The Pianist

by Wladyslaw Szpilman

  I was in the Aleje Jerozolimskie when a motor-bike approached from the direction of the Vistula. Two soldiers in unfamiliar green uniforms and steel helmets were sitting on it. They had large, impassive faces and pale blue eyes. They stopped beside the pavement and called to a startled boy. He went over to them.

  ‘Marschallstrasse! Marschallstrasse!’

  They kept repeating that one word – the German for Marszałkowska Street. The boy simply stood there, baffled, with his mouth open, unable to utter a sound.

  The soldiers lost patience. ‘Oh, the hell with it!’ shouted the driver, making an angry gesture. He stepped on the gas and the bike roared away.

  Those were the first Germans I saw.

  A few days later bilingual proclamations went up on the walls of Warsaw, issued by the German commandant and promising the population peaceful working conditions and the care of the German state. There was a special section devoted to the Jews: they were guaranteed all their rights, the inviolability of their property, and that their lives would be absolutely secure.

  4 ∼ My Father Bows to the Germans

  We went back to Śliska Street. We found our flat unharmed, although we had thought it impossible; some window panes were missing, but nothing else. The doors had been locked, and even the smallest objects were still in their old places inside the flat. Other houses in the area had also remained unharmed or had suffered only minor damage. Over the next few days, when we began going out to see what had become of our acquaintances, we discovered that, badly damaged as the city had been, in essence it was still standing. The losses were not as heavy as you might have thought at first, walking through the great expanses of ruins that were still smoking.

  The same was true of the people. Initially there was talk of a hundred thousand dead, a figure which amounted to almost 10 per cent of the population of the city and horrified everyone. Later we discovered that about twenty thousand people had died.

  They included friends whom we had seen alive only a few days before, and who now lay under the ruins or smashed to pieces by shells. Two of my sister Regina’s colleagues had died when a building collapsed in Koszykova Street. Passing that building, you had to hold a handkerchief to your nose: the nauseating stink of eight rotting bodies seeped through the blocked-up cellar windows, through nooks and crannies, infecting the air. A shell had killed one of my own colleagues in Mazowiecka Street. Only after his head was found was it possible to establish that the scattered remains belonged to a human being who had once been a talented violinist.

  Dreadful as all this news was, it could not disturb our animal pleasure in still being alive ourselves, and knowing that those who had escaped death were no longer in any immediate danger, although the subconscious mind repressed these feelings out of shame. In this new world, where everything that had been of permanent value a month ago was destroyed, the simplest things, things you hardly noticed before, took on enormous significance: a comfortable, solid armchair, the soothing look of a white-tiled stove on which you could rest your eyes, the creak of the floorboards – a comfortable prelude to the atmosphere of peace and quiet at home.

  Father was the first to take up his music again. He escaped reality by playing his violin for hours on end. When someone interrupted him with a piece of bad news, he would listen and frown, looking irritated, but his face soon cleared again, and he would say, raising his violin to his chin, ‘Oh, never mind. The Allies are sure to be here in a month.’ This stock answer to all the questions and problems of the time was his way of closing the door behind him and returning to that other world of music, where he was happiest.

  Unfortunately the earliest news passed on by people who had acquired accumulators and got their radio sets back in working order did not confirm Father’s optimism. None of what we had heard was accurate: the French had no intention of breaking through the Siegfried Line, any more than the British planned to bomb Hamburg, let alone land on the coast of Germany. On the other hand, the first German race raids were beginning in Warsaw. Initially they were conducted clumsily, as if the perpetrators felt ashamed of this new means of tormenting people, and they had not had any practice anyway. Small private cars drove down the streets, drawing up by the pavement unexpectedly when a Jew was spotted; car doors opened, a hand reached out, crooking a finger. ‘Get in!’ Those who came back from such raids described the first instances of maltreatment. It was not too bad yet; the physical abuse was confined to slaps, punching, sometimes kicking. But because it was so new the victims felt it particularly keenly, regarding a slap from a German as something disgraceful. They did not yet realize that such a blow had no more moral connotation than a nudge or a kick from an animal.

  At this early stage anger with the government and the army command, both of which had fled, leaving the country to its fate, was in general stronger than hatred for the Germans. Bitterly, we remembered the words of the field-marshal who had sworn that he would not let the enemy have a single button of his uniform – and nor did he, but only because the buttons remained attached to his uniform when he saved himself by escaping abroad. There was no lack of voices suggesting that we might even be better off, since the Germans would bring some order into the chaos that was Poland.

  Now that the Germans had won the armed conflict against us, however, they set about losing the political war. Their execution of the first hundred innocent citizens of Warsaw in December 1939 was a crucial turning point. Within a few hours a wall of hatred had been erected between Germans and Poles, and neither side could climb it thereafter, although the Germans did show some willingness to do so in the later years of the occupation.

  The first German decrees carrying the death penalty for failure to comply were posted up. The most important concerned trading in bread: anyone caught buying or selling bread at higher than pre-war prices would be shot. This prohibition made a devastating impression on us. We ate no bread for days on end, feeding on potatoes and other starchy dishes instead. However, then Henryk discovered that bread was still around and was on sale, and the buyer did not necessarily drop dead on the spot. So we began buying bread again. The decree was never rescinded, and since everyone ate and bought bread daily throughout the five years of occupation, millions of death sentences must have been incurred in the General Government area of German-ruled Polish territory for this offence alone. However, it was a long time before we were convinced that the German decrees carried no weight, and that the real danger was what could happen to you totally unexpectedly, out of a blue sky – unannounced by any rules and regulations, however fictitious.

  Soon decrees applying exclusively to Jews were being published. A Jewish family could keep no more than two thousand złoty at home. Other savings and items of value must be deposited in the bank, in a blocked account. At the same time Jewish real estate had to be handed over to Germans. Naturally hardly anyone was naïve enough to give his property to the enemy of his own free will. Like everyone else, we decided to hide our valuables, although they consisted only of my father’s gold watch and chain and the sum of five thousand złoty.

  We argued vehemently over the best way to hide them. My father suggested certain tried and tested methods from the last war, such as boring a hole in the leg of the dining-room table and hiding the valuables there.

  ‘And suppose they take the table away?’ asked Henryk sarcastically.

  ‘Idiot,’ said Father, annoyed. ‘What would they want with a table? A table like this?’

  He glanced scornfully at the table. Its highly polished walnut surface had been marked by spilt liquids, and the veneer was coming away slightly in one place. In order to remove the last vestige of value from this piece of furniture, Father went over to it and pushed his finger under the loose veneer, which snapped off, leaving a strip of bare wood behind it.

  ‘What on earth are you doing?’ Mother scolded.

  Henryk had another suggestion. He thought we ought to employ psychological methods and leave the watch and the money out in
full view. The Germans would search high and low and never notice the valuables lying on the table.

  We came to an amicable agreement: the watch was hidden under the cupboard, the chain beneath the fingerboard of Father’s violin and the money was jammed into the window frame.

  Although people were alarmed by the severity of the German laws, they did not lose heart, comforting themselves with the thought that the Germans could hand Warsaw over to Soviet Russia at any moment, and areas occupied just for the sake of appearances would be restored to Poland as soon as possible. No frontier had been established yet on the bend in the Vistula, and people came into the city from both sides of the river swearing that they had seen Red army troops with their own eyes in Jabłonna or Garwolin. But they were immediately followed by others who swore that they had seen, also with their own eyes, the Russians withdrawing from Vilna and Lvóv and surrendering those cities to the Germans. It was hard to decide which of these eyewitnesses should be believed.

  Many Jews did not wait for the Russians to march in, but sold their possessions in Warsaw and moved east, the only way they could still go to get away from the Germans. Almost all my musician colleagues went, and urged me to go with them. However, my family still decided to stay put.

  One of those colleagues came back two days later, bruised and angry, without his rucksack and his money. He had seen five half-naked Jews strung up by their hands to the trees near the border and whipped. And he had witnessed the death of Dr Haskielewicz, who told the Germans he wanted to cross the bend. At pistol point, they had ordered him walk into the river, further and deeper into the water until he lost his footing and drowned. My colleague had merely lost his belongings and his money, and was then beaten and sent back. But most Jews, although they were robbed and ill-treated, did make it to Russia.

  We were sorry for the poor man, of course, but at the same time we felt a sense of triumph: he would have done better to follow our advice and stay. Our decision was not swayed by any kind of logical consideration. The simple fact is that we decided to stay because of our fondness for Warsaw, although we could not have given any logical explanation for that either.

  When I say our decision, I am thinking of all my loved ones except my father. If he did not leave Warsaw it was more because he didn’t want to be too far from Sosnowiec, where he came from. He had never liked Warsaw, and the worse it was for us there the more he longed for and idealized Sosnowiec. Sosnowiec was the only place where life was good, where people were musical and could appreciate a good violinist. Sosnowiec was even the only place to get a glass of decent beer, because you couldn’t buy anything but disgusting, undrinkable dishwater in Warsaw. After supper my father would fold his hands over his stomach, lean back, close his eyes dreamily and bore us with his monotonous recital of visions of a Sosnowiec that existed only in his fond imagination.

  In those weeks of late autumn, not quite two months after the Germans took Warsaw, the city suddenly and completely unexpectedly returned to its old way of life. This upturn in its material circumstances, brought about so easily, was one more surprise to us in this most surprising of all wars, where nothing went the way we expected. The huge city, capital of a country with a population of many millions, was partly destroyed, an army of civil servants were out of work, and waves of evacuees kept coming in from Silesia, the Poznań area and Pomerania. Unexpectedly, all these people – people without a roof over their heads, without work, with the gloomiest of prospects – realized that large sums of money could be made with great ease by circumventing German decrees. The more decrees were issued, the higher the chances of earning.

  Two lives began to go on side by side: an official, fictional life based on rules which forced people to work from dawn to dusk, almost without eating, and a second, unofficial life, full of fairy-tale opportunities to make a profit, with a flourishing trade in dollars, diamonds, flour, leather or even forged papers – a life lived under constant threat of the death penalty, but spent cheerfully in luxurious restaurants to which people drove in ‘rickshaws’.

  Not everyone was living it up, of course. Every day, when I went home in the evening, I would see a woman sitting in the same niche in the wall in Sienna Street, playing a concertina and singing sad Russian songs. She never began begging before twilight came on, probably for fear of being recognized. She wore a grey costume, probably her last, and its elegance showed that its wearer had seen better days. Her beautiful face was lifeless in the dusk, and her eyes kept staring at the same spot, somewhere high above the heads of passers-by. She had a deep, attractive singing voice, and accompanied herself well on the concertina. Her whole bearing, the way she leaned back against the wall, showed that she was a society lady forced only by the war to make her living like this. But even she earned quite well. There were always a great many coins in the ribbon-bedecked tambourine that she no doubt thought the symbol of the beggar’s trade. She had placed it at her feet so that no one could be in any doubt that she was begging, and it contained some fifty-złoty notes as well as the coins.

  I myself never went out until dusk, if I could help it, but for entirely different reasons. Among the many irksome regulations imposed on the Jews was one which, although unwritten, had to be observed very carefully: men of Jewish descent must bow to every German soldier. This idiotic and humiliating requirement made Henryk and me incandescent with rage. We did all we could to get around it. We took long detours in the streets, just to avoid meeting a German, and if it could not be avoided we looked away and pretended not to have seen him, although we could have got a beating for that.

  My father’s attitude was quite different. He sought out the longest streets for his walks, and bowed to the Germans with indescribably ironic grace, happy when one of the soldiers, misled by his beaming face, gave him a civil greeting in return and smiled as if he were a good friend. On coming home every evening he could not refrain from commenting casually on his extensive circle of acquaintances: he had only to set foot in the street, he told us, and he would be surrounded by dozens of them. He really could not resist their friendliness, and his hand was getting quite stiff from raising his hat so politely. With these words he would smile impishly, rubbing his hands with glee.

  But the malice of the Germans was not to be taken lightly. It was part of a system intended to keep us in a constant state of nervous uncertainty about our future. Every few days new decrees were issued. They were apparently of no importance, but they let us know that the Germans had not forgotten us, and had no intention of doing so.

  Then Jews were forbidden to travel by train. Later, we were charged four times as much as an ‘Aryan’ for a tram ticket. The first rumours of the construction of a ghetto began to circulate. They were rife for two days, struck despair into our hearts, and then died down again.

  5 ∼ Are You Jews?

  Towards the end of November, when the fine days of that unusually long autumn were becoming rarer and cold showers were sweeping over the city more and more frequently, Father, Henryk and I had our first contact with the German way of death.

  One evening the three of us had been out visiting a friend. We had been talking, and when I glanced at my watch I realized to my alarm that it was nearly curfew time. We needed to leave at once, although there was no chance of our getting home in time. But it was not such a great crime to be quarter of an hour late, and we could hope to get away with it.

  We picked up our coats, said a hasty goodbye, and left. The streets were dark and already completely empty. The rain whipped into our faces, gusts of wind shook the signboards, the air was full of the rattling sound of metal. Turning up our coat collars, we tried to walk as fast and as quietly as possible, keeping close to the walls of the buildings. We were already halfway down Zielna Street, and it began to look as though we would reach our destination safely, when a police patrol suddenly came round a corner. We had no time to retreat or hide. We just stood there in the dazzling light of their torches, each of us trying to think of some excu
se, when one of the policemen marched straight up to us and shone his torch in our faces.

  ‘Are you Jews?’ The question was purely rhetorical, since he did not wait for us to answer. ‘Right, then…’ There was a note of triumph in this statement of our racial origin. It conveyed satisfaction at having tracked down such game. Before we knew it we had been seized and turned to face the wall of the building, while the policemen stepped back into the road and began releasing the safety catches of their carbines. So this was how we were to die. It would happen in the next few seconds, and then we would lie on the pavement in our blood, with our skulls shattered, until next day. Only then would Mother and my sisters learn what had happened and come in despair to find us. The friends we had been visiting would reproach themselves for delaying us too long. All these thoughts went through my head on a strange level, as if another person were thinking them. I heard someone say out loud, ‘This is the end.’ Only a moment later did I realize that I myself had spoken. At the same time I heard loud weeping and convulsive sobbing. I turned my head, and in the harsh torchlight I saw my father kneeling on the wet tarmac, sobbing and begging the policemen for our lives. How could he demean himself so? Henryk was bending over my father, whispering to him, trying to raise him to his feet. Henryk, my restrained brother Henryk with his eternal sarcastic smile, had something extraordinarily soft and tender about him at that moment. I had never seen him in such a mood before. So there must be another Henryk, one I would understand if I only knew him, instead of being constantly at odds with him.

  I turned to the wall again. The situation had not changed. Father was weeping, Henryk was trying to calm him, the police were still aiming their guns at us. We could not see them behind the wall of white light. Then suddenly, in the fraction of a second, I instinctively sensed that death no longer threatened us. A few moments passed, and a loud voice came through the wall of light.