Daniel Craig's new movie DEFIANCE [Archive] - Ron Paul Forums / Liberty Forest

xd9fan

12-30-2008, 06:02 PM

An inevitable rite of passage in any Jewish child’s informal initiation to
adulthood is to study, with grim fascination, the grainy, out-of-focus
images of hollow-eyed survivors in striped pajamas, the amateur photos
of corpses piled high in freshly dug pits, or possibly the 16 mm
handheld GI footage of living skeletons clinging to barbed wire during
the liberation of the camps. Such grisly iconography of passivity and
victimization was, during my childhood, and probably is still today, not
only an article of faith, but also a source of secret shame. As an assimilated
suburban kid growing up in the Midwest, I had thrilled to World
War II stories about John Kennedy and PT 109 (Cliff Robertson in the
movie version), the leatherneck marines at Guadalcanal (John Wayne),
the fl ying fortresses over Germany (Gregory Peck), and so many more.
In feeble contrast, Jewish heroes were the ancient biblical warriors
evoked by uninspired Sunday school teachers—Bar Kochba and Judah
Macabee wielding spears and jawbones, or young David with his little
slingshot.
So when my friend and collaborator, Clay Frohman, came to me
with a book called Defi ance, I was skeptical.
“Not another Holocaust movie,” I said.
What was to be accomplished, I asked myself, in telling yet another
story of familiar and unspeakable horror, especially when an entire
canon of literature, not to mention fi lms both documentary and fi ction,
have already dramatized it in the most exacting and harrowing detail?
What’s more, the greatest historians and philosophers of our time have
devoted entire careers to plumbing the roots and magnitude of its evil.
What could I possibly add?
But Clay was insistent. Here, he said, was something fresh and
utterly provocative. And so, somewhat grudgingly, I plunged into
Nechama’s Tec’s remarkable book and found myself deeply moved.
That was ten years ago. And the feelings I had upon that fi rst reading
have only grown stronger with time. To read of the Bielski brothers
and their fi ght to create a safe haven in the midst of a hell-on-earth
evokes in me something utterly primitive and deeply personal, a roiling
wave of fear, awe, humility, and admiration. And outrage, too—that
such a story was not better known.
Here, clutching captured Schmeisser submachine guns and “potatomasher”
grenades, were Jewish fi ghters whose deeds were as stirring
and brave as any I had ever encountered.
And what’s more, it was all true.
In an age when the term “hero” has been so overused as to become
meaningless, the Bielskis remind us that real heroism is not the stuff of
comic books. Rather, it is a set of decisions, sometimes impulsive, often
made by simple men of whom nothing of the sort could ever have
been expected. Their story is not simply one of courage or fortitude in
the face of adversity; it includes any number of daunting moral decisions—
whether to seek vengeance or to rescue, how to re-create a
sense of community among those who have lost everything, how to
maintain hope when all seems forsaken.
Those of us who make fi lms are forever searching for heroes. Most
often we are obliged to invent them. Luke Skywalker battles the alien
menace; Frodo Baggins duels with the Dark Lord. Even when we
choose a contemporary setting, the protagonists are usually more Jason
Bourne than Tuvia Bielski. Yet, presuming to adapt a work of such great
complexity and nuance such as Defi ance involves confronting a host of
issues the likes of which one rarely contemplates in making a movie. To
anyone with a serious interest in the historical record, a fi ction fi lm
x FOREWORD
purporting to tell a “true story” is a contradiction in terms, if not
something much worse. Movies are not just reductionist—compressing
months, even years, into a tidy two-hour experience (not counting time
out at the popcorn stand); they also attempt to impose order and shape
on events that were, in their moment, chaotic, complex, even random.
In the name of drama, events are rearranged, ideas are simplifi ed, and
perhaps worst of all, the maddening, often unfathomable messiness of
human behavior is made knowable for the sake of emotion.
Once before, I had confronted such a challenge. It derived from
another little-known moment of history (and became the fi lm Glory) in
which African Americans had been willing to fi ght and die for their
freedom in the American Civil War. While the stories of the 54th Massachusetts
regiment and that of Jewish partisans are analogous only in
part, one thing is true of both. Each of these histories presented an
opportunity for some necessary historical redress. The iconic image of a
black man in Union blue charging up a hill was long overdue, adding
deserved complexity to the conventional textbook view of the Civil War
by suggesting that freedom was not simply bestowed, but also fought for.
Similarly, to see Jewish men and women standing shoulder to shoulder
in the snowy woods, brandishing automatic weapons in their own
defense, fl ies in the face of the most pernicious oversimplifi cation 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.
There is one caveat I feel obliged to offer by way of introduction. Anyone
picking up this book in the hope of reading a tacky “novelization”
of Defi ance, the movie, is bound to be disappointed. This is a brilliant
narrative, written with an insight and analysis that only a lifetime spent
studying its subject can provide. Its rewards are for those who seek the
richness and complexity a fi lm can only suggest. But if the fi lm has led
you here in search of a deeper understanding of its source material,
then it accomplished more than I might have ever dreamed possible.
I am grateful to Nechama Tec for her guidance, her generosity, and
most of all her forbearance. From the very outset she understood the
dilemma of trying to put her book on fi lm. Even more important, she
understood our intentions in trying to do so. I like to imagine a boy
like myself, growing up in search of his identity and coming upon this
story. And I’d like to think it is in that spirit that she has graciously
forgiven us any number of exaggerations, compressions, and omissions,
not to mention the limits of our imagination in capturing, on fi lm, the
extraordinary spirit of her work.
Edward Zwick
Santa Monica, Calif., 2008