"That is the first and foremost lesson of the Holocaust to be learned. For all the unanswered moral, philosophical and theological questions-- the bottom line is that millions of Jews were killed, because they could be. The only true defense against a Holocaust is the ability to resist and to survive one." One of the routine stops I make when I visit my parents in central Ohio is the Village Bookshop in Linworth, a suburb of Columbus. It is a remainder house, selling many obscure but important titles on all manner of subjects. In May of 1995, for the princely sum of $9.98 I picked up a copy of Nechama Tec's "Defiance: The Bielski Partisans -- The Story of the Largest Armed Rescue of Jews by Jews During World War II."
Ten bucks was a lot for me to pay for a book back then, but after reading the book, I didn't regret it. From the dust jacket:
The prevailing image of European Jews during the Holocaust years is one of helpless victims under a death sentence, unable to fight consignment to the ghettos, to the camps, and to the gas chambers. In fact, many Jews struggled alone or with others against the terrors of the Third Reich, risking their lives against overwhelming odds for the slimmest chance of survival or a mere glimpse of freedom. In Defiance Nechama Tec offers a riveting history of one such group, a forest community in western Belorussia that would number 1,200 Jews by 1944 -- the largest armed rescue operation of Jews by Jews in World War II.
Describing the entire partisan movement in the region, Tec shows that while most forest fighters in Belorussia were rifle-carrying young men, the members of this extraordinary community included both men and women, some with weapons but mostly unarmed, ranging from infants to the elderly. She reconstructs for the first time the amazing details of how these partisans and their families -- hungry, exposed to the harsh winter weather, always on the lookout for German patrols -- managed not only to survive, but to offer protection to all Jewish fugitives who could find their way to them. Driven by courage born out of despair, they dug wells, set up workshops to repair guns, make clothes, and resole shoes, supplied services to other guerrilla units, and even established a makeshift hospital and school in the forest. Arguing that this success would have been unthinkable without the vision of one man, Tec offers penetrating insight into the group's commander, Tuvia Bielski, and his journey from his life as the son of the only Jewish peasant family in an isolated rural village to his emergence as a leader possessing the charisma and courage to command under all but impossible circumstances.
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