Defiance: The Bielski Partisans | 
 enlarge | Author: Nechama Tec
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Category: Book
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Rating:  8 reviews
Sales Rank: 34723
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 304
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 8.8 x 5.9 x 0.9
ISBN: 0195093909
Dewey Decimal Number: 341
EAN: 9780195093902
ASIN: 0195093909
Publication Date: December 8, 1994
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Amazon.com Review
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
Product Description
The prevailing image of European Jews during the Holocaust years is one of helpless victims under a death sentence, unable to fight consignment to the ghettos, to the camps, and to the gas chambers. In fact, many Jews struggled alone or with others against the terrors of the Third Reich, risking their lives against overwhelming odds for the slimmest chance of survival, or a mere glimpse of freedom. 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. Describing the entire partisan movement in the region, Tec shows that while most forest fighters in Belorussia were rifle-carrying young men, the members of 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, always on the lookout for German patrols--managed not only to survive, but to offer protection to all Jewish fugitives who could find their way to them. Driven by courage born out of despair, they dug wells, set up workshops to repair guns, made clothes, and resoled shoes, supplied services to other guerilla units, and even established a makeshift hospital and school in the forest. Arguing that this success would have been unthinkable without the vision of one man, Tec offers penetrating insight into the group's commander, Tuvia Bielski, and his journey from his life as the son of the only Jewish peasant family in an isolated rural village to his emergence as a leader possessing the charisma and courage to command under all but impossible circumstances. Tec brings to light the untold story of Bielski's struggle as a partisan who lost his parents, wife, and two brothers to the Nazis, yet never wavered in his conviction that it was more important to save one Jew than to kill twenty Germans. She shows how, under Bielski's guidance, the partisans smuggled Jews out of heavily guarded ghettos, scouted the roads for fugitives, and led retaliatory raids against Belorussian peasants who collaborated with the Nazis against their former Jewish neighbors. Refusing to turn away the weak or the old for the sake of the survival of the larger group, Bielski would warn new arrivals to the forest, "Life is difficult, we are in danger all the time, but if we perish, if we die, we die like human beings." A scholar, a writer, and herself a Holocaust survivor, author Nechama Techas devoted the last two decades to studying the fate of European Jewry, recording rare but vital examples of human compassion, resistance, altruism and heroism in the face of overwhelming horror and despair. Drawing on wide-ranging research and never before published interviews with surviving partisans--including Tuvia Bielski himself two weeks before his death in 1987--she reconstructs here the poignant and unforgettable story of those who chose to fight.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 3 more reviews...
Brilliant scholarship; hard read November 25, 2008
This is a brilliant social history of a Jewish resistance movement in Belarus and Eastern Poland. It focusses on the Bielski partisan group lead by the three Bielski brothers.
What made this partisan unit different from the others active in the area was the fact A) they were Jewish and B) focused much more on saving lives than on attacking the Germans. Their efforts eventually resulted in the saving of more than 1,000 Jews.
The book is a standard social history that tackles its subject in a thematic rather than a narrative style. This makes the book less accessible. This is not a piece of popular history but is intended to be read by scholars who have made a study of the Holocaust or the Jews. The result is that the book can be hard to follow at times as it does not strictly follow a chronological format. Additionally, the book seems repetitive as the author supported his assertions with a large number of examples many of which are very similar.
This is a stunning piece of scholarship with the information presented logically and clearly in a remarkably evenhanded manner. This is done at the expense of readability and accessibility. Therefore, I would not recommend this book to the casual reader but to the serious student of the subject.
"Amazing" doesn't begin to describe what Tuvia Bielski accomplished November 17, 2008
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 --- and by many better ones, like the French villagers in Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed? With the exception of rare individuals like Viktor Frankl --- who survived the concentration camps to write Man's Search for Meaning --- 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 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?
A Truly Amazing Story!!! August 29, 2008
This is an absolutely amazing and touching story. The will to live that the people in the Bielski Camp had is truly inspiring. Nechama Tec tells this true story with such attention to detail and such passion. This book is an absolute must read, it is a piece of history that everyone should know about.
A breathtaking and touching book!!
 Riveting Story June 22, 2006
7 out of 8 found this review helpful
This was among the six books my dad loaned me recently. It's about time there is a book about Jews saving other Jews! This book is a deep and thorough study of the partisans who have managed to escape the ghettos, camps and imprisonment and formed a group to survive till the war was over. It is an insightful look into a history of a group of people that one do not hear much of.
The author has relied heavily on personal interviews ~~ which definitely made this book interesting. However, this book was either translated choppily or written choppily because it was very hard to follow in some cases ~~ as the stories skipped back and forth and it got confusing following it. That is why I rated this a three ~~ I literally had to skip chapters because it was repetitive and sometimes, too drawn out. It was not written in a way to capture your attention ~~ if you have an imagination, this book only serves to enhance it because the stories are enlightening, terrible and wonderful ~~ depending on what it is. And after drawing it out for several hundred pages, the ending was rather chopped.
It is about time though that the world hears of Jews saving other Jews during this horrible blight on history. I think the stories are enlightening and provoking. The stories all rate a five star ~~ as they were personal and sometimes, intimate. The three Bielski brothers endured a lot to keep the Jews from starving to death as well as keeping order in a camp filled with women, children and men.
If you are studying the Holocaust and the Jews, please read this book. In spite of its' choppiness, it is still a good read and a good lesson to be learned. Everyone should read this and remember those who have fought to stay alive in that terrible time.
6-22-06
This Book is Absolutely Amazing April 7, 2004
12 out of 12 found this review helpful
In her book, "Defiance: The Bielski Partisans", Nechama Tec depicts an amazing tale of Jewish resistance and rescue on the eastern front during World War II. At the pith of this movement was one Tuvia Bielski, the commander of the large Jewish partisan outfit that roamed the Belorussian woods, constantly trying to avoid contact with the Germans. Tuvia, along with his brothers Asael and Zus were responsible for the salvation of over 1200 Jews, many of whom were elderly, female, or juvenile. Taking in such refugees in an extremely volatile environment was a huge risk. Without Tuvia's willingness, or determination to take on such risks, many of these people would have otherwise perished to the Nazi barbarity that was ubiquitous in the region. As a professor of sociology, the author Nechama Tec offers a unique perspective on this historical phenomenon. Her expertise brings into focus the social dynamic of partisan camps in World War II.
Rather than succumb to the popularly accepted view that Jews were passive victims who simply laid down and allowed the Nazi aggressors to do their bidding during the Holocaust, Tec attempts to elucidate the under-documented, untold side of the story. That is, despite the widespread annihilation and extermination that Jewish citizens faced in Europe, there were pockets of resistance to the Nazi menace that deserve laudatory recognition. Tec takes the sentiment that there is a necessity to educate people on the unmentioned and tries to fill in the gap she believes is left by mainstream historians. Her effort to do so indeed deserves the very same laudatory recognition that she sets out to bestow upon the Bielski partisans. Tec makes the interesting suggestion that, contrary to popular belief, the Eastern European Jewish population was chock-full of resilient human beings. Human beings who were not only perfectly capable of surviving harsh physical conditions of the Belorussian woods, but also endowed with enough self respect to openly defy and resist the malevolent psychological conditions brought about by the Nazi occupiers.
The evidence that Tec employs is abundant. She relies heavily on personal interviews with people who lived in, and survived with Tuvia Bielski's partisan group. Obviously, such interviews can be considered primary text evidence, and are therefore integral to any comprehensive historical study. However, the question of the reliability of such sources needs to be raised. Having conducted the interviews nearly fifty years post hoc, Tec leaves the question of their accuracy wide open. Many times, in the years that pass after a traumatic event, people who have lived through that event have a tendency to romanticize it. This skepticism is in no way meant to take away from the tremendous effort and commendable activity of the Bielski partisan organization. It is merely a suggestion that the facts offered by the various interviewees need to be taken with a grain of salt. The accuracy of the overall picture is not what should be questioned, only the minute details. Despite the possibility of these petty hair-splitting ambiguities, the nature of the evidence that she employs makes her argument a believable one.
As one tarries along the path that is the study of the Second World War, one continually stumbles upon certain recurring themes. Perhaps one of the most intriguing of these themes is the duality of hope. Hope was such a major factor in so many peoples' lives during this turbulent time in Eastern Europe, regardless of their religious beliefs. There is no doubt that hope for freedom, hope for equality, hope for a better life, and hope for a liberated post war Europe was the underpinning of the exemplary actions of the Bielski partisans. Such hope supplied this sui generis group of Jews with something to live for, something to long for. However, hope has a darker side as well, a side that many choose to ignore. At the very same time that hope was motivating the Jews to defy, resist and survive, it was providing legitimacy to the atrocities committed by Nazi collaborators. If hope was drawn on a continuum, the Bielski partisans, as limned in Nechama Tec's "Defiance", should be placed on one extremity, epitomizing the good that can come from hope. On the opposite extremity should be the various collaborators depicted in Tadeusz Borowski's "This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen". These people absolutely epitomized the evil and nefariousness that hope can breed. When studying the Holocaust it is important to understand that hope is not always a virtuous attribute. It is essential for one to comprehend the paradoxical qualities of hope during this pestilent period of Nazi occupation.
Overall, Nechama Tec does a wonderful job recounting this story. Her sociological perspective helps to illuminate the organizational dynamics of partisan groups in Nazi occupied Eastern Europe. This organizational understanding is not always available from strictly historical authors. From a Jewish standpoint, it is particularly difficult to read her book, and not swell up with pride when learning about the messianic determination of Tuvia Bielski to save his people. Perhaps messianic is a bit too strong of a word for this situation. Still, Tuvia's work was highly meritorious. If one word could be used to describe the manner in which Jews are portrayed by mainstream History it would be compliance. If one word could be used to describe the manner in which Jews are portrayed by Nechama Tec it would be, and is Defiance. Her title is an apt one indeed. Ultimately, her work is a must read for anyone wishing to broaden their understanding of the Holocaust, Jewish history, or European history. Thusly, her book is recommended with the highest amount of adulation.
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