Volume 56, Number 7 · April 30, 2009
Caught Between Hitler & Stalin
By Timothy Snyder
Defiance
a film directed by Edward Zwick
Defiance
by Nechama Tec, with a foreword by Edward Zwick
Oxford University Press, 374 pp., $14.95 (paper)
Tuvia Bielski rescued more than a thousand of his fellow Jews from the Holocaust, an extraordinary feat worth recording in ink and celluloid, as Nechama Tec and Edward Zwick have now done. In Belarusian lands under German occupation, Bielski and his brothers, the town toughs of Stankiewicze, put to use the charms of thieves and the skills of smugglers, creating a mobile camp in the forests that sheltered almost every Jew who could find it. Rather than saving only themselves, which surely would have been easier, the Bielski brothers supported hundreds of strangers, most of them women, children, and the elderly. Living rough in the woods for two years in northern Europe is no mean trick, even without the burden of hundreds of mouths to feed and the threat of death from an implacably hostile invader intent on annihilating your people. Bielski's extraordinary achievement is fairly and finely rendered in both book and film.
Review, 3413 words
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