Director Edward Zwick (R) with Daniel Craig and Alexa Davalos on the set of Defiance

By Michael Fox, Special To The Dayton Jewish Observer

In the gripping World War II drama Defiance, the Jews fight back. That’s all you need to know about Edward Zwick’s saga of survival and community in the woods of Eastern Europe.

The veteran Hollywood writer-director set out to do more than just adapt the remarkable true story of the reluctantly heroic Bielski brothers, who organized and protected hundreds of Belorussian Jews from the Nazis and their collaborators. He crafted a calculated rebuff to the 60-year-old myth of Jewish passivity.

The Bielski brothers’ experiences, Zwick explained during a recent publicity stop in San Francisco, “addressed something that had nagged at my unconscious for a very long time: ‘Where was that spirit of resistance? Why had it not been portrayed?’ The Warsaw Ghetto was something that had stood alone as the sort of poster child for it, but there seemed to be no other evidence. As I began to research, I found that that impulse had been everywhere.”

Zwick speaks in long paragraphs, a rarity among Hollywood types. It’s also rather unusual to hear such weighty insights dispensed by someone dressed in L.A. casual: V-neck sweater, faded jeans and athletic shoes.

“There is a very important distinction that has to be understood between passivity and powerlessness,” he explains deliberately.

“The Jews were a stateless people. They had no access to weapons. They didn’t have a government in support of them of any kind. Their neighbors were often hostile. The local gendarmerie was often in collaboration with the Nazis, and they were confronted by this remarkably, precisely executed policy. So that rendered them powerless. But at any moment that they could find the means to resist, they did. And that’s what was absent in the portrait: the human impulse to resist.”

Defiance was shot outside Vilnius, some 37 miles from where the Bielskis had been. The entire story unfolds in the forest that the Bielskis knew so well, and which largely shielded them from the Nazis. In his research, Zwick turned up a fascinating detail.

“When you see maps of Eastern Europe, and even Western Europe, where Jews were able to survive, it had to do with landscape,” he notes. “In an urban setting of the sort that (most Jews) were in, there was no hiding. And they were often revealed by others who sought there or exposed them.”

There’s a sequence in Defiance, scheduled to open in Dayton on Jan. 16, where an accountant joins the group in the forest.

“That’ll come in handy,” snickers one veteran of the encampment, in what can be viewed as a riposte to the portrayal of Jews (notably the Ben Kinglsey character) in Schindler’s List. But Zwick brushes that reading aside.

“I don’t think filmmakers make movies in reaction to other movies. It was, in fact, in response to a pervasive iconography of victimization and passivity that I have experienced since childhood.”

Zwick, who grew up in the northern suburbs of Chicago and made his name in Hollywood with Glory and thirtysomething, lists a number of factors that contributed to the prevailing and ongoing view of Jews as victims. The most jarring is the lengthy silence of those who resisted the Nazis.

“Everyone I’ve ever met who’s done something of this sort does not want to be reminded of that time,” Zwick asserts, “and in fact there are things they have done of which they are not necessarily proud. On top of which there was a certain measure of survivor’s guilt. Why should they talk about themselves when so many others had been lost?”

For Jewish moviegoers, Defiance will readily evoke associations with the Exodus and Chanukah tales. Zwick adds another biblical point of reference.

“For me, it led me back to one point, to read the Book of Judges again,” he confides. “Now, the Book of Judges is a positive Iliad of Jewish warriors. And it reinforced that understanding of how that warrior tradition had been central to the culture, and always has been. To read about Gideon, and Joshua and Jeptha and Deborah and Judith and it just goes on and on.”

You can add the Bielski brothers to that long list of fighting heroes.

Zwick, like all filmmakers, intends for his work not only to entertain and educate but to have lasting impact.

“The notion that I might be adding another iconic image to that vocabulary for a younger generation is something that was important to me. Because there is shame attached to that single and more oversimplified understanding of what happened.”