bielski and the survival strategies of the Jewish community he created in the forest.
Tuvia Bielski was a nobody. Born in 1906, he came from a peasant family with no electricity or running water. Their large family lived in a two-room hut.
But there was something special about Tuvia. In prewar Poland, most Jews lived in cities and did not work with their hands; in their little Belorussian village, the Bielskis, the only Jews, owned a mill. Tuvia grew up tall and strong --- and ready to fight: “Father used to say with fine people we have to be good and proper, but with bad people we have to be bad.” Literally --- when a neighboring farmer abused and attacked him, the teenaged Tuvia beat him so badly the guy wasn't seen for weeks.
Tuvia joined the Polish army, became a sharpshooter, got married. In July of 1941, the German army arrived and gave the Jews fifteen minutes to leave their homes. Then the Nazis moved into urban ghettos, where, for sport, a German soldier might offer to help a young mother --- only to toss her baby in the air and spear it with a bayonet.
Because Tuvia and his brothers refused to comply with German orders, they were not at home when the Germans killed their parents, Tuvia's wife and other relatives. They fled to the woods, acquired guns, made terrified peasants give them food. They lived in tents, slept in their clothes, cooked in a pot hung from a branch, moved fast and often.
Tuvia became the group's commander. One brother was in charge of day-to-day activities. Another was head of reconnaissance.
Their goal: save Jews.
This is counter-intuitive. The Germans kill your family, don't you most want to kill Germans? In that situation, saving lives is a fine goal --- but very secondary. And yet, from day one, Tuvia was obsessed with rescuing every Jew in Poland.
No easy task. “Two Jews, five opinions” is not just a joke --- the escapees from the ghettos weren't looking to be led. But Tuvia organized then, enforced disciple, became their hero. He didn't make fiery speeches --- he led by determination and commitment.
Listen to him talk to a group of new arrivals to his camp:
"I don't promise you anything --- we may be killed while we try to live. But we will do all we can to save more lives. That is our way --- we don't select, we don't eliminate the old, the children, the women. Life is difficult, we are in danger all the time, but if we perish, if we die, we die like human beings."
The bulk of the book is closely-reported history. It is unsparing. You will see the Bieklsis execute Polish peasants who betrayed them --- and, once, a Jew who refused to obey orders. You will read of drinking, desperate grief, flagrant adultery, jaw-dropping ingenuity. And, after the war ends, you will see what happens to a charismatic leader when the need for charisma is no longer.
“Defiance” was written by a professor who, as a child, survived World War II in Poland by pretending to be Catholic. It has the flaws of academic writing. Professor Tec seems to have talked to every survivor of the Bielski partisans. In her understandably over-long, over-detailed book, there are more characters than you can follow. Feel free to skip ahead.
But no matter how much or little you read, you will ask yourself some uncomfortable questions. From the experience of the Bielski partisans, it would seem that men and women who were used to physical labor were most likely to adjust and flourish. That's not the majority of readers of this site --- or this book. And then there is the matter of spirit --- those who agreed that it was more important for Jews to live than for Germans to die made the best resistance fighters. Could you have squelched your desire for vengeance?
And, most of all, you will ask: Could I have survived this? And if I did, who would I be?
To buy “Defiance” from Amazon.com, click here. [5]