Defiance is a film new to DVD about a group of Jewish freedom fighters who fight the Nazis and struggle to maintain a camp of survivors. Like all films about Nazi atrocities, Defiance can be tough to watch. Yet in this film the emphasis is on the Jewish resistance, so there’s plenty to cheer for.
Edward Zwick, who directed the film, wrote the foreword to a new release to the history book by Nechama Tec on which the film is based. Zwick writes:
[T]o see Jewish men and women standing shoulder to shoulder in the snowy woods, brandishing automatic weapons in their own defense, flies in the face of the most pernicious oversimplification of the Holocaust — one that minimizes the impulse of its victims to resist. And it is this impulse that Nechama Tec details with such ferocious clarity. Indeed, as contemporary scholarship has now revealed, resistance in fact found its expression in almost every city, town, and shtetl in Eastern Europe over which the shadows of extermination had fallen.
It is this spirit of defiance which animates the cry, “Never again!”
I hope that Zwick and his Hollywood friends feel the same way about Israel. Spielberg doesn’t seem to feel Israel has a right to use lethal force against those who would kill her citizens.
Just saw this film yesterday and enjoyed it very much. I recommend it strongly. Well-made despite a small budget, very strong acting. What a story. What people, to have survived what they did, the way they did. Truly heroic and moving.