‘Defiance’ celebrates Jews’ daring acts of WW II resistance
\”Every day of freedom is like an act of faith,\” says Tuvia Bielski, one of three brothers who led a partisan group battling Nazi troops in the forests of Belarus.
\”Every day of freedom is like an act of faith,\” says Tuvia Bielski, one of three brothers who led a partisan group battling Nazi troops in the forests of Belarus.
More than 60 years have passed, yet French filmmakers are still wrestling with their country\’s less than heroic role under Nazi occupation during World War II.
Five years ago, veteran comic book artist Joe Kubert visited the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. He expected to be moved, but since he and his parents had escaped from Poland before the Nazi genocide began, he assumed his emotional reaction would be relatively contained. Then, he saw something that struck him profoundly: \”Yzeran,\” the name of the shtetl where he had been born, etched on a wall filled with names of towns that had been completely obliterated in World War II.
This one word began a creative odyssey that found its completion this month, with the publication of \”Yossel — April 19, 1943,\” Kubert\’s graphic novel about Jewish resistance during the Holocaust — artistic, as well as physical — with the date in the subtitle referring to the start of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.
There is a haunting image in the early part of the PBS \”Frontline\” documentary on Pope John Paul II. As the Warsaw ghetto goes up in flames, just outside the wall and within sight and sound of the remaining Jewish resistance fighters, a carousel goes round and round, full of carefree, frolicking, young Poles