Defiance

Defiance

The prevailing image of European Jews during the Holocaust years is one of helpless victims under a death sentence, unable to fight consignment to the ghettos, to the camps, and to the gas chambers. In fact, many Jews struggled alone or with others against the terrors of the Third Reich, risking their lives against overwhelming odds for the slimmest chance of survival, or a mere glimpse of freedom. In Defiance, Nechama Tec offers a riveting history of one such group, a forest community in western Belorussia that would number more than 1,200 Jews by 1944--the largest armed rescue operation of Jews by Jews in World War II. Describing the entire partisan movement in the region, Tec shows that while most forest fighters in Belorussia were rifle-carrying young men, the members of this extraordinary community included both men and women, some with weapons but mostly unarmed, ranging from infants to the elderly. She reconstructs for the first time the amazing details of how these partisans and their families--hungry, exposed to the harsh winter weather, always on the lookout for German patrols--managed not only to survive, but to offer protection to all Jewish fugitives who could find their way to them. Driven by courage born out of despair, they dug wells, set up workshops to repair guns, made clothes, and resoled shoes, supplied services to other guerilla units, and even established a makeshift hospital and school in the forest. Arguing that this success would have been unthinkable without the vision of one man, Tec offers penetrating insight into the group's commander, Tuvia Bielski, and his journey from his life as the son of the only Jewish peasant family in an isolated rural village to his emergence as a leader possessing the charisma and courage to command under all but impossible circumstances. Tec brings to light the untold story of Bielski's struggle as a partisan who lost his parents, wife, and two brothers to the Nazis, yet never wavered in his conviction that it was more important to save one Jew than to kill twenty Germans. She shows how, under Bielski's guidance, the partisans smuggled Jews out of heavily guarded ghettos, scouted the roads for fugitives, and led retaliatory raids against Belorussian peasants who collaborated with the Nazis against their former Jewish neighbors. Refusing to turn away the weak or the old for the sake of the survival of the larger group, Bielski would warn new arrivals to the forest, "Life is difficult, we are in danger all the time, but if we perish, if we die, we die like human beings." A scholar, a writer, and herself a Holocaust survivor, author Nechama Techas devoted the last two decades to studying the fate of European Jewry, recording rare but vital examples of human compassion, resistance, altruism and heroism in the face of overwhelming horror and despair. Drawing on wide-ranging research and never before published interviews with surviving partisans--including Tuvia Bielski himself two weeks before his death in 1987--she reconstructs here the poignant and unforgettable story of those who chose to fight.

Defiance

DEFIANCE HELPS TARGETED ENTREPRENEURSTAND UP TO GANGSTERS AND GOVERNMENTSNew tell-all book exposes corruption behind the worlds superpowers(NEW YORK, N.Y.)-- Alex Konanykhin was a wanted man. The Russian mafia took out a contract on his life. The KGB, the FBI, the U.S. Justice Department, and the Department of Homeland Security were also on his trail. With paid assassins and two governments in hot pursuit, Konanykhin was running out of time and places to hide.What happened to Konanykhin, once one of Russias wealthiest entrepreneurs who by his mid-20s amassed a $300 million empire and bankrolled Boris Yeltsins rise to power, is, as one U.S. judge noted, a tale worthy of a spy novel.It is a true-life story so riveting, only Konanykhin himself can tell it. His debut book, Defiance, out in September 2006, is a hair-raising account of betrayal, corruption, conspiracy, kidnapping, high-speed chases, as well as secret government cover-ups. The book goes behind the press headlines Konanykhins case has generated for the past 10 years; the case Washington Post called a spellbinding seminar on international intrigue.In Defiance Konanykhin, 39, the founder of KMGI, a thriving high-tech agency located in New York, describes in gripping detail his against-all-odds ascent from a poor but industrious science student in the former U.S.S.R, to a powerful tycoon in the post-Communist Russia, who lived in the mansion built for the former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and was protected around the clock by Russian Secret Service. But when trusted members of his own security team betrayed him, and the U.S. government became a willing accomplice in an illicit pact with the KGB, the lives of Konanykhin and his wife Elena became a terrifying roller coaster of desperate attempts at survival, vindication, and search for justice.After fleeing the KGB-plotted assassination attempt in Budapest and eventually settling in the United States, the Konanykhins became pawns in a high-level political game between the two countries. Russias leaders threatened to have the FBI field office in Moscow shut down if the Americans refused to extradite the couple. What followed was an extraordinary and bizarre web of intrigue that started with a KGB search of the Konanyakhins Watergate apartment and their arrests on fake charges fabricated by the Kremlin.Written in a Virginia jail while Konanykhin awaited his extradition to Russia, Defiance chillingly depicts corruption in U.S. government. The American government was hell-bent on unlawfully sending me to a sure death, Konanykhin says, pointing out that on three occasions the U.S. courts declared the arrests groundless and illegal. Writing this book was all I could do while locked up in a prison cell and it looked like the last thing I would be able to do in my life.Freed and granted political asylum in the U.S. the only post-Soviet Russians to receive this status based on their political activities -- the Konanykhins are still fighting efforts of U.S. government to send them to the KGB fourteen years after their arrival in the U.S. Amazingly, despite these ordeals Konanykhin managed to build a new fortune in America from scratch. In 2004 National Republican Congressional Committee chose him as New York Businessman of the Year.

Defiance