True Defiance: The story of the fabulous Bielski boys

As the lights came back up at the Ziegfeld Theatre in Manhattan on Wednesday afternoon, Robert Bielsky could only smile. The credits were rolling – first up were the big-name stars, of course, Daniel Craig and Liev Schrieber – and others in the audience were variously weeping or clapping or both.

It was the 20th time Mr Bielsky had seen the film, Defiance, either partially or all the way through, but this was its first public outing, on limited release. (It goes on general release in the US and Britain later this month.) But he had to be there. At last the story that so nearly petered out in the tidy streets of the Midwood section of Brooklyn was out there for all the world to see. The story of what his Jewish forebears – his uncles and his father – did during the Holocaust. The story of how they fought back.

This, of course, is the season when all the high-octane, high-expectation films come out, with the Oscar nominations just around the corner. The market is crowded. And this year, perhaps more than in any other, there is a risk that a kind of Nazi/Holocaust-weariness could set in with the likes of Valkyrie, The Reader, A Secret (French) and The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas all tapping the same vein.

Defiance has the opportunity to stand out, however, and not just because it features Mr Craig doing something that is not James Bond. Directed by Ed Zwick (Blood Diamond, Glory, Legends of the Fall) it is not a film that explores the familiar themes of victimhood and Jewish passivity in the face of Nazi savagery. The subject of this film is something different entirely. It is right there in its title.

Mr Zwick has given us the tale of the Bielski brothers – Tuvia (Robert's father), Zus and Asael – who in 1941 found themselves in Belorussia (modern day Belarus) being overrun suddenly by the Nazis as they moved east. Members of their own immediate family had been shot by German soldiers, while thousands of other Jews were being corralled into ghettoes where only death and starvation awaited them. The Bielski (Robert spells the name with a y) brothers, however, resisted.

More than resist, they founded a secret and mobile settlement in the forests of Belorussia. Tuvia and Zus – respectively the leader with the brains and the leader with the angry brawn – killed any German or collaborator who threatened their fugitive community, and sent scouts into the ghettoes to rescue more Jews to join them. Before it was over – and the film does not cover the whole time that the partisans were in the woods – their band had swelled to number 1,200. That is 1,200 Jews who were saved.

The film is an astonishing chronicle of courage and survival that is likely to be all the more affecting when audiences know it is based on real history. Never mind the response of a few critics, that Mr Zwick is less than subtle in his exploitation of our emotions and in the delivery of the film's message.

Certainly it cannot be missed in a scene roughly halfway through when Tuvia Bielski (aka Daniel Craig) meets a bedraggled new gaggle of Jewish families in the trees looking for his protection and vowing to provide it to them. "He's a Jew?" asks a dirty-faced child. Cue violin music. "Yes," the parent whispers back. (Oh and Tuvia, by the way, is sitting all the while on a handsome white horse.)

If part of the burden of being Jewish at the start of the 21st century is working to keep alive painful memories from the 20th, especially as the generation that witnessed the horrors begins to leave us for good, then this was one story, remarkable though it may be, that almost fell through the cracks.

When the war was over Asael Bielski was dead and there was no congratulation party waiting for Zus and Tuvia, however heroic they had been. One after the other, they left their native land and, via short spells in Palestine, found themselves emigrating to a place where others in their family, including an elder brother, had travelled to before the war had started. That was Brooklyn and more specifically, Midwood, a rather bland but orderly area of single family homes and clipped lawns close to Coney Island.

The post-year wars were not ones of white horses nor any kind of glory for the Bielski brothers, in spite of what they had done. Rather, like so many in the Jewish diaspora, they melted into their new milieu. They learnt the American middle class way, working and bearing children. Zus opened a petrol station in the shadow of the Williamsburg Bridge and later set up a small cab company. Tuvia, proud yet humble in his new circumstance, built a modest plastics haulage business. The father of Robert, Tuvia spent most of the rest of his life at the wheel driving plastic parts around Brooklyn in his lorry, and was virtually penniless when he died in 1985. He was buried with no particular hoopla in a grave on Long Island. (He was later to be disinterred and given a state funeral in Jerusalem, however.) Zus was to die just eight years later. Zus's widow, Sonia, is still alive and living in Brooklyn, but is in poor health.

The brothers, in other words, lived, worked and died in Brooklyn anonymously. A small stone marker was erected in honour of Tuvia after his death in a Holocaust memorial mall in Sheepshead Park by the water near Coney Island, but for years even members of the extended family did not know it existed.

At the start of the Nineties there was a brief squall of interest in what happened in the Belorussian woods and the connections drawn over the decades with Brooklyn when a professor at the University of Connecticut, Nechama Tec, wrote a rather scholarly book on the subject, Defiance: The Bielski Partisans. An 80-page children's book based on the heroism in the forest was also published in the Nineties. But to most of the world and even to neighbours in Brooklyn, Bielski remained an unknown name.

Tuvia's widow and Robert's mother, Lilka Bielski, remained in Midwood all her remaining years, but died at the end of 2001, just 11 days after the felling of the twin towers in the 9/11 terror attacks. In 2000, however, she spoke to a reporter writing an extended feature about the Bielskis for The New York Times. Of her husband, she said. "In America, he was a number like everybody else." Then she added, "He would always say, 'I'll be famous after I'm dead.' "

Well, indeed, thanks to Mr Zwick and, of course, Daniel Craig. Mr Zwick chose to make the film after reading the book by Professor Tec. It was while on a plane from New York to London, when he was about to begin shooting Blood Diamond, that he met Mr Craig by chance for the first time, and thought to cast him as Tuvia. Once he had the money to begin work on Defiance, the next stop for Mr Zwick were the Bielski family members who were still living in Brooklyn, first among them Robert.

His name was not among those rolling past on the screen at the Ziegfeld. But Robert Bielski, a commercial estate agent who works in Manhattan but lives today on Long Island beyond the city, became closely involved in the project. He gave Mr Zwick old home movies to watch, including one that showed his father talking in specific detail about what happened in the forests shortly before he died. He also travelled to Lithuania to see where the director intended to shoot most of the film in a region, in fact, that is less than 50 miles from where the partisans were based all those decades ago. He returned a second time with his children to visit areas of the forest where the partisans hid in huts. Mr Bielski also notes proudly that one of his sons, Jordan – a grandson of Tuvia – has a small role in the film. Ironically, though, he plays a Nazi collaborator.

"We first met Ed two years ago and it's been a very emotional time since then," Mr Bielski, 50, explained this week. If he was nervous at first how Hollywood would handle the material that is at the heart of his family's heritage, today he seems more than satisfied with how the film turned out.

"I went in with an open mind. Ed basically laid out his vision for what the movie was going to be, and it has come out exactly as he said it would, down to the relationships between the brothers. What he told me the first day we met became reality."

Those who say that casting Mr Craig, blond and blue-eyed, is stretching credulity for box office expedience have it wrong, Mr Bielski adds. "Craig is dead on, first of all. Second, my father didn't look much different from him. He too was a blond, blue-eyed man. One of the reasons he didn't get captured was he was able to move around because he didn't look like a Jew."

Most moving of all for Robert, perhaps, was an evening in October when he hosted a screening of the film at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Manhattan, on whose board he serves. Mr Zwick flew in from California to speak. But more importantly, he had invited as many Bielski family members as he could find. In the screening room that night, he counted 148 relatives of the brothers in the woods. They had come from Brooklyn, for sure, but also from elsewhere in the US and from Israel and even Australia.

Also there that night were some of the children of the 1,200 Jewish people the Bielskis saved. It is what they have achieved – and what was lost to the world because of the 6 million Jews who did not survive the Holocaust – that makes the film important, Mr Bielski believes.

"Today the descendants of the 1,200 number tens of thousands," he said. "Many are very, very productive people and influential people – we have lawyers, we have builders, we have politicians. They are people who would otherwise not be alive. I look at it now and think of what the Germans did to the world. By destroying 6 million lives, they caused the world to miss out the descendants who could have been so incredibly productive, who maybe could have cured cancer or had us living on Jupiter. Who knows?"

And again, the film of course is also important, he says, because it is about the Jews fighting the Nazis and cheating them of victims.

And what would his father have thought of it?

"He never considered himself a hero, and never sought any kind of accolades," Robert replied. "But he would have thought it was very authentic."