More than 60 years after the end of the second world war, it seems almost inconceivable that a story as astonishing as that depicted in the new film Defiance should have remained essentially unknown until now. Especially as, unlike so much else we know about the war and the Holocaust, this is a story not of victimhood, but of indomitable and often brutal Jewish resistance to the Nazis.

Defiance tells the story of the partisan group formed by the Bielskis, three Jewish brothers who had been farmers before the war, after the German invasion of the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941. Living deep in the forests of what is now Belarus, the Bielski partisans managed to keep more than 1,200 Jews alive until the end of the war. In the film, Tuvia, the leader, is played by Daniel Craig, Zus by Liev Schreiber and Asael by Jamie Bell.

Their story would have remained untold were it not for their children. Mickey Bielski, Tuvia’s oldest son, knew nothing about his father’s heroism until other people started telling him. “Out of the blue, someone would say something dramatic, like, ‘Your father saved my life,’ ” he recalled. “I had no idea what they were talking about.”

As Mickey and the other Bielski children pressed their parents to tell them more, the story came out in dribs and drabs. “My father would get emotional when he told stories from that time,” said Robert, one of Tuvia’s other sons. “The older he got, the more emotional he became, so it was hard to get the complete stories out of him.”

Although something of the history of the Bielski partisans was known in Jewish circles, it was not until Oxford University Press published Defiance: The Bielski Partisans by Nechama Tec, a professor of sociology at the University of Connecticut, in 1993 that the story became more widely known. The film is based on Tec’s book, as well as interviews with members of the Bielski family and other survivors, and videotaped interviews done with Tuvia and Zus before their deaths.

The Bielskis grew up on a farm in Stankevich, which was under Soviet control when the Nazis invaded in June 1941. In December 1941, their parents and many other family members, including Zus’s wife and small daughter, and Tuvia’s first wife, were killed in a mass execution in the Novogrudok ghetto. With about 10 others, the brothers fled to the woods they had known since they were children and formed a small resistance group. Rather than just seeking their own survival, however, the Bielski partisans went on missions into nearby Jewish ghettos to persuade others to join them in the Naliboki forest.

Instead of offering sanctuary merely to the young and able-bodied, who might have the best chance of surviving, Tuvia insisted on taking anyone, including old people and young children, doctors and lawyers as well as carpenters, barbers and blacksmiths, who were more useful. “I would rather save one old Jewish woman than kill 10 German soldiers,” he often said.

Although they were forced to move many times, and more than 50 died of disease and in the brutal winters, they tried to establish as normal a life as possible in the forest, building an underground village with a hospital, a mill, a metal shop, a bakery, a jail and, eventually, a theatre and a synagogue.

To survive, they got weapons and other supplies by attacking the Nazis, Nazi sym-pathisers and locals who had killed or betrayed Jews. They exacted terrible and brutal retribution against those they counted as enemies. Their exploits became so famous that the Nazis offered a reward of 100,000 Reichmarks for Tuvia’s capture. Yet at the end of the war, he led some 1,230 people out of the forest.

The director, Ed Zwick, who is Jewish, says he was attracted to the story because it told a different side of what happened to the Jews during the war: “Rather than victims wearing yellow stars, here were fighters in fur chapkas, brandishing machineguns. Instead of helplessness and submission, here were rage and resistance.”

After going to Palestine and fighting in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, the surviving Bielski brothers emigrated to America in 1956 and lived in Brooklyn, New York. (Asael was killed in 1945, fighting with the Red Army.) In New York, Zus, who died in 1995, and Tuvia worked as taxi and truck drivers.

Tuvia found it especially hard to adapt, according to his son Mickey. “He went from absolute authority - respect, admiration, loyalty - to coming to this country and getting a job being a truck driver,” he says. “I saw this man, at age 70, pick up drums of raw plastic material and load them onto a truck, 20 or 30 of them. It would kill me inside that he would wind up his life in this way.” Tuvia died in 1987, almost penniless.

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