Account of life and death in the Warsaw Ghetto
|
The Pianist is the story of Wladyslaw Szpilman and his remarkable story survival in Warsaw during the years of Nazi occupation from 1939 to 1945.
It tells how he survived against the odds , hiding in various parts of the city , before his life was saved by a German officer , who despised the Nazis brutality and genocide , a true righteous gentile , Captain Wilm Hosenfeld.
Unlike many personal holocaust accounts , which are of concentration and death camps , this one is an account of life and death in the Warsaw ghetto.
Szpilman describes life and death in the ghetto : the disease , the starvation and the Nazi mass murders of hundreds of thousands of men , women and children , including how the Nazis killed Jewish children , by seizing them by the legs and swinging their heads into brick walls.
Next to Szpilman's account are moving extracts from Hosenfeld's diary.
In his diary Wilm Hosenfeld described his conscience and his hatred of totalitarian brutality , describing the horrors of the French Revolution and the horrific atrocities of the Bolshevik revolution , who'se leaders and footsoldiers acted without compassion or conscience , believing in the totality and infinite importance of their causes. It was a war against Christianity and against descency , as was the Nazi war to destroy the Jews and other entire nations. He speaks of the total moral bankruptcy of Nazism and his disgust at it's rotten moral core and bloodthirsty savage evil.
Hosenfeld was captured by the Soviets after the war and died seven years later in a hideous Soviet Gulag.
Similarly voices of conscience have arisen from time to time against evil systems , such as Andrei Sakharov , who challenged the ultimate tyranny of the Soviet Union and more recently Walid Shoebat , a former Arab terorist turned Christian apostle of love and co-existence , who now condemmns Arab terror , and the war of destruction and hideous propaganda against Israel.
In the epilogue by Wolf Biermann , Biermann describes how "everyone knows how horribly the infection of anti-Semitism traditionally raged among 'the Poles' , but few know that at the same time no other nation hid so many Jews from the Nazis. If you hid a Jew in France , the penalty was prison , or a concentration camp , in Germany it cost you your life - but in Poland it cost the lives of your entire family".
Lastly Hosenfeld makes the plea that a tree is planted at Yad Vashem in the honor of Wilm Hosenfeld , among those of the thousands of other righteous gentiles honoured at the holocaust museum in Jerusalem.
|
|
Miracle in Warsaw
|
As quite a few reviewers did, I read this book after watching the film. I found the book, as I do most holocaust based books, to be horrific, sad and terribly tragic. Wladyslaw Szpilman is a pianist working for a Polish radio station when Poland falls to the German invaders in 1939. The subsequent segregation and systematic annihilation of the Warsaw Jews is then described with Szpilman and his family being the obvious fulcrum of the story.
Szpilman describes in depth the formation of the Jewish Ghetto, the Ghetto uprising, the Warsaw uprising, the `relocation' of his family to the gas chambers, the beatings, shootings and the random murder of so many of his race. A story of pure savagery that even after so many books, films and documentaries still shocks the reader to the core.
The main theme of this book however concerns the miraculous survival of the author. He is picked out from the `relocation' queue by an old friend who is now a Jewish Ghetto policeman and then embarks on a hide and seek escapade through various safe houses in Warsaw. Living with an instant death sentence if discovered, Szpilman is hidden at these various locations for weeks at a time, always alone and often without food. Eventually in the courageous Warsaw uprising the author is forced to take refuge in an abandoned building which catches fire, he is then discovered by the Germans and shot at but escapes. In what is a virtually a now abandoned Warsaw he takes refuge in other abandoned buildings and is eventually caught in one foraging for food by a German Captain namely Wilm Hosenfeld. Expecting the worse Szpilman finds the opposite and his life is saved by this kind and honourable German officer. Hosenfeld befriends Szpilman, hides him, feeds him and provides him warm clothing. Hosenfeld then disappears from the story when the Russians enter Warsaw and the Germans retreat. However the story has a twist as Hosenfeld gets taken prisoner by the Russians and in the post war period Szpilman finds this out and tries to find Hosenfeld to barter for his release. Alas this humanitarian Captain dies in a Russian prison camp in the early 1950's.
A sad but miraculous story, sometime told in quite a banal matter of fact matter with not much emotion....but it is said in the book that the author wrote the book immediately after the war ended...after so much horror I doubt if the author had any emotion left!
|
|
|
The pianist
|
I bought this book after having watched the award winning film version featuring Adrien Brody,and what a read it is.
Not much i can add to Amazon's own review other than to say that if you enjoyed the film you will love the book.
The film version is my favourite of it's kind and the horrors that Wladyslaw Szpilman,his family and the Jewish in general went through must have been horrific to say the least.
This book captures those horrors even more so,plus you get a more detailed insight into the man himself.
A fantastic read that often has you pausing for thought,trying to grasp just what he must have gone through,but once you start reading you will find it hard to stop,it is THAT good a read.
|
|
|
A gripping, thought provoking book
|
|
This was a thoroughly gripping and thought provoking book. Once you start to read it you are unable to put it down. The events described are incredibly powerful and you are left amazed at what humans can suffer and still survive. This book has the capacity to move you like few about the holocaust and the life of the Jews in ww2 can. Essential reading in this genre.
|
|
|
a truly remarkable book
|
|
Having watched the film version of "The Pianist" I went in search of the book, wanting to see if the film had done the story justice. This book is a remarkable story of what happens when one person manages to survive despite all the odds being stacked against them. Wladyslaw Szpilman's story of how he survived in Warsaw during WWII and the Nazi Occupation is moving and amazing. I managed to read the whole book in just 3 days because I couldn't put it down, it had me gripped from start to finish. I would recommend this to anyone who liked the film/likes books about this period of history.
|
|
|
United States | 
United Kingdom | 
Canada