The Pianist

‘The Pianist’ is the true story of Wladyslaw Szpilman, the Polish pianist who was just entering his prime in the ill-fated year of 1939. The German blitzkrieg began there, in September, and Poland fell in a fortnight. Then it was the occupation, with the gradual encroachment of civil rights. Jews had to wear armbands with the star of David. Jews couldn’t be seen in public parks or on public benches. Jews couldn’t walk on the sidewalk. Jews had to have a work permit. Jews had to relocate, in a narrow area known as the Warsaw ghetto. And the once-proud and prosperous Szpilman family, mother and father and sisters and brothers, were crammed like beggars into a dirty hovel where even the rats cannot survive because there is no food.

The incidents of Nazi cruelty are all too evident. Beatings for no reason. Spiriting away whole families in the night. Shooting protestors on sight. Forced labor. And then, the final solution: herd them into cattle cars to the ‘work camps’ and they are never seen again. Wladyslaw escapes this fate because one of the Jewish ‘police’ or Nazi co-operators singles him out as somebody worth saving from the concentration camp. But now he is alone, destitute, on the run and hungry. Always hungry.

He finds some sympathizers who knew his work before the war. They hide him in their private apartment, where he witnesses first-hand the ghetto uprising and its grim aftermath of retribution. Then the soldiers come to destroy his building and he is forced out onto the streets again. He has one last address to try, and the occupants also give him their private apartment, this time overlooking the Nazi hospital and police station. Surrounded by Germans, all he can do is watch the war scenes unfold outside his window: the marching troops and the rumbling tanks. The bedraggled prisoners and the bloody wounded. Piles of corpses. Dead children in the street. Horrible explosions followed by eerie silence. Burned-out buildings and dusty rubble.

He gets so sick once that he thinks he might perish, but he receives just enough medical attention. He hides in an abandoned hospital, behind trash cans, and finally in an attic, where he is horrified, one day, to find a German officer standing right in front of him. But it’s toward the end of the war now, and this is a real field officer, not Gestapo or SS. He has no interest in torturing civilians. He has a command to run, and he knows the Russian advance is inevitable. So, inexplicably, he brings food to our bedraggled, solitary, limping musician in the attic hideaway. And Szpilman does manage to survive until the Germans are driven out of Warsaw.

When the Russians arrive, they almost shoot him because he is wearing the overcoat of the German officer, for warmth only. Once the liberation is complete, he tries to find the German commander to help him, only to discover that all the prisoners have been transferred to Russia, and no one knows where any of them are. He learns, much later, that the officer died in a Russian prison camp in 1952, seven years after the war was over. The oppressors had become the oppressed, but it’s the survivors who get to tell their story.

Szpilman’s story is most compelling because it rings with so much authenticity. It’s not about the great military campaigns, it’s not about the world leaders or their political intrigue. It’s about one solitary man, a civilian, trying to survive when all the world around him is imploding, and all he can do is hope that they won’t find him, and that one day the hell will end, and he will be free once more.

Szpilman lived until age 88, dying just at the turn of the new century. He went back to giving concerts in his beloved Warsaw. Adrien Brody does a fantastic job with this role: from proud young prodigy to bemused political observer to gaunt escapee; from warm family living to prisoner to refugee; from a serene and sublime life with classical music to deprivation and isolation; then back again. It’s an extraordinary story, forcefully rendered under the direction of Roman Polanski, himself an escapee from the Cracow ghetto. This is a story that needs to be told, and makes a powerful impact with the telling.