Defiance (2008)

Christian Ethics and the Movies

Reviewed by David A. Thomas,
Prof. of Rhetoric, Emeritus University of Richmond[i]

War and Anti-Semitism

Defiance (2008)

Tuvia Bielski: “Every day of freedom is like an act of faith”.

Question: During the years of the Holocaust, when over six million Jews were exterminated by the Nazis, why didn’t the Jews fight back? Answer: sometimes they did.

Recent historical articles and books have explored Jewish resistance movements, in the ghettos, and in concentration camps. Wikipedia lists more than twenty entries detailing known Jewish uprisings. In the case of Defiance, a band of Jewish brothers in Eastern Europe became underground resistance fighters, and lived to tell about it.

Belorussia (now Belarus) is a landlocked country of forests and marshes bordered by Poland, Lithuania, and Russia. When Hitler invaded Poland, Belorussia was the hardest hit country in Eastern Europe. Over ninety percent of its Jewish population was decimated when nearly 400,000 young persons were sent to slave labor camps, and hundreds of thousands more were killed in the ovens and concentration camps. Over 5,000 Belorussian settlements and villages were destroyed. Himmler’s plan was to eradicate three-quarters of the entire Belorussian population, making slaves of the rest.

Defiance is one of the best documented of the growing collection of untold stories of Jewish resistance so far. The Bielskis, a farm family, was decimated but not totally destroyed by the invading Nazi regime. The two parents were murdered, along with several children; but four older Bielski sons escaped into the forest. From hiding, they formed the nucleus of a small but effective moving camp that managed to survive, uncaptured, to the end of the German occupation in 1944.

Defiance, The Movie. Defiance is a harrowing but ultimately inspiring tale of how the four very different brothers responded to their desperate situation. The story focuses on the two oldest brothers, Tuvia (Daniel Craig, most recently the star of 007 movies) and Zus (Liev Screiber), who personify two contrasting personality types. Their interpersonal conflicts spark most of the dramatic story line. (Think, hypothetically, or a civil rights group headed by the duo of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X, in the same room.) Their third brother, Asael (Jamie Bell), a young fighter and lover, adds human interest through the sub-text of his forest romance and wedding. The fourth brother, Aron, is depicted as a traumatized, nearly mute teen with only a minor role in the story.

Defiance is a thinking person’s action movie. Indeed, the Bielski brothers hooked up with local partisans to help the Russian Army, but the story focuses more on the ways the two brothers respond to the impossible struggle of staying two steps ahead of Nazi (and Nazi sympathizer) pursuers. At one point, Tuvia had a huge reward on his head.

Tuvia Bielski is a wily Russian Army veteran with good leadership and management skills. He sees his mission primarily in terms of saving as many Jews as he can for as long as he can. His brother Zus is an impulsive activist whose first reaction is to fight back; he is driven by his motive to get revenge. The Bielski brothers begin their odyssey with just a dozen other Jews, a small group that soon swelled to 47, then to a few hundred diverse Jews. Improvisation is their chief strategy. Among their growing entourage is a fair number of able-bodied young men who are actually capable of soldiering. Every day, they face the challenge of foraging for food and weapons while living undetected in the dense woods. By the end of their ordeal, they survive two brutal winters in the open.

At a certain point, Zus becomes impatient with Tuvia’s methodical patience. He recruits the cream of the crop among their men, and marches off to join a Russian underground resistance group. He leaves Tuvia to continue the operational task of organizing the remaining families, children, and old folks into a functioning community in hiding, in the dead of winter. Later in the story, just in the nick of time, Zus and his ragtag cavalry rejoin Tuvia and the main body of Jews, in the most crucial battle scene in the film. (Military buffs will recognize Tuvia’s tactic of waging a battle, to mount a classic flanking counterattack against an overwhelming force, worthy of Robert E. Lee.)

From tiny beginnings, the band of brothers and their followers continue to grow as more and more Jews are flushed out of their farms and ghettoes. Fleeing from the SS murder squads, the Jews gravitate towards the Bielski camp, which never turned anyone away. Tuvia imposes a rigid discipline founded on the rule that every person without exception must work, and everyone must share equally in whatever they have, including the potato soup and coarse rye bread. Makeshift “forest marriages” are accepted for the duration between the men and women whose real spouses were left behind, or killed; but pregnancies are forbidden because they cannot care for infants.

Traditional Jewish cultural, social, and religious rites are maintained by the rabbi. Together with the few intellectuals and artisan/tradesmen among them, they forge a functioning community in exile, but not without plenty of loud arguments. We listen to snippets of their debates over the ethical rules that must be applied to killings (both defensive and offensive – Zus: “We should have killed the milkman!”) Also, the group sets rules for how to be just in their robberies to get food supplies from neighboring farms. On one occasion, Tuvia acts decisively to execute one of their own mutinous members, which the group apparently accepts as the right thing for him to do.

In the credits, captions reveal that by the German withdrawal in 1944, the Bielski enclave finally numbered over 1200 Jews in their forest camp that included a makeshift school, nursery, bathhouse, and hospital. Only fifty died, or were killed by the Nazis. As was true of the Schindler’s List survivors, today the progeny of the Bielski brigade survivors number in the tens of thousands.

When the war ended, Tuvia remained married to his forest wife for life. Both Zus and Tuvia Bielski emigrated to NewYork City where they drove taxicabs and ran a trucking business together for thirty more years. Neither of them ever claimed any credit for what they did during the war. Aseal, the third brother, was later conscripted into the Russian Army in the final throes of WWII and died in battle. The fate of Aron was not specified.

Scriptural Implications. Defiance is a study in theology. Director Edward Zwick (Blood Diamonds, Shakespeare in Love Oscar winner) links Tuvia Bielski metaphorically with the story of Moses leading the slaves out of Egypt. During the brigade’s darkest hours, their wise rabbi continues to perform his important ritual functions, especially on holy days like Passover, all the while giving voice to his wavering doubts. At one point he prays to God, “Please take away our righteousness and choose some other people.”

Tuvia hears the Talmudic tradition, “He that saves a life is as if he has saved an entire world,” as, “He that saves a life becomes responsible for that life.” Reluctant at first to take on responsibility for others, he goes into the ghettoes to invite Jews to flee with him into the forest: “I’d rather save one old Jewish woman than kill ten German soldiers.”

Zwick, who claims an ancestor who died in the Polish woods, said: “You have these chapters of history that get lost. Sometimes that`s down to political agendas or because mythologies are created. Ideas and events that are contradictory to those myths often disappear. That`s what`s happened here. The image of European Jews going passively to their deaths is inaccurate. We hope this film corrects that view, while also exploring the specifics of the Bielski story. You have to consider how they felt. Where is God when they are hiding and scratching out this existence in the forests? Where is love in the forest? What is it like to be a child in the forest? All these things were important.”[ii]