Educational Media Reviews Online

Based on Shalom Yoran’s memoirs, The Defiant, this production aims the camera at Yoran and his remembrances of the Holocaust. While the cameraman alternates his shots between archival footage and  photographs, eyewitness testimony comprises the heart and substance of  the story. . Yoran’s pathos, courage, and strength compel the viewer to listen to his  heart-rendering autobiography.  Although Yoran sits in one position throughout most of this eighty-five minute production, we are rivetted to his  eyes, quiet demeanor, facial expressions,  and the manner in which he recounts the drama, horror, trauma, and bittersweet victory of his ordeal through the Nazi genocide.

We learn that he and his family fled from a small Polish village to Warsaw when he was 14 years old in 1939, only to abscond to the  Soviet portion of Poland following the German invasion of it. Yoran sheds light on perhaps the most famous photograph of the Holocaust, the one in which a five year old boy has his hands up while the Gestapo are rounding up Jews in a town square. He explains that the parents were forced to watch their son being bashed to death right in front of them. Yoran points out that the Nazis were experts at dehumanizing the Jews and controlling them through fear. They preyed on them by using the psychology of obedience and submission to parental-type state authority.                 

                                                                                However, Yoran emphasizes that Jews did resist and that the on-going documentation of uprisings, underground organizations, partisan alliances, and fighting refutes the overall impression that the Jews passively walked into the gas chambers. Like so many others, Yoran decided to fight, even risking his own parents’ safety since the Nazi-controlled Jewish Councils forbade Jewish young men to join the partisans.

Between 1942 and 1945, Yoran  and his fellow fighters amassed weapons, blew up railroad tracks to stop the flow of supplies and arms to the Nazis, cut down telephone poles, and fought with incalculable bravery, in the face of nil odds.They posed such threat that 20,000 German soldiers had to hunt down 2,000 partisans in the Lithuanian, Belorussian, and Polish woods, many of whom were tortured to death upon capture. However, their courage and iron will to rise up and fight their exterminators are testaments to the indestructibility of the Jewish people. Moreover, these stories mark a great victory against the worst genocide in all of human history.  

While the producer has packaged The Defiant: The Holocaust Memoirs of Shalom Yoran for a wide a range of ages as possible, the lesson plan aspect and public school teacher's testimonials following the main story are superfluous for a college audience. Despite thissmall detraction,  there can never be too many personal histories of the Holocaust such as this one so that we may never forget.