Defiance
by Nechama Tec
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Book Summary Information
Author: Nechama TecForeword: Edward Zwick
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2008-12-26
ISBN: 0195376854
Number of pages: 374
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Product features:
- Defiance by Nechama Tec
Book Reviews of Defiance
Book Review: Some flaws, but as good a telling from the inside as the Bielski story will get
Summary: 5 Stars
You gotta love any story where, in the movie, a Jewish hero gets played by the same guy who played James Bond.
Tuvia Bielski was a real-life character who, with his brothers, saved 1,200 Jews from the Holocaust in the forests of Belorussia. He didn't stop at being a Jewish bandit or gunslinger, which he might have done; he insisted on saving as many of his fellows as possible, including a large number of civilians, total strangers, unable to fight - women, children, old people. This largesse was almost unknown among the partisans. Each life he saved was one that almost certainly would have been annihilated otherwise.
This and the accompanying movie are a timely telling of the Bielski story, timely because more attention is being paid now to the Holocaust inside the former Soviet Union, inaccessible during the Cold War. The Communists suppressed this history for any number of reasons, including the collaboration of local peoples in the killing of the Jews in their midst, their own anti-Semitism as expressed in the purges, and because Communists were never going to lead inquiries into genocide. Glass houses, etc.
This story's milieu will be unfamiliar to many readers - the small towns and primeval forests of Western Belorussia, land Polish before 1939, invaded by the Russians after their non-aggression pact with Hitler in 1939, overrun by the Germans in 1941, only to be retaken by the Soviets in 1944 and finally (for now) to become part of today's Belarus in 1989. The Bielskis were rural Jews, who farmed amidst their Belorussian neighbors, who knew the back country and how to survive there. Many other Jews in this story are rural or small town people, types unfamiliar to American Jews.
Tec doesn't supply enough historical background for my taste; I wanted to know if these were the remainders of the shtetls of the Jewish Pale, or if these had dissipated by this time and the Jews more intermingled in the surrounding communities. She notes a large percentage of the Bielski group were uneducated people, working class before the war. I'm unclear whether this was the makeup of the Jews of this area generally, if it reflects the Nazi targeting of Jewish elites for annihilation, or if it reflects who survived to get to the forest.
The book would have been improved by better maps. The only one included in the softcover version was cursory, barely a line drawing, that didn't include most place names referenced in the book. And the book needs more reference to outside military history. It may sustain the mood to tell it entirely from the partisans' limited viewpoint - unclear what nearby Germans were doing - but I'd like a better description of why the Nazis vanished after a summer 1943 anti-partisan offensive, torching nearby towns and murdering or deporting a lot of non-Jewish residents, only to reappear in mid-1944 just before being finally vanquished. Did they pull back to the major population centers, leaving the towns and villages unsecured? Or did they vacate the entire area, leaving only their front armies to retreat in disorder back through it almost a year later? The Bielskis, no longer having to move every few weeks, take this opportunity to build their forest camp into a small town complete with tannery, gun repair shop, synagogue and Turkish bath. If the area was that devoid of Germans for an entire year, though, where was the Red Army?
Some of Tec's story is surprising, showing conventional timelines of the war to be incomplete - for instance, there are still Jewish ghettos in Belarus in the summer of 1943, when the destruction of Polish Jewry has already been completed, the Warsaw Ghetto now a smoking ruin for several months, and Auschwitz turning farther afield to Hungary, Greece, and Yugoslavia for Jews to provide grist for its death mill. She might want to explain this further. The Belarus chapter is still being added to the Holocaust canon.
Tec's telling is studious, a bit too much at times. A retired sociology professor, she too often lapses into abstractions or sociological analysis when she could be documenting more historical facts instead. There is much rumination about Tuvia Bielski's role as a charismatic leader. It's clear he was one; say so and move on.
She makes numerous passing references to fighting missions the Bielski partisans participated in, yet describes almost none of them, despite her access to many surviving partisans who undoubtedly could have supplied her with more. This in turn may feed criticisms that perhaps they didn't really fight much.
She values their having saved lives, yet remains skeptical about the notion of fighting the Germans. Underlying her skepticism is the attitude that this was some foolish male need for revenge, and perhaps she thinks telling war stories also a foolish male preoccupation. She never seems to get her arms around the concept that these were Jews who fought, and who fought as Jews, on their own terms, protecting their own - not only from the Nazis but from non-Jewish partisans, bandits, peasants, and the Soviets - when no one else would, and that this was not only survival or respect for life, it was an amazing blast of dignity, a heroic story. And that most of those among the Bielskis who died, died fighting, with their boots on, not as victims, an inspiration to . . . well, to people less academic than Nechama Tec. That the Bielskis protected unarmed civilians and to some extent avoided combat to favor that mission, is notable, admirable, unique and heroic, but Tec seems not to value resistance itself. Don't get me wrong, I am not questioning the Bielskis in the least; whatever decisions they made were proved right by history, by their survival and by having saved saving so many lives. I am questioning Tec's seeming need to question whether that kind of resistance was worth it.
She does spends an entire chapter, meanwhile, on the role of women in the forest - who slept with whom on what terms. Despite efforts at objectivity, she cannot withhold her own judgment, or class prejudices, when considering why more refined women, having linked up with lower-class protectors in the forest, often stayed with them after the war. "Yet, after the war, like Sulia, most of the women continued with the men they had married in the forest. When I asked why they did not change their seemingly unsuitable partners the women had no answers." Hello? Maybe they fell in love with them? Maybe they felt they owed their lives to them? Maybe they had kids with them? Maybe everyone they ever knew from their own social class, was dead? Maybe they discovered these were good men even if they hadn't read Proust in the original French? Maybe not every woman waits for Mr. Perfect forever, or wants to? Maybe they weren't part of today's divorce culture? She finds no inherent merit in the long marriages that resulted. She seems to admire women in the forest who rejected men entirely, and refuses to be at all judgmental of those whose sexual favors were offered freely and perhaps variously. She saves her greatest skepticism for those who found a man, who waited a while before yielding sexually, and who then stayed with him for good. What's up with that?
Although Tec's style grates on me, it takes away but marginally from her otherwise very good work - one unlikely to be replicated, as firsthand witnesses have died since her interviews with them and as the camp's own official account was confiscated to disappear down the Soviet memory hole. Tec, who herself survived in Poland as a hidden child, undoubtedly could open doors with the survivors based on language and common history. She has interviewed dozens of eyewitnesses, does her best to cross-check facts and notes conflicting accounts where she can, and frequently cites the Bielski family's own memoir, unpublished in English.
More recent books on the Bielskis may put their story in better historical perspective, but this is as good as it's going to get on how it looked to those who were there.
Summary of Defiance
Nechama Tec tells the story of the largest armed rescue operation of Jews by Jews in World War II. Arguing that the success of the Bielski partisans, as the rescue organization came to be known, would have been unthinkable without the vision of one man, Tec offers penetrating insight into the group's commander, Tuvia Bielski. 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.Herself a Holocaust survivor, Nechama Tec here draws on wide-ranging research and never before published interviews with surviving partisans--including Tuvia Bielski himself--to reconstruct here the poignant and unforgettable story of those who chose to fight.
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 Foreword
Writer and director Edward Zwick reveals the challenges and personal significance of making a film adaptation of Nechama Tec's Defiance. 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. What was to be accomplished, I asked myself, in telling yet another story of familiar and unspeakable horror, especially when an entire canon of literature, not to mention films both documentary and fiction, have already dramatized it in the most exacting and harrowing detail? What?s more, the greatest historians and philosophers of our time have devoted entire careers to plumbing the roots and magnitude of its evil. What could I possibly add?
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. In an age when the term "hero" has been so overused as to become meaningless, the Bielskis remind us that real heroism is not the stuff of comic books. Rather, it is a set of decisions, sometimes impulsive, often made by simple men of whom nothing of the sort could ever have been expected. Their story is not simply one of courage or fortitude in the face of adversity; it includes any number of daunting moral decisions--whether to seek vengeance or to rescue, how to re-create a sense of community among those who have lost everything, how to maintain hope when all seems forsaken. Read more
Edward Zwick
Santa Monica, Calif., 2008
Belarus Books
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