The text below is copied from the Tennessee Holocaust Commission's newsletter. I would like for you to read it, link to the article on the USHMM website, and think especially about Elie Wiesel's quote. Prior to seeing the movie, what are your thoughts on this? Once we have seen the movie, you might want to comment again with another perspective.
When Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel was asked why Jews did not fight during the
Holocaust, he replied "...the question is not why all the Jews did not fight, but
how so many of them did. Tormented, beaten, starved, where did they find the strength-spiritual
and physical-to resist?"
The new movie Defiance starring Daniel Craig is based on the real life experience
of the Bielski brothers who under the greatest of hardships fought as Wiesel described.
In December 1941 after the murder of Jews in the Baranowicze region in western Belorussia
which included their parents, the four remaining Bielski brothers fled into the
Zabielovo and Perelaz forests where they started a partisan unit. Led by eldest
brother Tuvia, the group grew from 13 to around 1000 between 1941 and 1944.
Tuvia insisted that resistance and rescue must go hand and hand and was vigilant
in his conviction that no Jew would be turned away whether armed or unarmed, young
or old, healthy or in need of medical attention. Remarkably at the end of the war
over 1200 Bielski partisans emerged from the forest thanks to the brothers and the
cooperative nature of the unit.
