The Pianist, originally published as Śmierć Miasta. Pamiętniki Władysława Szpilmana 1939–1945 ("Death of a City: Memoirs of Władysław Szpilman 1939–1945"), is a 1946 memoir by the Polish-Jewish pianist and composer Władysław Szpilman, in which he describes his life in Warsaw in occupied Poland during World War II. After being forced with his family to live in the Warsaw Ghetto, Szpilman manages to avoid deportation to the Treblinka extermination camp, and from his hiding places around the city witnesses the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943, as well as the Warsaw Uprising (the rebellion by the Polish resistance) the following year. He survives in the ruined city with the help of friends and strangers, including Wilm Hosenfeld, a German army captain who admires his piano playing.
The book was edited by Jerzy Waldorff, a Polish music critic and friend of Szpilman. In his introduction, Waldorff explained that he had written down the story as told by Szpilman.Piotr Kuhiwczak (2007). "The Grammar of Survival: How Do We Read Holocaust Testimonies?", in Myriam Salama-Carr (ed.), Translating and Interpreting Conflict, Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 70. A 1950 Polish film based on the book was heavily censored by the Communist government.Melissa U. D. Goldsmith, Paige A. Willson, Anthony J. Fonseca (2016). The Encyclopedia of Musicians and Bands on Film, Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield (218–221, 229–230), 230.
A German translation by Karin Wolff in 1998, Das wunderbare Überleben: Warschauer Erinnerungen ("The Miraculous Survival: Warsaw Memories"), named Władysław Szpilman as the sole author, and in 1999 an English translation by Anthea Bell was published as The Pianist: The Extraordinary Story of One Man's Survival in Warsaw, 1939–45. Two years after Szpilman's death, Roman Polanski's film The Pianist (2002) won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, and the following year it won three Academy Awards (Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Actor and Best Director), and BAFTA Awards for Best Film and Best Direction.
Synopsis Władysław Szpilman
Władysław Szpilman (1911–2000) was born in Sosnowiec, Poland, and studied piano in the early 1930s at the Fryderyk Chopin University of Music in Warsaw and at the Berlin Academy of Arts."Szpilman's Warsaw: The History behind The Pianist", United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. In Berlin he was instructed by Leonid Kreutzer and Artur Schnabel. During his time at the academy he also studied composition with Franz Schreker.
In 1933, after Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party rose to power in Germany, Szpilman returned to Warsaw, where he worked as a pianist for Polish Radio.Andrzej Szpilman (2000). "Foreword", in Władysław Szpilman, The Pianist, New York: Picador. During the invasion of Poland in September 1939, German bombs destroyed the power station that kept Polish Radio running. Szpilman played the station's last pre-war live recording (a Chopin recital) on 23 September 1939, the day it went off the air.For the date, "Polish Radio – Studio 1 named after Pianist Szpilman", Radio Poland, 25 September 2011.
Days after Warsaw's surrender, German leaflets were hung on the walls of buildings, promising Poles the protection of the German state. A section of the leaflets were devoted to Jews, guaranteeing that their rights, property and lives would be secure. Decrees applying to Jews were posted around the city. From 1 December Jews over the age of 12 had to wear a blue Star of David on a white armband; they were given five days to comply.The Pianist, 54. They had to hand real estate and valuables over to German officials. Jewish families were permitted to own just 2,000 zlotys; the rest had to be deposited in a bank in a blocked account.The Pianist, 45. Very few people complied. Szpilman's family—he was living with his parents, his brother Henryk, and his sisters Regina and Halina—hid their money in the window frame, an expensive gold watch under a cupboard, and the watch's chain beneath the fingerboard of Szpilman's father's violin.The Pianist, 46.
Creation of the ghetto
By 1940 many of the roads leading to the area set aside for the Warsaw Ghetto were being blocked off with walls. No reason was given for the construction work. Notices appeared in the streets that were to mark the ghetto's boundary announcing that the area was infected by typhus. Szpilman describes a newspaper article that appeared soon after the ghetto was announced:
[T]he only Warsaw newspaper published in Polish by the Germans provided an official comment on this subject: not only were the Jews social parasites, they also spread infection. They were not, said the report, to be shut up in a ghetto; even the word ghetto was not to be used. The Germans were too cultured and magnanimous a race, said the newspaper, to confine even parasites like the Jews to ghettos, a medieval remnant unworthy of the new order in Europe. Instead, there was to be a separate Jewish quarter of the city where only Jews lived, where they would enjoy total freedom, and where they could continue to practise their racial customs and culture. Purely for hygienic reasons, this quarter was to be surrounded by a wall so that typhus and other Jewish diseases could not spread to other parts of the city.The Pianist, 58–59.
Szpilman's family was already living in the ghetto-designated area; other families had to find new homes within its confines. They were given just over a month's warning, and many had to pay exorbitant rents for tiny slums in bad areas. (By May 1941, 445,000 Jews were living in the ghetto, which covered 4.5 percent of the city's area.)Friedlander (2008), 105.
Life in the ghetto By the time the Germans closed the gates of the ghetto on 15 November 1940, Szpilman's family had sold all their belongings, including their "most precious household possession", the piano. Szpilman found he was able to earn a living by playing piano, first in the ghetto's Café Nowoczesna in Nowolipki Street, then in a café in Sienna Street frequented by the Jewish intelligentsia, and later in the ghetto's largest café, the Sztuka in Leszno Street.The Pianist, 13–14, 16.
The Café Nowoczesna pandered to the ghetto's upper class, largely smugglers and their guests. The closure of the ghetto had made little difference to the trade. Food, drink and luxury goods arrived heaped on wagons; Kon and Heller, who ran the business (both in the service of the Gestapo), paid the guards to turn a blind eye. There were other, less organized, forms of smuggling too. Every afternoon carts would pass by the ghetto wall, a whistle would be heard, and bags of food would be thrown over the wall. Several smugglers were children who squeezed through the gutters that ran from the Aryan to the Jewish side.The Pianist, 11–13. 68. Szpilman describes watching such an operation in progress; the goods had been thrown over, and the child was about to follow:
His skinny little figure was already partly in view when he suddenly began screaming, and at the same time I heard the hoarse bellowing of a German on the other side of the wall. I ran to the child to help him squeeze through as quickly as possible, but in defiance of our efforts his hips stuck in the drain. I pulled at his little arms with all my might, while his screams became increasingly desperate, and I could hear the heavy blows struck by the policeman on the other side of the wall. When I finally managed to pull the child through, he died. His spine had been shattered.The Pianist, 12–13.
As time went on, the ghetto slowly split into a small ghetto, made up of the intelligentsia and middle and upper classes, and a large one that held the rest of the Warsaw Jews. The two were connected by a crossing on Chłodna Street. Szpilman and his family lived in the small ghetto, which was less crowded and dangerous. Whenever he went into the large ghetto, he would visit a friend, Jehuda Zyskind, who worked as a smuggler, trader, driver or carrier as the need arose. Zyskind would supply Szpilman with the latest news from outside the ghetto, which he received via radio. In the winter of 1942, Zyskind and his family were shot after being caught producing underground publications.
After completing whatever other business he had, Szpilman would head back to his house in the small ghetto. On his way he would meet up with his brother, Henryk, who made a living trading books in the street. Henryk, like Władysław, was cultured and well educated. Many of his friends advised him to do as most young men of the intelligentsia and join the Jewish Ghetto Police, an organization of Jews who worked under the SS, upholding their laws in the ghetto. Henryk refused to work with "bandits". In May 1942 the Jewish police began to carry out the task of "human hunting" for the Germans:
You could have said, perhaps, that they caught the Gestapo spirit. As soon as they put on their uniforms and police caps and picked up their rubber truncheons, their natures changed. Now their ultimate ambition was to be in close touch with the Gestapo, to be useful to Gestapo officers, parade down the street with them, show off their knowledge of the German language and vie with their masters in the harshness of their dealings with the Jewish population.
During a "human hunt" conducted by the Jewish police, Henryk was picked up and arrested. Szpilman went to the labour bureau building, hoping that his popularity as a pianist would be enough to secure Henryk's release and stop himself from being arrested as well, for none of his papers were in order. After much effort, he managed to extract a promise from the deputy director of the labour bureau that Henryk would be home by that night. The other men arrested during the sweep were taken to Treblinka.
Umschlagplatz
The deportations began on 22 July 1942. Buildings, randomly selected from all areas of the ghetto, were surrounded by German officers leading troops of Jewish police. The inhabitants were called out and the buildings searched, then everyone was loaded into wagons and taken to the Umschlagplatz (assembly area) in Stawki Street next to the Warszawa Gdańska station. From there, they were loaded onto trains. Notices posted around the city said that all Jews fit to work were going to the East to work in German factories. They would each be allowed 20 kilograms of luggage, jewelry, and provisions for two days. Only Jewish officials from the Judenräte or other social institutions were exempt from resettlement.
In the hope of being allowed to stay in Warsaw if they were useful to the German community, Jews tried to find work at German firms that were recruiting within the ghetto. If they managed to find work, often by paying their employer to hire them, Jews would be issued with certificates of employment. They would pin notices bearing the name of the place where they were working onto their clothing.
After six days searching and deal making, Szpilman managed to procure six work certificates, enough for his entire family. At this time, Henryk, Władysław and their father were given work sorting the stolen possessions of Jewish families at the collection centre near the Umschlagplatz. They and the rest of the family were allowed to move into the barracks for Jewish workers at the centre. On 16 August 1942, their luck ran out. A selection was carried out at the collection centre, and only Henryk and Halina passed as fit to work. The rest of the family was taken to the Umschlagplatz. Henryk and Halina, working in the collection centre, heard about the family's plight and volunteered to go there too. Szpilman was horrified by his siblings' headstrong decision, and only accepted their presence after his appeal to the guards had failed to secure their release. The family sat together in the large open space: