Book Concierge's Reviews > The Pianist: The Extraordinary Story of One Man's Survival in Warsaw, 1939–45

The subtitle is all the synopsis anyone needs: The Extraordinary True Story of One man’s Survival in Warsaw, 1939-1945.

Szpilman was a pianist who performed on Polish radio. He was, in fact, playing Chopin’s Nocturne in C-sharp Minor, live on the radio on Sept 23, 1939, when shells exploded outside the station. It was the last live music broadcast from Warsaw that day; a German bomb hit the station, and Polish radio went off the air. Ultimately, the Nazi’s plan for extermination of the Jews would take all of his family, but Szpilman would manage – by luck, courage, tenacity, and the kindness of others – to stay hidden and survive. The most unlikely person to help him was a German officer who came across him in the ruins of a building scrounging for food.

He wrote his story shortly after the war was over, but it was suppressed for decades, finally being published in 1999, and even then, not in Poland. The edition I had included entries from the diary of Captain Wilm Hosenfeld, the German officer who saved Szpilman towards the end of the war.

Szpilman’s story is told in a very straightforward manner. He recounts the ever-increasing restrictions imposed by the government on Jews, the forbearance and belief that “this is bound to pass” among his family and others in the community, the terror and horror of witnessing (or being subject to) random acts of violence and death. And yet, there is a certain cool detachment. Almost as if he were witnessing someone else’s story rather than reliving those experiences himself. In the forward, his son Andrzej supposes that his father wrote the memoir “… for himself rather than humanity in general. It enabled him to work through his shattering wartime experiences and free his mind and emotions to continue with his life.”

I found it engaging and gripping. Even though I knew he survived, I simply could not stop reading.

The extraordinary memoir was adapted to film in 2002, starring Adrien Brody (who won the Oscar for his performance) and directed by Roman Polanski (Oscar for Best Director).