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Books for Adults - The Pianist
About the Author
Wladyslaw Szpilman was a Polish-Jewish musician and composer who survived the Warsaw Ghetto. His entire family was murdered at the Treblinka concentration camp.
Szpilman was born in 1911 in Sosnowiec in Poland. He studied the piano and composition as a young man in Warsaw and Berlin.
After Adolf Hitler seized power in Germany in 1933, Szpilman returned to Warsaw, where he quickly became a celebrated pianist and a composer of both classical and popular music. Szpilman composed many classical pieces and he toured Poland accompanying violinist Bronislav Gimpel.
On 1 April 1935 he joined Polish Radio, where he worked as a pianist performing classical and jazz music, until the German invasion of Poland reached Warsaw in autumn 1939 and Polish Radio was forced off the air.
Szpilman and his family were forced to move to the Warsaw Ghetto where he continued to play piano in cafes and bars. Szpilman survived the War with the help of friends and a German captain, Wilm Hosenfeld. His family was murdered at Treblinka.
After the War Szpilman returned to Polish Radio and his music career.
Szpilman died in Warsaw in July 2000 at the age of 88.
About the Book
Wladyslaw Szpilman wrote his memoir of his time in the Warsaw Ghetto shortly after the end of the War. He published the book, Śmierć Miasta (Death of a City) in Poland, but it was suppressed by the country’s Communist authorities, who disagreed with its perspective on the war. The largest problems for the authorities were the grey areas that Szpilman described: not all Germans were bad and, worst of all, not all of the oppressed were good.
The memoir was not reprinted for fifty years, when in 1998 it was published by Szpilman’s son Andrzej, in German as Das wunderbare uberleben (“The Fantastic Survival”) and then in English as The Pianist.
The memoir was adapted into an Award-winning film directed by Roman Polanski in 2002.
- The_Pianist (pdf)
