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The last live broadcast on Polish Radio, on September 23, 1939, was Chopin's Night in C-sharp minor, played by a young pianist named Wladyslaw Szpilman, until his performance was interrupted by the German conch shell. 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 born of shock. Szpilman, now 88, hasn't looked at his description since he wrote it in 1946 (around the same time as Primo Levi's If This Is A Man?; it's very ugly. The rest of us don't have such an excuse.
Szpilman's family was deported to Treblinka, where they were exterminated; he survived only because a music-loving policeman recognized 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 found him. Hosenfeld died seven years later in a Stalingrad labor camp, but portions of his diary, reprinted here, recounting his overwhelming incomprehension of the madness and evil they witnessed, provide an effective counterpoint to ground the pianist's nocturnal vision in a desperate reality. Szpilman originally published his account in Poland in 1946, but it was almost immediately discovered by Stalin's Polish lackeys, without a shadow of a word describing Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Poles, and Jews as Nazis. In 1997 it was published in Germany after Szpilman's son found it in 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; afterward there were 240,000. Wladyslaw Szpilman's extraordinary account of his own miraculous survival offers a voice across the years for the faceless millionaires who lost their lives. --David Vincent
