The Pianist

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

Written immediately after the end of World War II, this morally complex Holocaust memoir is notable for its exact depiction of the grim details of life in Warsaw under the Nazi occupation. "Things you hardly noticed before took on enormous significance: a comfortable, solid armchair, the soothing look of a white-tiled stove," writes Wladyslaw Szpilman, a pianist for Polish radio when the Germans invaded. His mother's insistence on laying the table with clean linen for their midday meal, even as conditions for Jews worsened daily, makes palpable the Holocaust's abstract horror. Arbitrarily removed from the transport that took his family to certain death, Szpilman does not deny the "animal fear" that led him to seize this chance for escape, nor does he cheapen his emotions by belaboring them. Yet his cool prose contains plenty of biting rage, mostly buried in scathing asides (a Jewish doctor spared consignment to "the most wonderful of all gas chambers," for example). Szpilman found compassion in unlikely people, including a German officer who brought food and warm clothing to his hiding place during the war's last days. Extracts from the officer's wartime diary (added to this new edition), with their expressions of outrage at his fellow soldiers' behavior, remind us to be wary of general condemnation of any group. --Wendy Smith --

Amazon.co.uk Review

The last live broadcast on Polish Radio, on September 23, 1939, was Chopin's Nocturne in C sharp Minor , played by a young pianist named Wladyslaw Szpilman, until his playing was interrupted by German shelling. It was the same piece, and the same pianist, when broadcasting resumed six years later. The Pianist is Szpilman's account of the years in between, of the death and cruelty inflicted on the Jews of Warsaw and on Warsaw itself, related with a dispassionate restraint borne of shock. Szpilman, now 88, has not looked at his description since he wrote it in 1946 (the same time as Primo Levi's If This Is A Man?; it is too personally painful. The rest of us have no such excuse. Szpilman's family were deported to Treblinka, where they were exterminated; he survived only because a music-loving policeman recognised him.

This was only the first in a series of fatefully lucky escapes that littered his life as he hid among the rubble and corpses of the Warsaw Ghetto, growing thinner and hungrier, yet condemned to live. Ironically, it was a German officer, Wilm Hosenfeld, who saved Szpilman's life by bringing food and an eiderdown to the derelict ruin where he discovered him. Hosenfeld died seven years later in a Stalingrad labour camp, but portions of his diary, reprinted here, tell of his outraged incomprehension of the madness and evil he witnessed, thereby establishing an effective counterpoint to ground the nightmarish vision of the pianist in a desperate reality. Szpilman originally published his account in Poland in 1946, but it was almost immediately withdrawn by Stalin's Polish minions as it unashamedly described collaborations by Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Poles and Jews with the Nazis. In 1997 it was published in Germany after Szpilman's son found it on his father's bookcase. This admirably robust translation by Anthea Bell is the first in the English language. There were 3,500,000 Jews in Poland before the Nazi occupation; after it there were 240,000.Wladyslaw Szpilman's extraordinary account of his own miraculous survival offers a voice across the years for the faceless millions who lost their lives. --David Vincent

From Publishers Weekly

Originally published in Poland in 1945 but then suppressed by the Communist authorities, this memoir of survival in the Warsaw Ghetto joins the ranks of Holocaust memoirs notable as much for their literary value as for their historical significance. Szpilman, a Jewish classical pianist, played the last live music broadcast from Warsaw before Polish Radio went off the air in September 1939 because of the German invasion. In a tone that is at once dispassionate and immediate, Szpilman relates the horrors of life inside the ghetto. But his book is distinguished by the dazzling clarity he brings to the banalities of ghetto life, especially the eerie normalcy of some social relations amid catastrophic upheaval. He shows how Jewish residents of the Polish capital adjusted to life under the occupation: "The armbands branding us as Jews did not bother us, because we were all wearing them, and after some time living in the ghetto I realized that I had become thoroughly used to them." Using a reporter's powers of description, Szpilman, who is still alive at the age of 88, records the chilling conversations that took place as Jews waited to be transported to their deaths. "We're not heroes!" he recalls his father saying. "We're perfectly ordinary people, which is why we prefer to risk hoping for that 10 per cent chance of living." In a twist that exemplifies how this book will make readers look again at a history they thought they knew, he details how a German captain saved his life. Employing language that has more in common with the understatement of Primo Levi than with the moral urgency of Elie Wiesel, Szpilman is a remarkably lucid observer and chronicler of how, while his family perished, he survived thanks to a combination of resourcefulness and chance. (Sept.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Szpilman's memoir of life in the Warsaw ghetto is remarkable not only for the heroism of its protagonists but for the author's lack of bitterness, even optimism, in recounting the events. Written and published in a short run in Poland soon after the war, this first translation maintains a freshness of experience lacking in many later, more ruminative Holocaust memoirs.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews

A striking Holocaust memoir that conveys with exceptional immediacy and cool reportage the author's desperate fight for survival and the German who came to his aid. When WWII broke out, Szpilman was a talented young Jewish pianist in Warsaw. Within a few years, he would be forced with his family into the Warsaw ghetto, where he supported them by playing in ghetto cafs. Szpilman's memoir, suppressed by the Polish government shortly after its original publication in 1946, tells the story of the young mans difficult survival in wartime Warsaw and the deportation and death of his entire family. With marked clarity and detachment, Szpilman takes us through the changing moods among the doomed population, moods determined by the merest whim or close calculations of the Germans. This is also a book about the power of music, which provides Szpilman the determination to go on and literally saves him several times. Several things distinguish this among Holocaust memoirs. Written immediately after the war, The Pianist is distant and cool in its emotional tone; we sense that the author has not yet processed his emotions. Yet the immediacy of his experiences is found on every page in the details of daily life in the ghetto and his months of hiding. This account also contains extracts from the diary of the German officer who saved Szpilman's life. Captain Wilm Hosenfeld's extraordinary reflections on the war and the epilogue by German writer Wolf Bierman describing the many times that Hosenfeld came to the aid of Jews and Poles are fitting companions to Szpilman's memoir. They allow the reader to contemplate more personally the author's marked lack of desire for revenge. After the war, Szpilman returned to his career playing for Polish Radio and in concert halls. What interested Szpilman (who still lives in Warsaw), and what comes through here, is not a desire for revenge, but the brute animal drive for survival. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

"He tells his remarkable epic with great clarity and sensitivity." -- Dade Jewish Journal

“Stunning.” —The Wall Street Journal

“Remarkable...a document of lasting historical and human value.” —Los Angeles Times

“Historically indispensable.” —The Washington Post Book World

“The Pianist is a great book.”—The Boston Globe

"[Szpilman's] account is hair-raising beyond anything Hollywood could invent...an altogether unforgettable book." -- THE DAILY TELEGRAPH

"[Szpilman's] shock and ensuing numbness become ours, so that acts of ordinary kindness or humanity take on an aura of miracle. --THE OBSERVER

"Rarely has the sheer claustrophobia of living in the Warsaw Ghetto been so vividly conveyed as it is by Szpilman." --THE INDEPENDENT
--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

About the Author

From Wladyslaw Szpilman "The Pianist" Official Homepage © Andrzej Szpilman

To say that the music was Wladyslaw Szpilman's life-blood is more than just a poetic metaphor. The Polish composer and pianist literally owes his miraculous survival of the Holocaust to music.

Born in the Polish town of Sosnowiec on 5 December 1911, after first piano lessons Wladyslaw Szpilman continued his piano studies at the Warsaw Conservatory under A. Michalowski and subsequently at the Academy of Arts (Akademie der Kuenste) in Berlin under Arthur Schnabel and Leonid Kreutzer. He also studied composition under Franz Schreker. In 1933, he returned to Warsaw where he quickly became a celebrated pianist and a composer of both classical and popular music. On 1 April 1935 he entered Polish Radio, where he was working as a pianist performing both, classical and jazz music.

The German invasion of Warsaw on 23 September 1939 put an untimely but temporary end to Szpilman's musical career when a bomb, dropped on the studios of Polish Radio, interrupted his performance of Chopin's Nocturne in C Sharp minor. Yet despite the inevitable changes to his life, brought about by the onset of war, Szpilman refused to give up his music. His Concertino for piano and orchestra was composed while he was experiencing the hardships and deprivation of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1940. Time after time, Szpilman managed to escape the deportations. Even when he and his entire family were packed into cattle trucks to be sent off to Treblinka, the famous pianist was miraculously picked out and spared from the death camp. He fled to the Aryan part of the city and spent two long and agonising years in hiding, always assisted by loyal Polish friends. After the Warsaw Uprising he continued to lead the life of a recluse in the deserted ghost town. Towards the end of the war, he was discovered by a German officer of the Wehrmacht, Wilm Hosenfeld, who saved his life after listening to the starved pianist play Chopin's C Sharp minor Nocturne on the out-of-tune piano of his hiding-place.

When Szpilman resumed his activities as the at Polish Radio in 1945, he did so by carrying on where he left off six years before: poignantly, he opened the first transmission of the station by playing, once again, Chopin's C Sharp minor Nocturne.

From 1945 to 1963 he held the position of Director of Music at Polish Radio. During these years he composed several symphonic works and about 500 songs, many of which still are popular in Poland today, including some children's songs, as well as music for radio plays and film. He also performed as a soloist and with the violinists Bronislaw Gimpel, Roman Totenberg, Ida Haendel and Henryk Szeryng. In 1963, he and Gimpel founded the Warsaw Piano Quintet with which Szpilman performed world-wide until 1986.

Wladyslaw Szpilman died on 6 July 2000 in Warsaw.

Excerpts

Excerpted from Pianist by Wladyslaw Szpilman. Copyright © 1999. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved
On that final day at the radio station, I was giving a Chopin recital. It was the last live music broadcast from Warsaw. Shells were exploding close to the broadcasting centre all the time I played, and the buildings were burning very close to us. I could scarcely hear the sound of my own piano through the noise. After the recital I had to wait two hours before the shelling died down enough for me to get home. My parents, brother and sisters had thought I must be dead, and welcomed me like a man risen from the grave....

When darkness fell that evening, I put my head out of the window. The street was empty, and there was no sound but the echo of bursting shells. Heavy blood-red masses of smoke loomed above the buildings. Outside the door of our building lay the corpse of a woman with her head and one arm blown off. A bucket lay tipped over beside her; she had been fetching water from the well. Her blood flowed into the gutter in a long, dark stream, and then ran on into a drain covered by a grating. --From The Pianist
--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Book Description

Named one of the Best Books of 1999 by the Los Angeles Times, The Pianist is now a major motion picture directed by Roman Polanski and starring Adrien Brody (Son of Sam). The Pianist won the Cannes Film Festival’s most prestigious prize—the Palme d’Or.

On September 23, 1939, Wladyslaw Szpilman played Chopin’s Nocturne in C-sharp minor live on the radio as shells exploded outside—so loudly that he couldn’t hear his piano. It was the last live music broadcast from Warsaw: That day, a German bomb hit the station, and Polish Radio went off the air.

Though he lost his entire family, Szpilman survived in hiding. In the end, his life was saved by a German officer who heard him play the same Chopin Nocturne on a piano found among the rubble. Written immediately after the war and suppressed for decades, The Pianist is a stunning testament to human endurance and the redemptive power of fellow feeling.

• Editorial Reviews
• About the Author
• Excerpts
• Book Description