(2008; English w/Russian) Upon encountering Tuvia Bielski (Daniel Craig) and his "bandits," a Russian unit accuses them of stealing from the Belorussian locals; the Soviet commander Viktor Panchenko (Ravil Isyanov) scoffs at their claim of being partisan fighters: "But Jews don't fight." Tuvia replies: "These Jews do."

Based on Nechama Tee's nonfiction book, Defiance: The Bielski Partisans, this film defies the prevailing view that Ashkenazi Jews were all passive victims in the face of the Holocaust; director Edward Zwick, who co-wrote the screenplay, dramatizes the great daring of the Bielski Otriad during the first of three years of their resistance against the Nazis.

Opening with archival footage of Hitler's 1941 occupation of Belorussia - the German SS murdering 50,000 people in weeks while a million more awaited death or deportation - the movie merges black-and-white into color with Zus Bielski (Live Schreiber) and younger brother Asael (Jamie Bell) returning home to find their father dead, youngest sibling in hiding, mother and wives missing. In the Lipiczanska Forest in August, Tuvia joins his three younger brothers; shortly afterward they come upon a trench of slaughtered bodies and other survivors like themselves fleeing the pogrom.

Relying on sympathetic Christians for food and information, Tuvia, having learned that the local police official is responsible for his father's and many other deaths, goes to the official's home for a revenge killing. However, as their number increases and they construct a camp, disagreeing with Zus, who wants to kill the collaborators, Tuvia insists: "We must not become like them." Zus answers: "No, but we can kill like them."

Ambushing Germans and their fraternizers, the partisans accumulate weapons; but they attempt to respect farmers, taking food proportionally for their survival, not as thieves. "Our revenge is to live," says Tuvia.

Their being discovered by a band of local militia forces them to abandon their camp as winter approaches and resources become scarcer. Contact with Commander Panchenko's Russians causes a split within the otriad as Zus (who refers to many of the Hebrews among the partisans as "pretentious Jews") and other warriors make alliance with the Communists to fight the Fascists, leaving Tuvia in charge of the remainder.

In the new camp (its population swollen after Tuvia's having convinced those confined to the ghetto to ignore their rabbi's passivity of "waiting for God") where men have taken "forest wives" and intellectuals debate the Talmud and politics, Tuvia establishes rules for the community: everyone will work, women will fight along side the men, and pregnancies are forbidden. Nonetheless, Asael formally weds Chaya.

In the Nalibocka Forest camp of December 1941, conditions worsen further during the depths of winter, with a typhus epidemic, lack of nourishment, and contention over leadership - Tuvia being ill, nursed by Lilka Ticktin (Alexa Davalos). "Choose another people," implores a former teacher of God: "Take back the gift of our holiness."

But defiant David, though outnumbered and outmatched by the strength of the enemy with its aircraft and bombs, refuses at the brink of desperation - "God will not part these waters" - to surrender to the Nazi Goliath.

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Copyright © 2008 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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