The Pianist

by Wladyslaw Szpilman

  ‘What do you do for a living?’

  Henryk answered for all three of us. He was amazingly self-controlled, his voice as calm as if nothing had happened. ‘We’re musicians.’

  One of the policemen stationed himself in front of me, grabbed my coat collar and shook me in a final fit of temper, not that there was any reason for it now he had decided to let us live.

  ‘Lucky for you I’m a musician too!’

  He gave me a shove, and I stumbled back against the wall.

  ‘Get out!’

  We ran off into the dark, anxious to get out of range of their torches as fast as possible, before they could change their minds. We could hear their voices falling away behind us, engaged in violent argument. The other two were remonstrating with the one who had let us go. They thought we deserved no sympathy, since we had started the war in which Germans were dying.

  For the moment they were not dying but enriching themselves. More and more frequently German gangs invaded Jewish homes, plundered them and took the furniture away in vans. Distraught householders sold their finer possessions and replaced them with worthless stuff that would tempt no one. We sold our own furniture, although out of necessity rather than fear: we were getting poorer and poorer. No one in the family was good at haggling. Regina tried but failed. As a lawyer, she had a strong sense of honesty and responsibility, and she simply could not ask, or accept, twice the price of what something was worth. She soon switched to tutorial work. Father, Mother and Halina were giving music lessons, and Henryk taught English. I was the only one who could find no way of earning my bread at that time. Sunk in apathy, all I could do was work occasionally on the orchestration of my concertino.

  In the second half of November, without giving any reasons, the Germans began barricading the side streets north of Marszałkowska Street with barbed wire, and at the end of the month there was an announcement that no one could believe at first. Not in our most secret thoughts would we ever have suspected that such a thing could happen: Jews had from the first to the fifth of December to provide themselves with white armbands on which a blue Star of David must be sewn. So we were to be publicly branded as outcasts. Several centuries of humanitarian progress were to be cancelled out, and we were back in the Middle Ages.

  For weeks on end the Jewish intelligentsia stayed under voluntary house arrest. No one would venture out in the street with the brand on his sleeve, and if there was simply no way to avoid leaving home we tried to pass unnoticed, walking with our eyes lowered to the ground, feeling shame and distress.

  Months of bad winter weather set in, unheralded, and the cold seemed to unite with the Germans to kill people. The frosts lasted for weeks; the temperature sank lower than anyone in Poland could remember. Coal could hardly be obtained at all, and commanded fantastic prices. I remember a whole series of days when we had to stay in bed because the temperature in the flat was too cold to endure.

  During the worst of that winter, numbers of Jewish deportees evacuated from the west arrived in Warsaw. That is, only some of them actually arrived: they had been loaded into cattle trucks in their places of origin, the trucks were sealed, and the people inside were sent on their way without food, water, or any means of keeping warm. It often took several days for these ghastly transports to reach Warsaw, and only then were the people let out. On some of the transports scarcely half the passengers remained alive, and they were badly frostbitten. The other half were corpses, standing frozen stiff among the rest and falling to the ground only when the living moved.

  It seemed as if things could get no worse. But that was only the Jewish view; the Germans thought otherwise. True to their system of exerting pressure by gradual stages, they issued new repressive decrees in January and February of 1940. The first announced that Jews were to do two years’ labour in concentration camps where we would receive ‘appropriate social education’, to cure us of being ‘parasites on the healthy organism of the Aryan peoples’. Men aged twelve to sixty and women aged fourteen to forty-five would have to go. The second decree set out the method for registering us and taking us away. To spare themselves the trouble, the Germans were handing the job over to the Jewish Council that dealt with the community administration. We were to assist at our own execution, preparing for our downfall with our own hands, committing a kind of legally regulated suicide. The transports were to leave in the spring.

  The Council decided to act to spare most of the intelligentsia. Asking a thousand złoty a head, it sent a member of the Jewish working classes as surrogate for the person supposedly registered. Of course not all the money ended up in the hands of the poor surrogates themselves: the Council officials had to live, and they lived well, with vodka and a few little delicacies.

  But the transports did not leave in spring. Once again it transpired that the official German decrees were not to be taken seriously, and in fact there was a relaxation of tension in German-Jewish relations for a few months, which seemed more and more genuine as both parties were increasingly concerned with events at the front.

  Spring had finally come, and now there could be no doubt that the Allies, who had spent the winter making suitable preparations, would attack Germany simultaneously from France, Belgium and Holland, break through the Siegfried Line, take the Saarland, Bavaria and northern Germany, conquer Berlin, and liberate Warsaw that summer at the latest. The whole city was in a state of happy excitement. We waited for the offensive to start as if it we were looking forward to a party. Meanwhile the Germans invaded Denmark, but in the opinion of our local politicians that meant nothing. Their armies would simply be cut off there.

  On 10 May the offensive finally began, but it was a German offensive. Holland and Belgium fell. The Germans marched into France. All the more reason not to lose heart. The year 1914 was repeating itself. Why, the same people were even in command on the French side: Pétain, Weygand – excellent men of the Foch school. They could be trusted to defend themselves against the Germans as well as they did last time.

  Finally, on 20 May, a colleague of mine, a violinist, came to see me after lunch. We were going to play together, reminding ourselves of a Beethoven sonata that we had not played for some time and that gave us both great pleasure. A few other friends were there, and Mother, wanting to give me a treat, had provided coffee. It was a fine, sunny day, we enjoyed the coffee and the delicious cakes Mother had baked; we were in a cheerful mood. We all knew the Germans were just outside Paris, but no one felt too much concern. After all, there was the Marne – that classic line of defence where everything must come to a standstill, the way it does in the fermata of the second section of Chopin’s B minor scherzo, in a stormy tempo of quavers going on and on, more and more tempestuously, until the closing chord – at which point the Germans would retreat to their own border as vigorously as they had advanced, leading to the end of the war and an Allied victory.

  After coffee, we were about to get on with our performance. I sat down at the piano, a crowd of sensitive listeners around me, people who could appreciate the pleasure I intended to give both to them and to myself. The violinist stood on my right, and to my left sat a charming young friend of Regina’s who was going to turn the pages for me. What more could I ask to complete my happiness just then? We were only waiting for Halina before we began; she had gone down to the shop to make a phone call. When she came back she was carrying a newspaper: a special edition. Two words were printed on the front page in huge letters, obviously the largest the printers had available: PARIS FALLS!

  I laid my head on the piano and – for the first time in this war – I burst into tears.

  Intoxicated with victory and stopping for a moment to draw breath, the Germans now had time to think of us again, although it cannot be said that they had forgotten us entirely during the fighting in the west. Robberies from Jews, their compulsory evacuation, deportations for labour in Germany were going on all the time, but we had become accustomed to it. Now there was worse to be expected. In September the
first transports set off for the labour camps of Bełżec and Hrubieszów. The Jews who were receiving ‘appropriate social education’ there stood up to their waists in water for days on end, laying improved drainage systems, and were given a hundred grams of bread and a plate of thin soup a day to keep them going. The work was not in fact, as announced, for two years but for only three months. However, that was enough to exhaust people physically and leave many of them with TB.

  The men still left in Warsaw had to report for labour there: everyone was to do six days’ physical labour a month. I did my utmost to avoid this work. I was worried about my fingers. I only had to suffer muscular atony, an inflammation of the joints or simply a nasty knock, and my career as a pianist would be over. Henryk saw things differently. In his view an intellectually creative person must do physical labour in order to assess his own capabilities properly, and so he did his quota of work, although it interrupted his studies.

  Soon two further events affected the public mood. First, the German air offensive against England began. Second, notices went up at the entrances of streets that were later to mark the boundary of the Jewish ghetto, informing passers-by that these streets were infected by typhus and must be avoided. A little later the only Warsaw newspaper published in Polish by the Germans provided an official comment on this subject: not only were the Jews social parasites, they also spread infection. They were not, said the report, to be shut up in a ghetto; even the word ghetto was not to be used. The Germans were too cultured and magnanimous a race, said the newspaper, to confine even parasites like the Jews to ghettos, a medieval remnant unworthy of the new order in Europe. Instead, there was to be a separate Jewish quarter of the city where only Jews lived, where they would enjoy total freedom, and where they could continue to practise their racial customs and culture. Purely for hygienic reasons, this quarter was to be surrounded by a wall so that typhus and other Jewish diseases could not spread to other parts of the city. This humanitarian report was illustrated by a small map showing the precise borders of the ghetto.

  At least we could console ourselves that our street was already in the ghetto area, and we did not have to look for another flat. Jews who lived outside the area were in an unfortunate situation. They had to pay exorbitant sums in key money and look for a new roof over their heads in the last weeks of October. The luckiest found rooms available in Sienna Street, which was to be the Champs-Elysées of the ghetto, or moved into the nearby area. Others were condemned to squalid holes in the infamous areas of Gęsia, Smocza and Zamenhof Streets, which had been occupied by the Jewish proletariat from time immemorial.

  The gates of the ghetto were closed on 15 November. I had business that evening at the far end of Sienna Street, not far from Żelazna Street. It was drizzling, but still unusually warm for the time of year. The dark streets were swarming with figures wearing white armbands. They were all in an agitated state, running back and forth like animals put into a cage and not yet used to it. Women were wailing and children were crying in terror as they perched beside the walls of the buildings, on mounds of bedding gradually getting wet and dirty from the filth in the streets. These were Jewish families who had been forcibly put behind the ghetto walls at the last minute, and had no hope of finding shelter. Half a million people had to find somewhere to lay their heads in an already over-populated part of the city, which scarcely had room for more than a hundred thousand.

  Looking down the dark street, I saw floodlights illuminating the new wooden grating: the ghetto gate, beyond which free people lived – unconfined, with adequate space, in the same city of Warsaw. But no Jew could pass through that gate any longer.

  At one point, someone took my hand. It was a friend of my father’s, another musician, and like my father a man of a cheerful, friendly nature.

  ‘Well, how about this, then?’ he asked with a nervous laugh, his hand describing an arc that took in the crowds of people, the dirty walls of the houses, wet with rain, and the ghetto walls and gate visible in the distance.

  ‘How about it?’ I said. ‘They want to finish us off.’

  But the old gentleman didn’t share my opinion, or did not want to. He gave another, slightly forced laugh, patted me on the back and cried, ‘Oh, don’t you worry!’ Then he took hold of the button on my coat, put his red-cheeked face close to mine, and said, with either genuine or pretended conviction, ‘They’ll soon let us out. We only need America to know.’

  6 ∼ Dancing in Chłodna Street

  Today, as I look back on other, more terrible memories, my experiences of the Warsaw ghetto from November 1940 to July 1942, a period of almost two years, merge into a single image as if they had lasted only a single day. Hard as I try, I cannot break it up into smaller sections that would impose some chronological order on it, as you usually do when writing a journal.

  Naturally some things happened at the time, as well as before and after it, that were common knowledge and easy to grasp. The Germans went hunting human game for use as workhorses, just as they did all over Europe. Perhaps the only difference was that in the Warsaw ghetto these hunts suddenly stopped in the spring of 1942. In a few months’ time the Jewish prey was to serve other purposes, and like other game needed a close season, so that the big show hunts would be all the better and cause no disappointment. We Jews were robbed, just as the French, Belgians, Norwegians and Greeks were robbed, but with the difference that we were robbed more systematically and in a strictly official way. Germans who were not part of the system had no access to the ghetto and no right to steal for themselves. The German police were authorized to steal by a decree issued by the governor-general in line with the law on theft, published by the government of the Reich.

  In 1941 Germany invaded Russia. In the ghetto we held our breath as we followed the course of this new offensive. At first we believed erroneously that the Germans would finally lose now; later we felt despair and ever-increasing doubt about the fate of mankind and ourselves as Hitler’s troops advanced further into Russia. Then again, when the Germans ordered all Jewish fur coats to be handed in on pain of the death penalty, we were pleased to think they could not be doing particularly well if their victory depended on silver fox and beaver furs.

  The ghetto was closing in. Street by street, the Germans were reducing its area. In exactly the same way, Germany shifted the borders of the European countries it had subdued, appropriating province after province; it was as if the Warsaw ghetto were no less important than France, and the exclusion of Złota Street and Zielna Street as significant for the expansion of German Lebensraum as the separation of Alsace and Lorraine from French territory.

  However, these outside incidents were entirely unimportant compared to the one significant fact that constantly occupied our minds, every hour and every minute of the time we spent in the ghetto: we were shut in.

  I think it would have been psychologically easier to bear if we had been more obviously imprisoned – locked in a cell, for instance. That kind of imprisonment clearly, indubitably, defines a human being’s relationship to reality. There is no mistaking your situation: the cell is a world in itself, containing only your own imprisonment, never interlocking with the distant world of freedom. You can dream of that world if you have the time and inclination; however, if you don’t think of it, it will not force itself on your notice of its own accord. It is not always there before your eyes, tormenting you with reminders of the free life you have lost.

  The reality of the ghetto was all the worse just because it had the appearance of freedom. You could walk out into the street and maintain the illusion of being in a perfectly normal city. The armbands branding us as Jews did not bother us, because we were all wearing them, and after some time living in the ghetto I realized that I had become thoroughly used to them – so much so that when I dreamed of my Aryan friends I saw them wearing armbands, as if that white strip of fabric was as essential a part of the human wardrobe as a tie. However, the streets of the ghetto – and those streets alone – en
ded in walls. I very often went out walking at random, following my nose, and unexpectedly came up against one of these walls. They barred my way when I wanted to walk on and there was no logical reason to stop me. Then the part of the street on the other side of the wall would suddenly seem to be the place I loved and needed most in all the world, a place where things must be going on at this very moment that I would give anything to see – but it was no use. I would turn back, crushed, and I went on like this day after day, always with the same sense of despair.

  Even in the ghetto you could go to a restaurant or a café. You met friends there, and nothing seemed to prevent you from creating as pleasant an atmosphere as in a restaurant or café anywhere else. However, the moment inevitably came when one of your friends would let slip a remark to the effect that it would be nice for this little party, engaged in such pleasant conversation, to go on an excursion somewhere one fine Sunday, say Otwock. It’s summer, he might say, and nice weather, the warm spell seems to be holding – and there’d be nothing to stop you carrying out such a simple plan, even if you felt like doing it there and then. You would only have to pay the bill for coffee and cakes, go out into the street, walk to the station with your laughing, cheerful companions, buy tickets and get on the suburban train. All the conditions to create a perfect illusion existed – until you came up against the boundary of the walls …

  The period of nearly two years I spent in the ghetto reminds me, when I think of it, of a childhood experience which lasted a much shorter time. I was to have my appendix removed. The operation was expected to be routine, nothing to worry about. It would be performed in a week’s time; the date was agreed with the doctors and a hospital room had been reserved. Hoping to ease the wait for me, my parents went to great trouble to fill the week before my operation with treats. We went out to eat ice-cream every day and then to the cinema or theatre; I was given lots of books and toys, everything my heart could desire. It looked as if there was nothing more I needed to complete my happiness. But I still remember that all week, whether I was at the pictures, in the theatre or eating ices, even during amusements that called for great concentration, I was not free for a single moment of the itch of fear in the pit of my stomach, an unconscious, persistent fear of what would happen when the day of the operation finally came.