And Now For Something Completely Absurd

Coincidentally on the same day that Pope Benedict XVI reinstated a far-right previously excommunicated bishop--Richard Williamson--who just last week denied the World War II Holocaust, I went to see Defiance. Believe me, I rarely agree with anything Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League, says. I find his paranoid belief that anything critical of anyone Jewish as not-so-veiled anti-semitism more than a bit much.

But at a time when religion seems to be at the root of too many regional disputes, what is our German-born Pope up to?

Defiance is the creative product of the guys--Edward Zwick and Marshall Hershkovitz-- who brought us the television series "thirtysomething," a show that seemed to chronicle the delayed maturation of folks my age who dragged out our adolescence, delayed marriage and childbearing, and who obsessed about everything. I loved the show.

Defiance is a true story about a band of brothers who hid out in the forests of Lithuania and harbored by the end of World War II, 1200 Jews who ran off rather than be massacred by the Nazis as they came through, rounding up Jews and slaughtering them in pits. This is a story we don't often hear: about militant resistance against the Nazis.

Daniel Craig, who is now playing James Bond, plays the older brother who believes in maintaining civility despite the thieving the band resorts to. Liev Schreiber plays his younger rival who before the war was already a smuggler and criminal. The film is a bit long, the relationship between the brothers could do with a better development (I suspect something got lost in the editing room), but overall the film is exciting (I couldn't watch several scenes) and adds another dimension to the story of the Holocaust. Is there an ethic to survival?

The screenplay is based on the book Defiance: The Bielsky Partisans by Necama Tec, which you can preview on the new Google Books feature. The two Bielsky brothers at the heart of the film's action and conflict both ended up living in New York. They never really publicized their role in saving 1200 Jews.

Liev Schreiber seems to have some profound connection to the Jews of Eastern Europe. He produced the brilliant visually elaborate film version of Everything is Illuminated, the first novel of Jonathan Safran Foer, starring Elijah Wood, that brings a young man back to the Ukraine to try to find the woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis.

Not for the faint-hearted, Defiance is a powerful film about the ethics of survival. I often wonder what Israel would have become if it hadn't been settled after World War II by the survivors of the Holocaust, the ones who were wily enough and shrewd enough, or just plain lucky enough, to have stayed alive in secret apartments scattered throughout the Third Reich and its occupied territories and the annihilation camps of Auschwitz, Terezin, and Bergen Belson, to name a few.