The Pianist by Wladyslaw Szpilman

Reviewed by Claudine

The Roman Polanski movie led me to this book. Being the book nut that I am, I borrowed "The Pianist" from the library after watching the movie and the book is as good as the movie.

‘The Pianist’ is the memoir of Szpilman, a Polish Jew pianist who managed to survive the ‘resettlement’ of the Jewish Holocaust in Warsaw, where he lived. The book describes the plight of the Jewish people under the cold heartless systematic control of the Germans. To be able to fight to survive under such extenuating circumstances is what I admire about the author, who lived mostly by following his intuition and gut feeling. At times, he followed an innate sense of foreboding, forsaking his hiding place for another, just in time to have his previous hiding place raided, missing liquidation just in the nick of time. It makes for great suspenseful TV, except when you realise it was his life you are reading about.

After the war, he went on to become an accomplished pianist, tucking his horrific experiences away into this memoir, which his son published only after the death of his father.

Reading this book, one tries to understand how one human race can so intensely despise and loathe another. The ways in which the Jews were treated were appalling --transported around in trucks and literally stuffed into train cars like cattle to be deported to their fate or taunted or shot at will by German officers. I think animals in SPCA are more humanely put down than the Jews in that period and I'm not speaking in jest.

The language used in the book makes for easy reading, very much like listening to him talk about his wartime experiences. No melodrama, just the narration of events that happen to him and those around him one after another as if he were an observer, neutral and unmoved. But it is this numbing narration that conveys the effect of muted anguish and horror, which assaulted and paralysed the Jewish Community then. But by the end of this book, readers are inspired with the triumph of the human spirit – to hope and survive against all odds.

Both the book and the movie are highly recommended.

For movie buffs, here's the url to the movie : http://www.thepianist-themovie.com/pianistel.html