Following his appearance as Agent 007, Daniel Craig plays a partisan - a Polish Jew from the Kresy.

Defiance , a Hollywood superproduction, hits movie theatres in the US on 16 January, and a week later - cinemas in Europe, including Poland. The New York Times , which devoted half a column to the movie following its pre-premiere on New Year's Eve, praises Defiance . Daniel Craig is noble, brave, and shoots well. And his Tuvia Bielski is an authentic figure.

For Jews - a hero equal to Oskar Schindler. For some on the Polish right - a murderer. Nasz Dziennik calls him a butcher and a slaughterer of Poles.

'This movie will trigger off a national debate comparable to those provoked by Jan Tomasz Gross's books,' writes Tomasz Dostatni, a Dominican friar, on jewish.org.pl.

Who is Tuvia Bielski?

He was born in 1906 in a small village near Nowogrodek (today Navahrudak, Belarus) as the son of a Jewish miller. He had a Polish passport, served briefly in the Polish army, spoke Polish and Yiddish.

He was probably a smuggler, the Soviet border was just 50 kilometres away from his home village of Stankiewicze (Stankievichy). Matched and wed for money to an unattractive merchant daughter, he became a respected textile trader in the town of Sobotniki (today Subotniki).

Following the Soviet invasion of Poland on 17 September 1939, he offered support to the new regime and began an official career. When Hitler invaded Russia two years later, Bielski avoid the ghetto by fleeing to the forest. Together with his three brothers (and a new wife) they set up a partisan camp, in which some 1,000 Jews survived the war. Initially independent, Tuvia, Zus, Asael, and the teenage Aron from the winter of 1942/1943 were subordinated to Soviet command. Until the Polish government in exile remained Stalin's official ally, the Bielski brothers and the local Home Army fought together. After Katyn, in 1943, a Polish-Soviet war broke out in the Nowogrodek area. The Bielski Jews took part in some of the over 100 documented clashes between Polish and Soviet forces - fighting on the Soviet side, of course. Tuvia personally fought against neither the Germans nor the Poles, but his people attacked Home Army units. The Bielski partisans participated, for instance, in the treacherous disarmament of Polish partisans by the Soviets on 1 December 1943.

What happened in Naliboki?

The most well-known crime that Soviet partisans committed in the Nowogrodek area was the murder of 128 inhabitants, including women and children, of the village of Naliboki, a settlement in the heart of the Naliboki Forest. In 1993, a former Naliboki resident, Wacław Nowicki, published a book Żywe echa (Living Echoes) in which he attributed the massacre to the Bielski brothers. The accusation was then repeated by various Polish and Belarussian historians, such as Zygmunt Boradyn, author of the monograph Niemen - rzeka niezgody (Neman - a River of Discord , Warsaw 1999). In 2001, the Canadian Polish Congress caused the National Remembrance Institute (IPN) to launch an inquiry against the partisans of the 'so called Tuvia Bielski brigade.' The inquiry is pending.

'I can only say we've taken testimonies from 80 witnesses of the massacre, a dozen of which recognised people of Jewish origin among the attackers,' says IPN prosecutor Anna Gałkiewicz. 'Five witnesses testified those were members of the Bielski unit. No names have been offered. Neither Tuvia nor his brothers were seen among the attackers.'

Our Investigation

We went to Belarus, found people who remember the Bielski brothers, as well as Soviet documents where partisan commanders describe the Naliboki massacre as a victorious battle against a 'German garrison.' The archives contain the names of four officers awarded for the 'battle' - comrades Gulevich, Muratov, Shashkin, and Surkyev. Pavel Gulevich is mentioned as the one who personally killed four 'fascist lackeys.'

We also found the last living members of the Bielski unit: they live in Belarus, the US, and Britain. Their accounts correspond with the contents of the Soviet archives - on the day of the pacification of Naliboki (8 May 1943), the Bielski unit stationed 100 kilometres away.

'They were in the village of Stara Huta on that day,' says historian Tamara Vyarshitska, director of the Navahrudak regional museum, which has the largest collection of documents pertaining to the Bielski unit. 'They moved to Naliboki Forest only several months later, which long-published accounts clearly say.'

We also visited Mr Nowicki, who lives in Warsaw. He received us in a room filled with old copies of Nasz Dziennik . Mr Nowicki admitted he had never seen any of the Bielski brothers, nor does he have any proof of their participation in the massacre, and that he learned about their role in it from a certain 'Lova from Nowogrodek,' whose words were confirmed by one 'Vanya from Lubocz.' Mr Nowicki called the results of the IPN inquiry 'pulling the wool over the public's eyes,' and Defiance - an anti-Polish scandal.

Bielski Brothers Hollywood-Style

Defiance indeed departs from the truth on several occasions. Not only because the Bielski partisans fight against German tanks, which in fact never happened. Worse that the pre-war Nowogrodek is a Belarussian town in the movie where no one speaks Polish, and Polish partisans are missing from the film altogether. In Naliboki Forest (in reality the movie was shot on locations in Lithuania and Canada) there are only good Soviet partisans and bad Germans. Daniel Craig speaks Russian, even though for the real Bielski it was a language as strange as German (he spoke both only poorly).