Books that are turned into films always excite debate, usually over
whether the writer has had justice done to his words. Roman
Polanski's film of the same name has been an overwhelming advantage
for this little-known and tragic memoir, both because the movie has
been acclaimed and also because anything that can have helped bring
the book to the attention of a wider audience has to be a good
thing. Stalin's often-quoted remark that one man's death is a
tragedy while that of a million men is a statistic is particularly
true when today's readers struggle to engage with the reality of
the events of the Second World War. The numbing statistics and the
sheer horror of the millions wiped out in the concentration camps
is rendered more immediate when translated into individual stories.
Szpilman was a classical pianist working for Polish Radio at the
beginning of the war. His life was an ordinary middle-class Jewish
one, in which the importance of culture and family values was
paramount. Szpilman himself escaped Auschwitz, pulled back from the
transport convoy at the last moment by an unseen hand. But he took
little comfort in his narrow escape, as his father, mother, brother
and two sisters were wrenched away from him to die there, their
last family meal a shared bar of chocolate cut up with a penknife.
In sparse, unemotional language, Szpilman explains how, as the
ghetto was shut off from the rest of Warsaw under German occupation
and gradually emptied, normal lives became increasingly desperate,
people fighting over scraps of food and selling off their family
treasures, all the while holding on to the hope that the Allies
would defeat Germany before any more of their people died. After
his family were taken, he managed to eke out a strange existence,
more or less on his own in the abandoned ghetto, moving from
burned-out building to burned-out building and foraging for scraps
of food. Just as it seems his luck - if you can call it that - is
about to run out, a platoon of German soldiers set up base in the
latest abandoned building he has chosen. Yet, incredibly, the first
German he encounters is a kindly former schoolteacher, Wilm
Hosenfeld, who was sickened by the actions of his own side and not
only helped Szpilman escape, but also brought him food and even an
eiderdown. This edition of the book, which should be compulsory
reading, contains excerpts from Hosenfeld's diaries, and a foreword
by Szpilman's son. (Kirkus UK)
The powerful and bestselling memoir of a young Jewish pianist who
survived the war in Warsaw against all odds. Made into a Bafta and
Oscar-winning film. 'You can learn more about human nature from
this brief account of the survival of one man throughout the war
years in the devastated city of Warsaw than from several volumes of
the average encyclopaedia' Independent on Sunday 'We are drawn in
to share his surprise and then disbelief at the horrifying progress
of events, all conveyed with an understated intimacy and dailiness
that render them painfully close - riveting' Observer 'A book so
fresh and vivid, so heartbreaking, and so simply and beautifully
written, that it manages to tell us the story of horrendous events
as if for the first time' Daily Telegraph
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