MORE THAN 125 PEOPLE IN THIS PHOTO. AND NONE OF THIS HAPPENS WITHOUT SURVIVAL.
Take a good look at this photograph.
It was taken in 2008 at the premiere of Defiance, the movie in which Daniel Craig portrayed my grandfather, Tuvia Bielski.
Standing together in this photograph are more than 125 direct descendants of the Bielski Partisans.
Children. Grandchildren. Great-grandchildren.
And this was almost 20 years ago. Think about how many more descendants exist today.
During the Holocaust, my grandfather and the Bielski Partisans created a refuge in the forests of Belarus where 1,236 Jewish men, women and children survived.
The Nazis wanted those 1,236 people to disappear.
Instead, they survived.
They married. They had children. Their children had children. Families continued growing around the world.
This photograph is what survival looks like generations later.
Lately, people have been contacting me and saying something I never imagined I would hear so often:
“I’m alive today because my grandparents survived with your grandfather.”
When I look at this photograph, I understand those words differently.
Every face represents another branch of a family tree that someone tried to cut down.
And remember, this photograph represents only a small fraction of the descendants of the 1,236 survivors.
My grandfather could never have imagined Defiance. He could never have imagined Daniel Craig portraying him. And I don’t think he could have imagined generations of descendants gathering at a movie premiere more than 60 years after they walked out of those forests alive.
But I know what he would have understood.
They survived.
And because they survived, we are here.
That may be the greatest legacy of the Bielski Partisans.
Their revenge was to live.
Source: Brendon Rennert
