They marched by the millions to their death during the Holocaust and relatively few resisted. Many Jews were terrorized by Nazi brutality, isolated without hope in a rising tide of anti-Semitism or convinced that this too shall pass just like the persecutions endured in past centuries. But some Jews did resist and unlike the doomed defenders of the Warsaw Ghetto, a few resisters outlived the Third Reich.
Defiance is a story of Jewish partisans in the forests of the Soviet republic now called Belarus who relived the legend of David and Goliath every day of their lives from the summer of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 until Germany's defeat four years later. It's based on a non-fiction account of the brothers Tuvia and Zus Bielski, organizers of a community of Jewish refugees in the shelter of the dark birch woods who led a guerilla war against the Nazis and their local allies.
Director-writer Edward Zwick tailored the messy reality of the brothers Bielski and their struggle for survival to suit the specifications of Hollywood drama, but Defiance concisely enacts and encapsulates many of the harsh and complicated moral and social conflicts of its time and place. Tuvia (stony-faced Daniel Craig) and Zus (a passionaste Liev Schreiber) were smugglers before the war who knew the forest as intimately as they knew their own bodies. After surviving the roundup and murder of their family, they took to the woods and gathered other Jewish survivors. Although he was averse to schooling, Tuvia proved to be the philosopher partisan, intent on building the men, women and children gathered around him into a communal society for everyone's welfare. Zus is the hothead, keen on killing Germans and little else. At one point he deserts Tuvia for the Red Army irregulars who also prowl the forest, only to find anti-Semitism in their ranks.
Despite its moments of heart-swelling orchestrated drama, Defiance doesn't simplify the story more than is necessary for telling it in a two-hour movie. It shows how the struggle in Belarus was more than invader versus invaded, Nazi versus Jew, but included elements of civil war and opportunities to settle old scores. The Germans had plenty of willing helpers among the local population. And the Jews of the forest were not orderly and united but factious and contentious. Sometimes conflict became a friendly clash of worldviews, as in the ongoing arguments over chess between a Talmudic scholar and a Marxist intellectual. Other disputes came to blows. When fighters claiming a greater share of the rations than the women and elderly challenge Tuvia's authority and vision of community, the argument can only end in the death of one party or another.
