The Defiant

The Defiant: A True Story is a 1996 World War II memoir by Shalom Yoran, a Holocaust survivor and a former Jewish partisan.

At 14, Yoran witnessed the first hours of World War II when his home in Poland, 60 kilometres (37 miles) from the German border, came under attack. Yoran barely escaped the roundup and execution of virtually all the Jews in his town. He fled Poland with his family and found refuge in communist Lithuania. He later served in both the Soviet and the Polish armies, was jailed in Hungary while posing as a Greek, and entered Palestine posing as a British soldier.

He wrote his memoirs, illustrating his harrowing experience during the war, at the age of 21, but they remained unpublished for five decades.