http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=3284
By Marissa Brostoff
As Paramount Pictures gears up its ad campaign for a new movie about a band of http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2967 partisans who fought the Nazis, some in Poland are suggesting that the partisans in question may also have been murderers.
In anticipation of the December release of “Defiance,” — starring http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2329 town of Naliboki.
The tarnishing of the Bielski partisans has infuriated a number of people close to the memory of the group. Some of those people have also been involved with the production of the movie, directed by Ed Zwick (“Legends of the Fall,” “The Last Samurai”). Nechama Tec, who wrote the historical account of the Bielski partisans on which the film is based, told the Forward that allegations connecting the partisans to the massacre were “total lies.”
Those allegations “underline the antisemitic tendencies of the writers and the distortion of history,” Tec said.The controversy comes on the heels of a http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=1813 into allegations that Jewish partisans committed war crimes during World War II. That investigation has been met with dismay on the part of Jewish communal leaders inside and outside Lithuania, who note that only three Lithuanians have ever been prosecuted for wartime crimes against Jews.
The reinvestigation — or, as some former partisans and historians claim, the revision — of what happened in the town of Naliboki in May 1943 began in 2001, when the massacre was first being studied by the Institute of National Remembrance, a Polish government agency known as IPN, that is devoted to prosecuting “crimes against the Polish nation.” The agency’s report, which has thus far been limited to a short brief released this year, claims that on the morning of March 8, 1943, Soviet partisans shot 128 civilians outside their homes.
http://www.forward.com/articles/polish-investigators-tie-partisans-to-massacre-02323/