My grandmother used to talk about the forests of Belorussia. She left that country when she was five, but the dense woods around her village had stirred her imagination. And the stories she told left a sort of genetic imprint on her children and grandchildren.

I imagine it was the same for Bielskis, four brothers Jews who lived in that same part of Western White Russia but stayed behind, only to see their homeland fall into Polish hands, then become part of the Soviet Union, ultimately to be subsumed by the Nazi meat grinder in the summer of 1941. The film Defiance tells their story, beginning shortly after the Germans invaded. It is a story of resistance, revenge, survival, and, ultimately, redemption.

The German intention to kill every Jew within their reach becomes clear almost immediately: German soldiers, along with native Belorussian police, round up Jewish men, women, and children, shoot them, and dump their bodies into pits or just simply leave them where they fall. It is in this state, crumpled and sprawled that Zus and Asael Bielski (Liev Schreiber and Jamie Bell) find their mother and father, murdered, on the family farm. They discover a third brother, Aron (played by George MacKay) hiding in a fruit cellar, holding a pairing knife.

Without sentiment, Zus pries the mezuzah (the small metal tube that marks a Jewish home) off the doorpost and leads the remnants of his family to the forest, where they are reunited with their older brother, Tuvia (Daniel Craig). Together, the four brothers decide to not only take up arms against the Germans, but also to take revenge on the locals who helped them.

When Tuvia finds out that the local police chief was the one who actually killed his parents, he shows up in the man's kitchen, armed with a pistol and four bullets given to him by another local peasant who was friends with his father. The police chief, a ruthless anti-Semite, who, only a few minutes before, had bragged about killing Bielski's parents and other Jews, begs for his life in front of his wife and two of his lieutenants. With neither joy nor remorse, Tuvia watches the man humiliate himself, as the audience wonders exactly what he will do.

The brothers efforts are more organized from there. As their numbers grow, they build a base, a Jerusalem in the forest, from which they conduct raids, haphazard at first, against the Germans. They take food and build a cache of arms. The Germans, for their part, seem surprised by the resistance, much like a schoolyard bully, who discovers that no one actually likes him.

Meanwhile, the two socialist dictatorships - the National Socialists of Germany and the Soviet Socialists of Russia (the Big Moustache and the Little Moustache, as one character states wryly in the film, borrowing a line from Martin Amis's Koba The Dread") fight it out in the swamps, fields, and forests of the Russian Steppes. The Bielskis ally with the Soviet partisans.

Perhaps the Germans thought that the forests of Belorussia would be as easy to control as the open fields of Poland or the Dutch Lowlands, but the combination of harsh terrain, tough Belorussian peasants, and steeled Jews prove harder to digest than the Germans had anticipated. Within two years, they begin losing control of entire areas behind their front lines. In the midst of the chaotic brutality and uneasy alliances of the partisan war, the Germans come after the Bielskis in the forest.

When the film reaches its climax, the trees echo with the sounds of machine gun fire, as Jews Labor Zionists, intellectuals, tradesmen, communists, businessmen, Talmudic scholars, secular, religious fight the Nazis for their lives.

Words also echo off the trees. There are three languages spoken in the film: German and Russian, of course, and English, as a stand-in for the savory Belorussian Yiddish of the Bielski Jews. This somehow works, causing the audience to identify even more with the brothers and their cohort in the forest. And English may be the only language that could pull it off, possessing much of the same cheeky, self-deprecating, but florid and expressive character of its Yiddish sibling.

It is the words coming across, from brother to brother, in the swamp at the edge of the forest, which provides the film with its final punch. There is a religious undertone to the film's conclusion, but, like everything else, director Edward Zwick handles it with care and intelligence.

I was, at first, skeptical about seeing yet another Holocaust movie, but this film is different. It is complex and nuanced like many others, but this time, the Jews fight back. That alone makes it a soul-cleansing experience. I know it would have made my grandmother smile.