Szpilman’s account of what happened next was first published in Poland during 1946 but it was almost immediately withdrawn by Stalin’s new Communist Government. Finally it was published in Germany in 1997 after Szpilman's son found it on his father's bookcase.
The film of that book is a dark, depressing tale about a man and his fight for survival and it’s simply brilliant. Roman Polanski, himself a survivor of the Krakow and Warsaw ghettos, directs.
For Szpilman, life becomes one long struggle to keep his family together as the German’s move in and impose their anti-Jewish laws. The Germans rapidly increase the restrictions, forcing Jews to walk in the gutter, wear the star on their arm and anything else they can think of to humiliate them. When they get bored with that, they brick them up inside the Ghetto instead. Life in the Ghetto is at first tolerable but quickly gets worse as the persecution escalates.
The full horror of the atrocities that go on there is not spared us. Jews are often lined up for no apparent reason and shot. One woman asks a Nazi officer, ‘What will happen to us?’ and promptly finds out first hand as she is shot point blank in the head. A man in a wheelchair is tossed over a balcony because he failed to stand up when the soldiers walked in.
Finding food becomes difficult, Szpilman’s father has to barter for a single piece of caramel and then cuts it in six pieces to share it with his family. This is also practically his last action because it’s not long before everyone is being packed into trains bound for Treblinka, an extermination facility. Szpilman himself is fortunate that a Jewish policeman recognised him and saved him. This was just one of many lucky escapes that Szpilman manages.
Everything in the film is shown from Szpilman's point of view and we become part of his frantic plight for survival. We share his guilt at not going with his family, although he knows that to do so would have been futile. You can feel the hopelessness he feels, his loneliness, his desperation.
He is conscripted into working for the Germans but manages to escape and goes into hiding outside the Ghetto. From where he witness's, from a safe distance, the failed Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
He manages to get help from other non-Jewish Poles and with their kindness manages to survive, moving from place to place. First in safe houses and then in bombed out ruins. He is continually hiding and fleeing, gradually becoming a shadow of his former self, visibly losing weight throughout the film and suffering jaundice along the way. All the time death via a German bullet never seems far away.
In one of the `safe house' there is a piano. As he sits at it and we hear music playing, we think he’s gone mad and the sound of his playing will give him away but then we see his hands are moving above the keyboard and realize that the music is playing only in his head.
His final hiding place is the attic of a bombed out building where he discovers a large can of pickles which might just keep him alive until the Russians come. The pickles though are his undoing. He makes such a din trying to open them that he is discovered by a German officer. You expect another quick shooting but when the officer finds out he ‘was’ once a pianist he tells him to play. After so many years of being unable to play you wonder at his capacity to pull this one off but after a few tentative chords, he does. This seemed to save his life and the officer ends up helping Szpilman, bringing him food and, finally, his overcoat.
When the Russian troops finally liberate Warsaw, after all he’d been through to survive; Szpilman is almost killed by his rescuers when they see the German coat he is wearing. Their shots miss him and then when they realise that he’s a Pole, they ask
“Why the ****ing coat?"
Szpilman manages to gulp a reply,
"I'm cold"
The officer who helped him tries to contact Szpilman from the pen he is incarcerated in and although Szpilman tries to find him, he fails and the officer is taken away to a Stalingrad labour camp where he was to die seven years later.
When broadcasting resumed on Polish Radio, six long years after it was bombed off air, it was with the same piece, Chopin's Nocturne in C sharp Minor and the same pianist, Wladyslaw Szpilman.
I was riveted from start to finish and although it can be hard to watch at times, it is a remarkable film. Szpilman is portrayed as a man that we can all relate to and that you care about what happens to. What would we have done in his situation? He doesn’t try to be a hero; he is just a man doing what he can to stay alive.
Also the film doesn’t try to judge anybody, although that would have been easy to do and just gives you the historical facts and what affect it had on one man's life.
The film was nominated for seven Academy Awards in 2002 and won Best Director, Best Actor, and Best Adapted Screenplay. I had to check to see what defeated it for Best Film that year. Now I haven't seen Chicago and no disrespect to it but I imagine most people who saw it back in 2002 will have forgotten it by now. Had they seen the Pianist instead, they wouldn't have forgotten it so easily. This film will stay with you for some time afterwards.
There were 3,500,000 Jews in Poland before the Nazi occupation; after it there were just 240,000.
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