A Unique WWII Drama Well Told

Rating: 7/10 (26 January 2009)

This was a compelling film about a group of WWII Jewish refugees hiding out in the forests of Nazi occupied Poland (present day Belarus). The group, lead by Tuvia Bielski (Daniel Craig), evade the Nazis and do battle with Polish villagers and police, while foraging for food, guns, and medical supplies. While it's true that many of the action sequences were embellished and the Bielski brothers weren't exactly model citizens, the inspiration for the story is beyond dispute: a group of Jewish refugees facing certain death choose to flee into the forests of Belarus, where many of them manage to survive the war. How they are able to survive in the midst of Nazi, Soviet, and Polish partisans trying their best to kill them is what makes this movie work. It was clear in the movie that the Poles were every bit as eager to murder the Jews as their Nazi occupiers. These Jews fought back.
This is a different type of Holocaust film, and one whose story needed to be told. Considering the hundreds of WWII movies dealing with the Holocaust, where the mostly docile and unsuspecting Jewish prisoners were uniformly murdered by the Nazi war machine, it was good to see a film where the Jews fought off the Nazis & their willing executioners (i.e. - the Poles) and managed to survive in the end.
I would recommend this film to anyone with an interest in WWII history, particularly with regard to partisan resistance to the Nazis and their collaborators.