Zus Bielski, the author’s uncle who died in 1995, didn’t speak about his exploits fighting the Nazis, which are chronicled in the upcoming film “Defiance.”
by Eric Herschthal Staff Writer
In the past several months, many personal stories have been circulating about the Bielskis. Since word spread that Daniel Craig would star in a major Hollywood film about the partisan fighters — “Defiance,” opening in January — many relatives have come out of the wilderness, so to speak, with their own family tales. That includes my family. You wouldn’t know it from our name, but the Bielskis, who saved and fought alongside 1,200 Polish Jews against the Nazis, have a prominent place in our past. My grandmother, now deceased, was a Bielski, the little sister of brothers Tuvia, Zus and Asael. She escaped on her own in Poland, only learning after the fact of her brothers’ fight, once everyone made it to America. Still,
I got to know one of the brothers, Zus, even though my memories of him don’t quite add up to something whole. Anyway, it now seems clear that Zus was a man whose mercurial, primal emotions were wrestled with and spent mostly in his youth. By the time I knew him he was a towering, creaking old man — well over six feet — who came down to Florida in the winter to spend time with his sister, Estelle, my grandmother. For many Sundays, it was bagels and lox with Grandma and Uncle Zus. He mostly sat in silence, with his wife Sonia, a tiny tempest whirling about our patio, bringing him herring in cream sauce, whitefish, another bagel piled high with lox. By the time brunch ended, he’d have a stout cigar hanging from his plump, purple lips, as if on a hinge — a vivid memory, for whatever reason. Everyone knew to pay his respects, myself included. In our baby-boomer suburb he was like the godfather, but in white creased shorts and tennis shoes. I’d usually kiss him on the cheek and pull a stool up close to him, whereupon he’d ask me a few perfunctory questions about sports or girls or both, and possibly school. I don’t remember his responses, or even if he gave any for that matter. He was a very quiet man. The point of our visits wasn’t to glean some pithy bits of wisdom, at least I don’t think so. It was more likely, my parents must have thought, to spend time with someone who wouldn’t be around for long. Indeed they were right: he died in 1995, when I was 12. In any event, if there were adages to be passed down, they would have come from Tuvia, who died when I was not yet 2. “I’d kill 10 Nazis to save one Jew” was his famous line, the one that has now become the Bielski maxim. It’s quoted in both books about them — Nechama Tec’s “Defiance,” from which the film is based, and Peter Duffy’s “The Bielski Brothers” — and you’ll hear Daniel Craig say it again onscreen. For me though, the quote still doesn’t sit right, as if my family’s ennobling story and their rationale for fighting somehow grated against a moral core of my own. I don’t like violence of any kind, even if sometimes wooed by the unlikely logic of a necessary fight. And yet what they did by means of war enabled the most profound moral act — 1,250 lives saved. So many more, my own even, made possible because of their scrappy defensive war. That I should even give air to a personal misgiving still makes me cringe at its arrogance. Perhaps this is why I tend to talk about my relationship to the Bielskis only when asked. (My father, whose mother is Estelle, has been pleading with me to write something; my editor recently asked, too.) I do so a bit grudgingly and try to make clear that it’s simply the amplification of a particular set of details in their story that distances me from them. The family stories I grew up hearing about Zus were mostly about the way he killed Nazis. Of course he didn’t tell them to me, and I’m not sure he told them to anyone. But they were passed along in the family like open secrets that kept growing in their implausibility. If Nazis came near the Bielski forest hideout and Zus found them, he’d kill them “with his bare hands” (though I still don’t know what that means). One time, he killed a Nazi, nailed a note to his chest, then had a village accomplice drive back the dead body to his platoon. This isn’t in the movie, but you’ll see a similar brutishness in the way Liev Schreiber plays Zus. (I saw the film at a family-only screening in the fall.) By all accounts, this is how he was — the family ruffian, a warrior to the nobler general Tuvia, his big brother. Schreiber shows it in the physicality of his portrayal: the hard swills of liquor, the yelling of obscenities at enemies, women, his own brother Tuvia. There’s a bloodthirsty vengeance invoked in each clutch of his gun. Ed Zwick, the director, has done a fine job and makes his point clear: heroes aren’t saints. They’re flawed human beings who summon the best of themselves in the most hellish times. Even Daniel Craig’s Tuvia, the noblest among them, we see succumb to his own fits of rage. That is a powerful, essential message, and it seems particularly appropriate now. My concern though, is that audiences — critics too — might be seduced by the grisliness of the tale. Or for that matter, turned off by it, as I usually am. The images are what move the message; they’re necessary. They are what make it a story we can pass on. But we shouldn’t revel in the details. It’s Zwick’s bigger idea about the human-ness of heroes that must be savored. More importantly, I hope the Bielski story is not viewed as some kind of corrective to the Holocaust’s overarching narrative. This has already been suggested as one possible motive behind the film: Jews didn’t all go like lambs to the slaughter, see! Yes, the Bielskis fought back, saved lives, and survived because of it. But many died in their ranks fighting too, and millions more in Auschwitz simply could not or would not anyway. Courage is no measure of humanity. The lessons of the Holocaust will not change as newer stories emerge and the Bielskis now have their due. Even so, it’s well known that Tuvia was not the champagne-popping type. His widow Lilka told biographers that when her husband was asked why he didn’t talk more openly about his acts, he’d say, “I’ll be famous after I’m dead.” He would have appreciated the irony now, but probably not laughed. And the more excitable Zus? Who knows? By the time I knew him, most of his human impulses seemed drained — anger, ecstasy, vengeance and certainly pride. Anyway, all we have to go on is this: He died with his sanity, but still said very few words, including ones about himself. That is a hero.
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