Most people are familiar with this material through the award-winning motion picture of the same name, featuring Adrien Brody. This remarkable account speaks to the strength of the human spirit and the unconquerable will to survive, even in the face of unfathomable hardship and personal tragedy. This account tells the story of Wladyslaw Szpilman, a famous pianist and accomplished composer who was working for Polish radio at the time war broke out.
What this account reveals is the total breakdown of civilization: survival is little more than chance, despite an individual's wealth, intelligence, or will to survive. So many brushes with death suggest little more than simple random chance for survival: Wladek's instinct to stay in one place, when he would have been almost certainly killed had he followed others, the total chance of running into a Jewish policeman who knew him, who grabbed him by the collar and dragged him out of the crowd which was being herded into cattle cars, to be shipped off to be murdered in masse at Treblinka, the site of the greatest mass slaughter in human history: over 800,000 were systematically murdered at that site in less than a single year. Five of those individuals included Wladek's entire immediate family: his parents and three siblings, a brother and two sisters, one of them an accomplished attorney.
The account also speaks to the efforts of "ordinary people" to challenge the brutality, in risking their lives to either fight back or to save others, at great risk to themselves. He also even survived a suicide attempt, in overdosing on medication in a burning building; it is unfathomable that this moving account comes down to us. Simply put: it just wasn't his time.
Wladek survived two attempts at extermination: the snuffing out of his life, and, later, that of his story, his testimony, his indictment of man's inhumanity to man, which will long outlive him. The first draft of this book was written just after the war, literally while the ashes were still smouldering. This in itself is unique, as most accounts which survive were written years, and sometimes, decades, after the events, after survivors had had time to internalize, to make sense of, and, in some ways, to recover from their experiences.
This account reads very much like a very raw and visceral catharsis, but it is still highly introspective and extremely moving. Wladek's son, Andrzej Szpilman, wrote that "my father wrote the first version of this book in 1945, I suspect, for himself rather than humanity in general. It enabled him to work through his shattering wartime experiences and free his mind and emotions to continue with his life." To that end, I'm curious as to how his thoughts changed over the years, when he had to confront the loss of everyone he knew; he mentions it throughout this moving account, but the process of recovery in subsequent months and years, when he realized that he would survive, but then had to confront the reality of living a life without his family and many friends and acquaintances.
The second part of my initial statement, that later powers that be attempted to silence his story, occurred in the years after the war. It was first published in 1946 in Poland, under the title Death of a City (Warsaw), but after the Soviet takeover of Poland, in the words of famous essayist Wolf Biermann, "the nomenklatura of Eastern Europe in general were unable to tolerate such authentic eyewitnesses accounts as this book. They contained too many painful truths about the collaboration of defeated Russians, Poles, Ukrainians, Latvians and Jews with the German Nazis," truths that the conquerors wished to silence in order to concoct their own.
Even in the first edition, Wilm Hosenfeld was portrayed as an Austrian, not a German: "directly after the war it was impossible to publish a book in Poland which presented a German officer as a brave and helpful man." Wladek's son Andrzej also noted that the book was never reprinted, despite a few efforts in the 1960s. It was published again only a half-century after it was written, and a movie was produced in 2002, which brought it to an even larger audience.
Another unique aspect of this re-release was the inclusion of some of the diary entries (albeit highly selective) of Wilm Hosenfeld, the German officer who is credited with "saving" Wladek's life (although I am somewhat dubious of this claim; as Wladek had survived thus far, by scavenging bombed-out buildings, it is highly likely that he would have lasted another few weeks in hiding until Warsaw was retaken and the war ended).
This content is complex: on the one hand, this individual, who died in a Soviet labor camp seven years after the end of the war, was a Nazi, this account portrays him as a decent human being and a Christian, who saved many persons in addition to Wladek, a man devoted to his family and his students, highly critical of the German war machine, although it's difficult to determine his true position based on the few pages included here. The passages are revealing, however: one states that ""When the terrible mass murders of Jews were committed last summer, so many women and children slaughtered, I knew quite certainly that we would lose the war. There was no point in a war that might once have been justified as a search for free subsistence and living space [he remains highly critical of "Jewish Bolshevism"] - it had degenerated into vast, inhuman mass slaughter, negating all cultural values, and it can never be justified to the German people; the torturing of Poles under arrest, the shooting of prisoners of war and their bestial treatment - that can never be justified, either."
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"Every war casts up certain small groups among ethnic populations: minorities too cowardly o fight openly, too insignificant to play any independent political prt, but despicable enough to act as paid executioners to one of the fighting powers."
What this account reveals is the total breakdown of civilization: survival is little more than chance, despite an individual's wealth, intelligence, or will to survive. So many brushes with death suggest little more than simple random chance for survival: Wladek's instinct to stay in one place, when he would have been almost certainly killed had he followed others, the total chance of running into a Jewish policeman who knew him, who grabbed him by the collar and dragged him out of the crowd which was being herded into cattle cars, to be shipped off to be murdered in masse at Treblinka, the site of the greatest mass slaughter in human history: over 800,000 were systematically murdered at that site in less than a single year. Five of those individuals included Wladek's entire immediate family: his parents and three siblings, a brother and two sisters, one of them an accomplished attorney.
The account also speaks to the efforts of "ordinary people" to challenge the brutality, in risking their lives to either fight back or to save others, at great risk to themselves. He also even survived a suicide attempt, in overdosing on medication in a burning building; it is unfathomable that this moving account comes down to us. Simply put: it just wasn't his time.
Wladek survived two attempts at extermination: the snuffing out of his life, and, later, that of his story, his testimony, his indictment of man's inhumanity to man, which will long outlive him. The first draft of this book was written just after the war, literally while the ashes were still smouldering. This in itself is unique, as most accounts which survive were written years, and sometimes, decades, after the events, after survivors had had time to internalize, to make sense of, and, in some ways, to recover from their experiences.
This account reads very much like a very raw and visceral catharsis, but it is still highly introspective and extremely moving. Wladek's son, Andrzej Szpilman, wrote that "my father wrote the first version of this book in 1945, I suspect, for himself rather than humanity in general. It enabled him to work through his shattering wartime experiences and free his mind and emotions to continue with his life." To that end, I'm curious as to how his thoughts changed over the years, when he had to confront the loss of everyone he knew; he mentions it throughout this moving account, but the process of recovery in subsequent months and years, when he realized that he would survive, but then had to confront the reality of living a life without his family and many friends and acquaintances.
The second part of my initial statement, that later powers that be attempted to silence his story, occurred in the years after the war. It was first published in 1946 in Poland, under the title Death of a City (Warsaw), but after the Soviet takeover of Poland, in the words of famous essayist Wolf Biermann, "the nomenklatura of Eastern Europe in general were unable to tolerate such authentic eyewitnesses accounts as this book. They contained too many painful truths about the collaboration of defeated Russians, Poles, Ukrainians, Latvians and Jews with the German Nazis," truths that the conquerors wished to silence in order to concoct their own.
Even in the first edition, Wilm Hosenfeld was portrayed as an Austrian, not a German: "directly after the war it was impossible to publish a book in Poland which presented a German officer as a brave and helpful man." Wladek's son Andrzej also noted that the book was never reprinted, despite a few efforts in the 1960s. It was published again only a half-century after it was written, and a movie was produced in 2002, which brought it to an even larger audience.
Another unique aspect of this re-release was the inclusion of some of the diary entries (albeit highly selective) of Wilm Hosenfeld, the German officer who is credited with "saving" Wladek's life (although I am somewhat dubious of this claim; as Wladek had survived thus far, by scavenging bombed-out buildings, it is highly likely that he would have lasted another few weeks in hiding until Warsaw was retaken and the war ended).
This content is complex: on the one hand, this individual, who died in a Soviet labor camp seven years after the end of the war, was a Nazi, this account portrays him as a decent human being and a Christian, who saved many persons in addition to Wladek, a man devoted to his family and his students, highly critical of the German war machine, although it's difficult to determine his true position based on the few pages included here. The passages are revealing, however: one states that ""When the terrible mass murders of Jews were committed last summer, so many women and children slaughtered, I knew quite certainly that we would lose the war. There was no point in a war that might once have been justified as a search for free subsistence and living space [he remains highly critical of "Jewish Bolshevism"] - it had degenerated into vast, inhuman mass slaughter, negating all cultural values, and it can never be justified to the German people; the torturing of Poles under arrest, the shooting of prisoners of war and their bestial treatment - that can never be justified, either."
---------------
"Every war casts up certain small groups among ethnic populations: minorities too cowardly o fight openly, too insignificant to play any independent political prt, but despicable enough to act as paid executioners to one of the fighting powers."
The powerful, bestselling memoir of a young Jewish pianist who survived the war in Warsaw against all odds, alongside moving extracts from the diary of the German officer who saved his life. The writing is better than the movie as each act of horror becomes increasingly mind-numbing. It is hard to believe that he managed to survive.
