By contrast the book and subsequent film, Defiance, told the true story of the Bielski brothers, armed Polish Jews who formed a band of freedom fighters, hid in heavy forest lands, and fought the Nazis.
In the fall of 1941, in Nazi-occupied Belarus (just east of Poland), where Jews were being executed by the thousands, four brothers from a large farming family named Bielski went into the forest along with a few other people determined to survive.