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"I
just cannot understand how we have been able to commit such
crimes against defenseless civilians, against the Jews.
I ask myself again and again, how is it possible?"
- Wilm Hosenfeld (excerpt from Hosenfeld's diary)
Questioning the Story:
Why was director Roman Polanski so passionate about doing
this movie?
Roman Polanski's inspiration for doing The Pianist
came from the fact that he himself had been a prisoner of
the Polish ghetto during World War II. He had returned to
Poland from France with his parents just two years before
the second world war began. Both of his parents were taken
to concentration camps, where his mother eventually died.
With the help of his father, who pushed him through the
barbed wire of a camp, Roman escaped the ghetto and traveled
through the Polish countryside where he lived with different
Catholic families. He reunited with his father in 1945.
Why did Szpilman's book go unnoticed for so long?
Recently
published in English with the title "The Pianist,"
Wladyslaw Szpilman's harrowing account was first published
in Poland in 1946 under the title "Death of a
City."
Until recently, the book had remained largely unnoticed.
Upon its initial publication, the Communists suppressed
it, because, as Wolf Biermann surmises in an Epilogue to
The Pianist, it "contained too many painful
truths about the collaboration of defeated Russians, Poles,
Ukrainians, Latvians and Jews with the German Nazis".
Stalin, at the time of his death in March 1953, had been
assembling a transport for his own eastwards "resettlement"
of the Jews, which could have led to a second Holocaust.
It was only after the dissipation of the Soviet block that
publication became possible thanks to the efforts of Wlayslaw
Szpilman's son.
Did a boy at the train stop at Umschlagsplatz really
sell Wladyslaw Szpilman and his family a single, overpriced
caramel as their last meal together?
Yes. This was Szpilman's last memory of his family together.
In his memoir he said the following, "At one point
a boy made his way through the crowd in our direction with
a box of sweets on a string round his neck. He was selling
them at ridiculous prices, although heaven knows what he
was going to do with the money. Scraping together the last
of our small change, we bought a single cream caramel. Father
divided it into six parts with his penknife. That was our
last meal together."
Watch
the Peter Jennings Report on Wladyslaw Szpilman:
This
brief report gives an overview about Szpilman during the course
of the war from the German invasion in September 1939 to Poland's
liberation in January 1945. Szpilman is shown as well as a
picture of the officer who saved him. The quality is low but
bearable due to its short runtime. Courtesy of Szpilman.net.
Watch
the real Wladyslaw Szpilman play Chopin:
Watch
and listen to Szpilman play this beautiful rendition of Nocturne
c sharp minor by F. Chopin. The quality is good. Courtesy
of Szpilman.net.
"I played Chopin's Nocturne in C sharp
minor. The glassy, tinkling sound of the untuned strings rang
through the empty flat and the stairway, floated through the
ruins of the villa on the other side of the street and returned
as a muted, melancholy echo. When I had finished, the silence
seemed even gloomier and more eerie than before. A cat mewed
in the street somewhere. I heard a shot down below outside
the building - a harsh, loud German noise."
-
Wladyslaw Szpilman, The Pianist
Wladyslaw
Szpilman Images:
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The
pianist, Wladyslaw Szpilman. |
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Wladyslaw
Szpilman with his son.
The photograph was taken in 1998. |
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Wladyslaw
Szpilman with his grandchildren, Alina and Daniel.
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Wladyslaw
Szpilman Obituaries (Independent, 14 August 2000) :
When the shells of the invading Nazis forced the closure of
Polish Radio on 23 September 1939, the last live music heard
was Wladyslaw Szpilman's performance of Chopin's C sharp minor
Nocturne. When broadcasting was resumed in 1945, it was again
Szpilman who initiated the transmissions, with the same Chopin
nocturne. (Around the same time, rather less high-mindedly,
BBC television resumed an interrupted Mickey Mouse cartoon.)
What happened to Szpilman in the interim formed the stuff
of one of the most harrowing of all accounts of Jewish life
under the Nazis, in a book published last year as The Pianist
that immediately climbed to the top of the international bestseller
lists --- hardly surprisingly: it is a compelling, harrowing
masterpiece.
Szpilman wrote Death of a City (the initial title of
his memoir) in 1945 more or less as therapy --- to put his
memories down on paper and thus somehow to externalise them.
In doing so he revealed that he was a masterly writer: his
text matches a sharp eye for detail and for human character
with a complete absence of self-pity and of sanctimony.
For the first two years of the occupation Szpilman played
in the bars and cafés that continued to open for business
behind the walls of the ghetto, sealed off from the rest of
Warsaw on 15 November 1940. Szpilman records life there with
dignity and dispassion. He recalls watching the SS forcing
a group of prisoners out of a building:
They switched on the headlights of their car, forced
their prisoners to stand in the beam, started the engines
and made the men run ahead of them in the white cone of
light. We heard convulsive screaming from the windows of
the building, and a volley of shots from the car. The men
running ahead of it fell one by one, lifted into the air
by the bullets, turning somersaults and describing a circle,
as if the passage from life to death consisted of an extremely
difficult and complicated leap.
Time and again, chance dictated that Szpilman escape death.
The end seemed finally to have come when he and his family
were ordered to turn up at the Umschlagsplatz where, skirting
the rotting corpses around them, they were to be herded
onto trains headed for the gas chambers. Szpilman's last
memory of his family is movingly understated:
At one point a boy made his way through the crowd in
our direction with a box of sweets on a string round his
neck. He was selling them at ridiculous prices, although
heaven knows what he was going to do with the money. Scraping
together the last of our small change, we bought a single
cream caramel. Father divided it into six parts with his
penknife. That was our last meal together.
But as the Szpilmans were being crammed onto the train,
one of the Jewish policemen grabbed Wladyslaw by the collar,
yanked him out of the throng and refused to let him through
to rejoin his family on the journey to death.
Szpilman continued
to avoid death's clutches, surviving against all odds, often
half-starved and usually alone, hidden in obscure corners
of bombed, burned or empty buildings, intermittently helped
by Polish friends risking their own lives to bring him food
or find him shelter: helping a Jew automatically brought
a death sentence. The strangest twist in Szpilman's strange
story came at its end: he was discovered by a German officer
who, after Szpilman had given proof of his profession by
playing that same C sharp minor Nocturne on an abandoned
piano, hid him and brought him food and an eiderdown for
warmth.
Not the least extraordinary aspect of Szpilman's book is
the complete lack of the indignation and anger that anyone
writing immediately after such years of hell might reasonably
be expected to allow himself. Yet even the grim vignettes
of pointless death that are studded through his text don't
draw judgement --- perhaps because none was necessary:
A boy of about ten came running along the pavement.
He was very pale, and so scared that he forgot to take off
his cap to a German policeman coming towards him. The German
stopped, pulled his revolver without a word, put it to the
boy's temple and shot. The child fell to the ground, his
arms flailing, went rigid and died. The policeman calmly
put his revolver back in its holster and went on his way.
I looked at him; he did not even have particularly brutal
features, nor did he appear angry. He was a normal, placid
man who had carried out one of his many minor daily duties
and put it out of his mind again at once, for other and
more important business awaited him.
Death of a City was published in Poland in 1946
and soon suppressed by the Communists because, as Wolf Biermann
surmises in an Epilogue to The Pianist, it "contained
too many painful truths about the collaboration of defeated
Russians, Poles, Ukrainians, Latvians and Jews with the
German Nazis". More likely, it was Szpilman's record
of the suffering of the Jews that required silencing –
after all, the Jews could hardly expect a warmer welcome
in Stalin's empire than in Hitler's: when Stalin died, in
March 1953, he was already assembling the transport for
his own eastwards "resettlement" of the Jews,
and his own death prevented would probably have been a second
Holocaust. And so it was only after the collapse of the
Soviet bloc that, thanks to the efforts of Szpilman's son,
publication became possible.
Szpilman's initial training as a pianist was in the Chopin
School of Music in Warsaw under Josef Smidowicz and Aleksander
Michalowski, both of them former students of Liszt. In 1931
he enrolled at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin, studying
piano under two of the most distinguished players of the
day, Arthur Schnabel and Leonid Kreuzer, and composition
under Franz Schreker, the renowned composer of Der ferne
Klang and other similarly successful operas. On his return
to Poland in 1933 he formed a highly successful duo with
the violinist Bronislaw Gimpel that formed the basis, 29
years later, of the Warsaw Piano Quintet, whose tours soon
earned it a reputation as an ensemble of world standing;
Szpilman played with the Quintet until 1986.
Szpilman's own early compositions include a violin concerto
and a symphonic suite, The Life of Machines, and when the
Nazis invaded he was engaged on a Concertino for piano and
orchestra --- a jazz-flavoured, Gershwinesque piece remarkably
good-natured for the circumstances of its origin. The score
went with him from hiding-place to hiding-place before he
had to sacrifice it to survival; he reconstructed it after
the War. His light music was particularly successful: for
decades the Poles sang tunes from his three musicals, 50---60
children's songs and 600-odd chansons as they went about
the business of their daily lives.
A CD released in 1998 by the German label Alina (run by
Szpilman's son, Andrzej) testifies to both his fluency as
a composer and his excellence as a pianist --- and it includes
an archive recording of that life-saving Chopin nocturne.
Six more CDs of Szpilman as both performer and composer
are scheduled for release in Poland in the autumn. With
luck his last-minute fame as a writer will bring his music
the wider currency he would have wished for it during his
lifetime.
MARTIN ANDERSON
Wladyslaw Szpilman, pianist and composer, born 5.December.1911,
Sosnowiec, Poland; married Halina Grzecznarowski, 2 sons;
died Warsaw, 6 July 2000.
Link-to-Learn
More:
The
Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (Photos and History)
THE
PIANIST /***1/2 Movie Review by Roger Ebert
Watch
the The Pianist Movie Trailer:
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SPLYCED (1:16)
