Sunday, May 03, 2009
Out of the Ghettos and into the Forests!
Defiance (O.U.P. 1993, reprinted 2009 with a foreword by Edward Zwick)
Reviewed by Red Bingham
Defiance – if you haven’t read a copy of Nechama Tec’s story of Belorussian Jews fighting the Nazis and collaborators, get it and read it. If you haven’t seen the movie, “Defiance”, then wait a few weeks and it will be coming to a cinema near you.
Predictably, the release of the movie has spawned reviews that question the timing of it (given the events in Gaza). There is also at least one reviewer from the English Guardian who points out “the heads of all eight major studios, and so many producers and directors, happen to be Jewish” and who goes on to draw parallels with Hollywood’s treatment of Moslems.[1] An interesting point perhaps but largely irrelevant to a film that focusses on a Jewish Partisan detachment that successfully fought back in WWII while keeping alive over a thousand men, women and children who had escaped the ghettos. That the film is a Hollywood treatment of an historical event and therefore a fictional narrative that is based on real events
The world knows little about the Bielski brothers – not even many Jews have heard of them. However, Nechama Tec’s history based on exhaustive interviews with surviving partisans will change all that. When people ask, “Why didn’t the Jews fight back in World War Two?” we can say, “Read Defiance”. Dr Nechama Tec chronicles how in 1941, Tuvia Bielski and his brothers Zus and Asael who, were farmers in the Polish/Belorussian village of Stankiewicze, organised a resistance movement whose priority was to save Jews and whose secondary aim was to fight back. This historical account describes how the Bielskis and some
Nechama Tec (maiden name Hela Bawnik)[2] was a child in Poland when the Nazis invaded. Her immediate family went into hiding and survived the war. Her autobiography, Dry Tears, deals with her family’s struggle to remain alive by denying their identity. Perhaps that is why she became so fascinated by the Bielski Otriad who lived and fought as Jews at a time when to do so was nearly impossible. Dr Tec’s online biography details many of the themes in Defiance: her “research and publications have concentrated on the intricate relationships between self-preservation, compassion, altruism, rescue, resistance, cooperation, and gender. She is currently working on two books, Profiles of Women and A Comparative Study of Jewish and Non-Jewish Resistance.[3]”
Defiance is not Mila 18. Mila 18 by Leon Uris and Schindler’s Ark by Thomas Kenneally were both excellent novels but that’s what they were – novels. Both were well researched and largely based on real events but you will find them in the fiction part of the library. Defiance is definitely non-fiction. Dr Tec’s blend of historical and sociological research is detailed and the reader will come across passages that have been repeated, comments about how accounts differ and comparisons of differing power relationships within the forest community. While these can be a little dry at times and can interfere with the flow of the narrative, it gives the book its historical integrity. You’ll still be turning the pages till the end to find out what happened to everyone. And the news there is pretty good – the Bielski otriad (partisan detachment with the Russian army) had an attrition rate of only 5% (an estimated 49 out of 1,200) and remarkably, noone died of starvation despite living in forests for three years.[4]
Below: A still from the movie with Daniel Craig as Tuvia Bielski
Defiance (O.U.P. 1993, reprinted 2009 with a foreword by Edward Zwick)
Reviewed by Red Bingham
Defiance – if you haven’t read a copy of Nechama Tec’s story of Belorussian Jews fighting the Nazis and collaborators, get it and read it. If you haven’t seen the movie, “Defiance”, then wait a few weeks and it will be coming to a cinema near you.
Predictably, the release of the movie has spawned reviews that question the timing of it (given the events in Gaza). There is also at least one reviewer from the English Guardian who points out “the heads of all eight major studios, and so many producers and directors, happen to be Jewish” and who goes on to draw parallels with Hollywood’s treatment of Moslems.[1] An interesting point perhaps but largely irrelevant to a film that focusses on a Jewish Partisan detachment that successfully fought back in WWII while keeping alive over a thousand men, women and children who had escaped the ghettos. That the film is a Hollywood treatment of an historical event and therefore a fictional narrative that is based on real events
The world knows little about the Bielski brothers – not even many Jews have heard of them. However, Nechama Tec’s history based on exhaustive interviews with surviving partisans will change all that. When people ask, “Why didn’t the Jews fight back in World War Two?” we can say, “Read Defiance”. Dr Nechama Tec chronicles how in 1941, Tuvia Bielski and his brothers Zus and Asael who, were farmers in the Polish/Belorussian village of Stankiewicze, organised a resistance movement whose priority was to save Jews and whose secondary aim was to fight back. This historical account describes how the Bielskis and some
Nechama Tec (maiden name Hela Bawnik)[2] was a child in Poland when the Nazis invaded. Her immediate family went into hiding and survived the war. Her autobiography, Dry Tears, deals with her family’s struggle to remain alive by denying their identity. Perhaps that is why she became so fascinated by the Bielski Otriad who lived and fought as Jews at a time when to do so was nearly impossible. Dr Tec’s online biography details many of the themes in Defiance: her “research and publications have concentrated on the intricate relationships between self-preservation, compassion, altruism, rescue, resistance, cooperation, and gender. She is currently working on two books, Profiles of Women and A Comparative Study of Jewish and Non-Jewish Resistance.[3]”
Defiance is not Mila 18. Mila 18 by Leon Uris and Schindler’s Ark by Thomas Kenneally were both excellent novels but that’s what they were – novels. Both were well researched and largely based on real events but you will find them in the fiction part of the library. Defiance is definitely non-fiction. Dr Tec’s blend of historical and sociological research is detailed and the reader will come across passages that have been repeated, comments about how accounts differ and comparisons of differing power relationships within the forest community. While these can be a little dry at times and can interfere with the flow of the narrative, it gives the book its historical integrity. You’ll still be turning the pages till the end to find out what happened to everyone. And the news there is pretty good – the Bielski otriad (partisan detachment with the Russian army) had an attrition rate of only 5% (an estimated 49 out of 1,200) and remarkably, noone died of starvation despite living in forests for three years.[4]
Below: A still from the movie with Daniel Craig as Tuvia Bielski
