Product Description

'You can learn more about human nature from this brief account of the survival of one man throughout the war years in the devastated city of Warsaw than from several volumes of the average encyclopaedia' Independent on Sunday 'We are drawn in to share his surprise and then disbelief at the horrifying progress of events, all conveyed with an understated intimacy and dailiness that render them painfully close...riveting' Observer 'The images drawn are unusually sharp and clear...but its moral tone is even more striking: Szpilman refuses to make a hero or a demon out of anyone' Literary Review

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #8696 in Books
• Published on: 1999-12-30
• Original language: German
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

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 Szpilman originally published his account in Poland in 1946, but it was almost immediately withdrawn by Stalin's Polish minions as it unashamedly described collaborations by Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Poles and Jews with the Nazis.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 the Publisher
From the reviews of THE PIANIST:
"The grand historical narrative of the Second World War, with its alliances and troop movements, its capitalised heroes and villains, is now largely established. Yet 54 years on, the smaller, individual accounts of those who lived through the war's terror continue to shock or surprise by their very particularity. Wladyslaw Spzpilman's memoir of life in Nazi-occupied Warsaw and the Jewish ghetto has a singular vividness. It was written and published immediately after the war, only then to be buried by the new Communist regime....the immediacy of Szpilman's account goes hand in hand with a rare tone of innocence. History has not yet been written, certainly not digested. We are drawn in to share his surprise and then disbelief at the horrifying progress of events. His shock and ensuing numbness become ours, so that acts of ordinary kindness take on an aura of miracle." OBSERVER, 28/3/99

"You can learn more about human nature from this brief account of the survival of one man throughout the war years in the devastated city of Warsaw than from several volumes of the average encyclopaedia." INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY, 28/3/99

"For a Jew to survive the Warsaw ghetto was amazing. For a German officer to feel agonised and ashamed of his country and his countrymen as their cruelty and madness destroyed human beings as if they were mere physical objects, to record his shame in diaries kept throughout his service in Warsaw, diaries which miraculously survived being posted to his family in Germany via the regular mail in late 1944, is probably unique. Captain Wilm Hosenfeld, excerpts from whose diary form part of THE PIANIST, saved Wladyslaw Szpilman by giving him food, an eiderdown and an overcoat when death from cold and starvation cannot have been far off....Szpilman writes of the gradually rising terror created in Warsaw by the Germans...it is all told with a simple clarity that lodges the story in one's stomach through a mixture of disgust, terror, despair, rage and guilt that grips the reader almost gently." THE SPECTATOR, 5/3/99

"The images drawn are unusually sharp and clear, perhaps because this book was first written immediately after the war. But its moral tone is even more striking: Szpilman refuses to make a hero or a demon out of anyone." THE LITERARY REVIEW

Customer Reviews

Excellent
This account of life in the Warsaw ghetto allows the reader to view the 're-settlement' of Jews during WW2 from a completely different perspective than the one usually portrayed in literature of the period, penned by holocaust survivors.

This is simply because it is not a recollection of concentration camp life, but that of a young man who managed to escape the net constantly threatening to close in around him.

The tale is told from a somewhat detached point of view, which indeed makes it all the more compelling in my mind. The matter-of-fact manner in which the author embraces his horrific experiences, brings his shattering ordeal home to the reader in horrifyingly blunt detail.

This is the type of subject that should never be ignored or brushed over; the heroism of the people who lived through the Nazi regime should always be addressed as a statement to mankind; and 'The Pianist' in its own way, indeed makes such a statement.

It's Easy to Forget
The Pianist is a deeply moving tale of repression and survival which highlights the plight of Jews in Warsaw over the course of the second world war and particularly the journey of one man, Wladyslaw Szpilman, whose courage and determination to survive should inspire awe in every reader.
It is always incredibly humbling to read accounts of the atrocities during the war and the Pianist is no exception. I feel torn when writing about this book as it is hard to write positively about such a awful period of time, but the narrative is heart breakingly effective and although one experiences great relief when the war is over, the plight of millions of Jews less fortunate than our Pianist is brought back into the picture by the moving excerpts from the diary of Wilm Hosenfeld.
It is a must-read in order to fully understand what went on and to appreciate what so many gave.

Two hundred and twenty two pages of adrenalin!
This book tells the story of Wladyslaw Szpilman's incredible
and unlikely survival through the war years in occupied Warsaw.

Szpilman describes the horror of the Warsaw ghetto and tells of the sickening
brutality administered by the Gestapo and Jewish Secret Police
towards the Jews.

He narrates with a chilling frankness and leaves the reader feeling
both shocked and relieved that they are not in his situation.

The book reaches the pinnacle of sadnesss when Szpilman watches his
own family being taken in cattle trucks to the death camp in Treblinka.

Somehow though, he finds the will to carry on despite the odds being
stacked heavily against him. A house fire, accute malnutrition and
near capture are all obstacles in Szpilman's plight.

Eventually he is found by an German enemy soldier who saves him
from the brink of starvation and certain death...

Of all the second world war accounts I have read this has got to
be one of my favourites.

A captivating read - full of the stuff of escape and near misses
Great !