Defiance: Hiding In The Lipiczanska Forest

The 2008 movie Defiance tells the true story of a group of three Jewish brothers that are hiding in the Lipiczanska Forest, now known as the Bialowieza Forest. (4) They are escaping from the Nazi regime to survive. Their parents have been killed by the German Nazis and the forest is a place where they can hide. The forest is split in half between Poland and Belarus. (4) The brothers find other Jews that are hiding in the forest and their group begins to grow with many runaway Jews coming into their hiding area. They are the leaders and they offer protection to the group. As the group keeps on finding more and more survivor and runaway Jews, they begin building large shelters for the people to live in. Defiance is based on a real story

However, some of them are not accurately told in the movie. This is a story about the surviving Bielski brothers who were factually the leaders of what is called in Holocaust documents about them as a “Jewish partisan” movement that had started when they were forced to leave their home after their parents and family members were killed by Germans. Their escape to the forest did happen and they did become the leaders of the Jews that were in hiding. Their story has been untold for a long time. (3) Defiance shows the town of Nowogrodek where no one speaks Polish. The only people in Nowogrodek were good Soviet Jews and Germans who were bad. However, this is not factual. The town was inhabited by people whose language was Polish since it is in Western Poland. They escaped to the nearby Zabielovo and Perelaz forests. (5) These forests do exist and it is documented that the Bielski brothers and many other Jews did escape into these forests during the years of 1941-1943 running from the Germans. (1) The Bielski brothers defended and tried to protect their group which began as just their family members (1). The Bielsky brothers soon began a community in the forest and most of the events that are shown in the movie are factual. However, they are somewhat condensed in that what happened over a four-year period is shown as if it happened in just one year. The harsh winter, for example, which makes it hard for “the Germans to advance into Russia” (1) and find them, actually happened in the winter of 1941-42. The Bielski brothers actually did not begin their operations until after that first winter. In the movie this harsh winter is shown just after the half way point of the movie, with the all the Jews in the camp, when in reality the harsh winter was really when the brothers were by themselves. They had barely escaped after the murder of their parents and other