THE PIANIST

Author: Wladyslaw Szpilman
Year: 2000 (1946)
Publisher: Wydawnictwo Znak
Language: Polish

The Second World War is probably the lowest point of our species so far. Mankind, undressed to all its bare-naked evil, rage, bigotry, hypocrisy, savagery, and moral bankruptcy, deliberately imprinted an indelible bloodstain on its history. It is estimated that up to 60 million people perished. They died from genocide, massacres, bombings, and disease. Some were killed in battle. Some committed suicide. Some starved to death. Many more still went through unspeakable hardship, pain, despair, horror, and trauma.

Truth be told, I try to avoid reading books about the Second World War. It marks such a revolting epoch that it makes my stomach turn at the mere thought. And yet, some books just have to be read, contemplated, and shared. Some experiences may never be forgotten and by reading them, I imagine that I add my own conscience to the collective memory of the people and events of the 1930s and 1940s. One such book is “The Diary of a Young Girl” by Anne Frank (see my review from June 2020). Another is “Pianista” (“The Pianist”) by Wladyslaw Szpilman.

The book ventures to capture the haunting memories of a Varsovian Polish-Jewish pianist and employee of the National Polish Radio, from the day the Second World War broke out to the day the Nazis surrendered and Warsaw was liberated.

Szpilman recounts how despite German bombs barraging the once prosperous Polish capital, shattering windows and setting entire neighbourhoods aflame, tossing carts, vehicles, horses, and people into the air leaving only charred shadows in their stead, he made his way to the studio of the radio station to make his final broadcast. In the midst of this inferno, where the noise of the crumbling city and the blasts from the enemy’s relentless bombardment much of the time overcame the sound of his grand piano, he gave an incandescent Chopin recital to his horrified listeners as a musical valediction to the country that was to be no more. The Polish radio was soon thereafter taken off the air and replaced by Nazi-controlled transmissions.

He reminisces how one day, the dwindling population of Warsaw, already decimated by being systematically  bit by bit transported out of the city and to the extermination camps, is shocked to learn that a sizeable portion of the centre was to be designated Jewish and surrounded by walls on each side making it impossible to get either in or out without authorisation. Jews living in other quarters needed to move inside the walls, and non-Jewish Poles having thitherto resided within the designated area needed to move out. Neighbourhoods, friendships, households, businesses, schools were broken up in an instant and the ghetto came into existence.

In fact there were two ghettos, connected only by a narrow passageway across Chlodna Street which was, and I seem to recall still is, a busy thoroughfare in Warsaw with some critical tramlines running along it. It was guarded by German soldiers who had to stop the heavy traffic in order to allow the residents to cross from one of the ghettos to the other. In one memorable sequence, Szpilman relates how the soldiers, having grown bored with their monotonous jobs of keeping the Jews at bay during rush hours, came up with a game where they commanded a group of street musicians to play some merry tunes and then forced some unfortunate individuals from the anticipating masses on the pavement on each side of Chlodna Street to dance for their amusement. They found particular pleasure in matching up conspicuously silly pairs such as the shortest man they could find with the tallest woman or elderly and crippled couples which they spurred to dance faster and faster under the threat of being shot on the spot, until their frail bodies succumbed to the fatigue and tumbled to the ground.

The book is packed with stories like these. Every single page saturated with disbelief, fear, humiliation, despair, sacrifice, and senseless killing and death. Wladyslaw Szpilman would lose everything and everyone to the war; except his life. As if by a miracle, almost six years after he had given the last live recital on the wireless in 1939, he gave the first to a once again free Poland in 1945, playing the same piece by Frédéric Chopin as if to declare the indomitability of the Polish resolve through the music of one of the nation’s most illustrious patriots.     

Szpilman was to recover quickly after the war and his loyalty to Polish music and the Polish National Radio would become his path back to some sort of normality. Rebuilding the fine arts would prove to be a slow process facing many obstacles. While the Germans had prohibited much Polish music during the occupation years, Chopin among them, after the war the Russian overlords continued to restrict the freedom of Warsaw’s musicians, artists, writers, poets, and film-makers. Not until after Joseph Stalin’s death, did the Communist grip loosen enough to permit western influence and a more liberal production of art and entertainment.

In 1962, Szpilman, who was already an established and respected pianist, composer and songwriter at the time, became one of the founding members of what was to be the global phenomenon “The Warsaw Quintet” and from that moment his fame was secured.*

All this without anybody even having heard about “Pianista”.

The fact is that as early as 1946, the first edition of this book was released under the name “Smierc miasta” (“Death of a City”). The actual author was the Polish nobleman, socialite, intellectual, and cultural celebrity Jerzy Waldorff, to whom Szpilman had entrusted the literary composition of his memoir. The book was quickly censored by the totalitarian pro-Stalinist regime and soon put out of print. Not until 1998, when Szpilman was 87 years old, would it see the day of light in an uncensored German translation. It instantly became a global success and within two years had been issued in several languages, including the original Polish now under the title “Pianista”. Roman Polanski’s film adaptation another two years later went on to win three Academy Awards.

During the course of this revival, Jerzy Waldorff’s name was somehow lost. Still, the language of the Polish original could only have been produced by a lettered and sophisticated writer, far from Szpilman’s direct and sometimes crude way of communicating. The contrast between the literary and high flying language on the one hand and the horrendous events that it describes on the other, time and time again punched me right in the gut and I found that I could only read one chapter at the time on account of my heart-rate and blood pressure. Graphic descriptions of one unthinkable atrocity after the other are, after all, emotionally rather taxing.

What then can be said about actually living through this experience?   

 

*A comprehensive detail on the exploits of the Warsaw Quintet based on interviews with surviving members as well as historical records and documents is brilliantly provided in the Master thesis “Kwintet Warszawski – historia i opis dzialalnosci” by Karolina Orzelska from 2010.