Partisans

GENRE: War. Holocaust. True Events. Historical.

SUMMARY:  Jacob Stein studies to become a rabbi as the Nazis invade Poland.  Soon he is a slave, making saddles and cleaning corpses from the streets.

When Jake escapes the ghetto to the safety of the surrounding forest, he joins the Bielski Partisans, determined to avenge his loved ones and fight back.  But Tuvia Bielski, military leader of the all-Jewish, partisan fighting unit under Soviet command, does not see another soldier when Jake arrives. Instead, he makes Jake a religious leader.

Even rabbis, however, must take up arms and resist in this fictional, but historically accurate account of, “The largest armed rescue of Jews by other Jews during the holocaust.”

Bielski’s unit eludes massive Nazi manhunts, assassinates collaborating politicians and quislings, raids Nazi supply trains, destroys enemy food supplies, and in the process, rescues over 1400 Jews from certain death in Nazi ghettos.

Bielski arms those who reach his camp, trains them to fight, helps the children, the sick, and the elderly among them to survive the harsh winters in the dense forests of Eastern Poland.

This Layered, A/B script (a Scriptapalooza Semi-Finalist in 2004) weaves the fictional story of Jake’s and his fiance Helen’s incarceration and escape from a Nazi ghetto and a death camp into the true story of Tuvia Bielksi’s Jewish military unit wherein the culture, while under pressure to maintain the Jewish Law, is distinctly partisan:  Women are treated as property;  rank confers privilege;  and violence is the first tool employed by those in power.

The story forces the reader to confront the question that pervades all tales of human suffering: when, if ever, do the ends justify the means?