Nechama Tec | Defiance: The Bielski Partisans

Free Library Podcast

Holocaust survivor Nechama Tec is professor emerita of sociology at the University of Connecticut and the author of six books, including In the Lion's Den and Dry Tears, her memoir of growing up during the Nazi occupation of Poland. Recently adapted into an acclaimed film directed by Edward Zwick and starring Daniel Craig and Liev Schreiber, Defiance tells the story of a forest community in western Belorussia that numbered more than 1,200 Jews by 1944: the largest armed rescue operation of Jews by Jews in World War II. Tec illuminates group commander Tuvia Bielski's struggle as a partisan who lost his family to the Nazis, yet never wavered in his conviction that it was more important to save Jews than to kill Germans. Interviewed by Philadelphia Inquirer film critic, Carrie Rickey. (recorded 3/5/2009)