Defiance
By Nechama Tec
296 Pages
There are many magnificent works that portray the horror that was the Jewish Holocaust. Just to name a few examples, in film there are classics such as Schindler’s List, The Pianist , and The Pawnbroker, while literature boasts The Diary of Anne Frank, Night and Maus. While these are all phenomenal works, and I recommend each and every one of them, there are notable omissions from them as well as most pieces on the Holocaust. Foremost, each and every one these works are truly empathetic and sympathetic on the plight of the Jews in the Holocaust, we must not forget of the 5 million other people who were also massacred under Hitler’s regime, including gays, gypsies, communists, the mentally ill and some Catholics, especially priests. (I can not cover this aspect of the Holocaust here as it is not pertinent to Defiance, but I highly suggest that anyone who wishes to know more about these various groups to research further online in publications and works such as the one posted here to the Huffington Post.)
Another unintended effect of most Holocaust works is collectively creating the image of the Jews being helpless victims during World War II. It is not necessarily the fault of each of these works as individual pieces for this, especially the memoirs that focus on the experiences of an individual which of course can only contain what their author or narrator witnessed. Even so, this phenomena presents audiences with the idea that the Jews were either submissively biding time in their ghettos and praying that things improved, or that the Jews had no recourse as they were slaughtered in concentration camps. The occasional uprising by a handful of obstinate Jews in the ghettos and camps were always crushed swiftly by the Nazis, nothing more than a last-ditch effort on the part of the desperate.
Defiance challenges this conception by presenting the story of the Bielski brothers of Eastern Poland. In late 1941, the entire Bielski family is wiped out by Nazi forces, while brothers Tuvia, Zus, Asael and Aron are able to escape into the nearby forest. Rather than surrender to the Nazis, the brothers use their survival skills and knowledge of the forest’s geography in order to rescue Jews in the area and bring them under their fold. Their numbers quickly swell to the dozens (and later into the hundreds) and thus they turn from a ragged group of refugees into an “Otriad”, known in English as a Partisan organization. Partisans were organizations made up of civilians that fought against the Nazis, engaging in everything from sabotage and secret intelligence to organized raids and assassinations.
Originally the Bielskis planned to be nothing more than a few brothers and some rescued friends that would simply try and survive, but the Bielski Otriad grows exponentially as refugees hear of its success and quickly the group is the size of a small town. The population is not just young men, but includes women, children, the elderly and the sick. Buildings are constructed out of available materials and every adult is put to work as homes, storefronts, temples, hospitals, schools and armories are constructed in their new forest home. The Nazis discover this new civilization eventually and the Bielski Otriad not only manages to repel them, but even chases after them in the following months, destroying Nazi supply networks and taking out soldiers in organized ambushes. The Bielski Otriad is a force to be reckoned with, as the brothers all become capable leaders in either military strategy or daily administration. Eventually any able-bodied adult is taught to fight, including the women, converting an Otriad from a rag-tag survival squad into a deadly fortress squared away deep in the Belorussian forest made up of hundreds of armed Jews ready to fight to the last stand.
The Nazis and the Otriad clash for years with many dying on both side, and they are far from the only threats to the Otriad’s existence. Brutal winters and food shortages plague the Otriad and they are harassed by viscous packs of wolves. Russian fighters also discover the Otriad, and while some are friendly and offer cooperation, others are opportunistic and try and get many of the young men to defect from the camp. There are several instances where small groups of men attempt to sabotage the Bielskis in support of the Russians which leads to brutal fighting within their ranks. Between the roving band of hostile groups, brutal weather, primitive conditions supply shortages, and perilous infighting, Defiance often feels like a document from a post-apocalyptic novel. Despite this, all the events of this book are based on eye-witness account. And I don’t want to make it seem like this book is nothing but a nihilistic dredge, because life has its sweet spots even at the darkest times. For every funeral there is a wedding, for every shootout there is a small festival. The final chapter of the book opens with a poignant paragraph that describes the philosophy of the Bielski Otriad as a whole:
“People who are exposed to extreme dangers may be paralyzed into inaction. Whether this occurs is in part contingent on the extent to which they define a situation as hopeless. As a rule, fighting requires hope, yet hope tends to fade with grave dangers. Those who have been sentenced to death give up hope. Yet hope dies reluctantly. For some individuals condemned to death even a slim chance of survival turns the wish to live into an all-consuming passion.”
As real life is, the book is not told through a few major plot points in the conventional fictional style but rather many different small events and stories. Because of this, I can not describe the plot as a whole, but I found the whole story captivating up to the end. I first saw the movie adaptation of this book, which I also very much enjoyed (starring Daniel Craig and Liev Schreiber), but the book contains so many wonderful details and small stories that can not be packed into a two-hour film. And as a Jewish person myself, it is frankly very gratifying to know that some Jews, rather than submitting to Nazi authority, responded with a war cry and machine gun bullets; even if they were to die, it was going to be standing on two feet. For anyone who wants to read a war-time underdog story, a totally new perspective on Jews during the Holocaust, or a post-apocalypse style story that took place in reality, I highly recommend Defiance.
[Word Count: 1011]
The Grotto 