‘VILNA’: HOMAGE TO JEWISH RESISTANCE

Claude Lanzmann’s “Shoah” gave a numbing account of the Holocaust of European Jewry in World War II.

“Partisans of Vilna” (at the Westside Pavilion) presents another angle on this historical tragedy. Instead of the Holocaust’s millions of victims, it focuses on a handful who chose to resist: the several hundred members of the Jewish Resistance movement in the ghetto of Vilna, Lithuania.

Conceived and produced by Aviva Kempner (the child of a Lithuanian Holocaust survivor) and directed by Josh Waletzky, “Partisans of Vilna” is a fine documentary--though it never matches the massive, dark, accumulating power of “Shoah.” “Vilna” is more slickly done, more obvious technically. It employs the classic modern documentary mix of archival footage and “talking heads”--the testimony of Vilna’s survivors, scattered throughout the world.

The context is set for us precisely: Vilna was a historic Jewish cultural center--the site of great religious libraries, renowned Talmudic rabbis and flourishing Yiddish musical and theatrical groups. Gradually, the flames of this culture were snuffed. The invading Nazis made the ghetto a prison and finally liquidated it in September, 1943.

Most of the ghetto tried to persevere. Some residents dealt with the Nazis--and occasionally delivered them rebels--in a desperate attempt to keep Vilna’s inhabitants alive until Germany’s defeat.

The core group of the resisters reacted differently. They encompassed the most radical of the ghetto’s prisoners--a mixture of fervent Zionists and Communists, and refugees of Jewish youth groups from nearby Poland and other invaded countries. The resisters were mostly young, and an unusually large number of them were women. (Their youth is one reason so many survivors remain to tell Vilna’s story. Among them is the film’s principal spokesman, Abba Kovner, then a Resistance leader and today a world-renowned poet and novelist.)

Their battles were actually few. Many of Vilna’s Jews were shipped off to be killed in nearby death camps. Their resistance in no way matched the harrowing last stand of the Warsaw Ghetto. In one of their only direct fights with the Nazis (before they scattered into partisan units in the forests outside the city), their first leader was killed after getting off a few shots. Primarily, their battles were silent, smuggling information out, and weapons and food in.

But their resistance is crucial, since it answers the familiar query: Why did so many let themselves be led to the slaughter?

These few didn’t. The record of their fight has intense historical value--and an honesty, passion, and dedication that keep you absorbed for most of its length.

The film’s treatment is variable, but the story is so sobering, so often thrilling, that it beggars much of what passes for adventure in today’s fiction movies. Here is a great subject: rich, poignant, terrifying and even occasionally ennobling, filled at its best with the pitch darkness and blazing light of life’s most annihilating moments.