The Pianist

by Wladyslaw Szpilman

  According to the rumours, the resettlement ‘action’ was to start on Sunday night. However, the night passed quietly, and people were encouraged on Monday morning. Perhaps, yet again, there was nothing in the rumours?

  Towards evening, however, panic broke out once more: according to the latest information, the action was to begin tonight with the resettlement of the occupants of the small ghetto, and this time there was no doubt about it. Agitated crowds of people carrying bundles and large trunks and accompanied by children began moving from the small to the large ghetto, crossing the bridge the Germans had built over Chłodna Street to cut us off from the last chance of contact with the Aryan quarter. They were hoping to get clear of the threatened area before curfew. In line with our family’s fatalistic attitude, we stayed put. Late in the evening the neighbours heard news from Polish police headquarters that an alert had been issued. So something bad really was about to happen. I could not sleep until four in the morning, and stayed up sitting by the open window. But that night passed peacefully too.

  On Tuesday morning Goldfeder and I went to the Jewish Council’s administrative body. We had not yet lost hope that everything might work out somehow, and we wanted to get the Council’s official information about German plans for the ghetto over the next few days. We had almost reached the building when an open car drove past us. Sitting in it, surrounded by police, pale and bare-headed, was Colonel Kon, head of the community health department. Many other Jewish functionaries had been arrested at the same time, and a hunt had begun in the streets.

  The afternoon of the same day something happened that shook the whole of Warsaw, on both sides of the wall. A well-known Polish surgeon called Dr Raszeja, a leading expert in his field and a professor at Poznań University, had been called to the ghetto to perform a difficult operation. The German police headquarters in Warsaw had given him a pass to let him into the ghetto, but once he had arrived and was beginning the operation SS men made their way into the flat where it was going on, shot the anaesthetized patient lying on the operating table, and then shot the surgeon and everyone else present.

  On Wednesday, 22 July, I went into the city at about ten in the morning. The mood in the streets was a little less tense than the evening before. A reassuring rumour was circulating to the effect that the Council functionaries arrested yesterday had been set free again. So the Germans did not intend to resettle us just yet, since in such cases (as we had heard in reports from outside Warsaw where much smaller Jewish communities had been resettled long ago) they always began by liquidating the officials.

  It was eleven o’clock when I came to the bridge over Chłodna Street. I was walking along, deep in thought, and at first I did not notice that people were standing still on the bridge and pointing at something. Then they rapidly dispersed in agitation.

  I was about to climb the steps to the wooden arch of the bridge when a friend I had not seen for quite a long time seized my arm.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ He was greatly agitated, and when he spoke his lower lip twitched comically, like a rabbit’s muzzle. ‘Go home at once!’

  ‘What’s up?’

  ‘The action begins in an hour’s time.’

  ‘That’s impossible!’

  ‘Impossible?’ He gave a bitter, nervous laugh, then turned me to face the balustrade and pointed down Chłodna Street. ‘Look at that!’

  A detachment of soldiers in unfamiliar yellow uniforms was marching down Chłodna Street, led by a German NCO. Every few steps the unit halted, and one of the soldiers took up his position by the wall surrounding the ghetto.

  ‘Ukrainians. We’re surrounded!’ He sobbed rather than spoke these words. Then he hurried down the steps without a goodbye.

  Sure enough, around noon the troops did indeed begin clearing the old people’s homes, the veterans’ homes and the overnight shelters. These shelters accommodated Jews from the country around Warsaw who had been thrown into the ghetto, as well as those expelled from Germany, Czechoslovakia, Romania and Hungary. By afternoon posters had gone up in the city announcing the beginning of the resettlement action. All Jews fit to work were going to the east. Everyone could take twenty kilos of luggage, provisions for two days – and their jewellery. When they reached their destination those able to work would be housed in barracks and given jobs in the local German factories. Only the officials of the Jewish social institutions and the Jewish Council were exempt. For the first time, a decree did not carry the signature of the chairman of the Jewish Council. Czerniaków had killed himself by taking cyanide.

  So the worst had happened after all: the people of a whole quarter, a place with a population of half a million, were to be resettled. It seemed absurd – no one could believe it.

  During the first few days the action proceeded by the lottery system. Buildings were surrounded at random, now in one part of the ghetto, now in another. A whistle summoned all the inhabitants of a house out into the yard, loaded up everyone without exception on horse-drawn carts, regardless of sex or age, from babies to the old, and took them to the Umschlagplatz – the assembly and transit centre. Then the victims were crammed into trucks and dispatched into the unknown.

  At first the action was carried out entirely by Jewish police, led by three of the German executioners’ assistants: Colonel Szeryński, Captain Lejkin and Captain Ehrlich. They were no less dangerous and pitiless than the Germans themselves. Perhaps they were even worse, for when they found people who had hidden somewhere instead of going down to the yard they could easily be persuaded to turn a blind eye, but only for money. Tears, pleas, even the desperate screams of children left them unmoved.

  Since the shops had been closed and the ghetto was cut off from all supplies, hunger became widespread after a couple of days, and this time it affected everyone. People did not stop to let that bother them much: they were after something more important than food. They wanted certificates of employment.

  I can think of only one comparison that would give an idea of our life in those terrible days and hours: it was like an anthill under threat. When some thoughtless idiot’s brutal foot begins to destroy the insects’ home with its hobnailed heel, the ants will scurry hither and thither, searching more and more busily for some way out, a way to save themselves, but whether because they are paralysed by the suddenness of the attack, or in concern for the fate of their offspring and whatever else they can save, they turn back as if under some baleful influence instead of going straight ahead and out of range, always returning to the same pathways and the same places, unable to break out of the deadly circle – and so they perish. Just like us.

  It was a dreadful period for us, but the Germans did very good business at this time. German firms shot up in the ghetto like mushrooms after rain, and they were all ready to make out certificates of employment. For a certain number of thousands, of course, but the size of these sums did not deter people. There were queues outside such firms, assuming huge proportions outside the offices of the really large and important factories such as Toebbens and Schultz. Those who were lucky enough to have acquired certificates of employment pinned little notices to their clothing, giving the name of the place where they were supposed to be working. They thought this would protect them from resettlement.

  I could easily have got hold of such a certificate, but again, as with the typhus vaccine, just for myself. None of my acquaintances, even those with the very best connections, would entertain the idea of providing certificates for my whole family. Six free certificates – that was certainly a lot to expect, but I could not afford to pay even the lowest price for all of us. I earned from one day to the next, and whatever I earned we ate. The beginning of the action in the ghetto had found me with only a few hundred złoty in my pocket. I was shattered by my helplessness, and by having to watch as my richer friends easily secured their families’ safety. Unkempt, unshaven, without a morsel of food inside me, I trudged around from morning to night, from one firm to another, begging people to take
pity on us. After six days of this, and pulling all the strings I could, I somehow managed to scrape the certificates together.

  It must have been the week before the action began that I met Roman Kramsztyk for the last time. He was emaciated and nervous, although he tried to hide it. He was pleased to see me. ‘Not off on tour yet?’ he said, trying to crack a joke.

  ‘No,’ I replied briefly. I did not feel like joking. Then I asked him the question we were always putting to each other at the time. ‘What do you think? Will they resettle us all?’

  He did not answer my question, but avoided it by remarking, ‘You look terrible!’ He looked at me sympathetically. ‘You take all this too much to heart.’

  ‘How can I help it?’ I shrugged my shoulders.

  He smiled, lit a cigarette, said nothing for a while, and then went on, ‘You wait, it’ll all be over some fine day, because…’ and he waved his arms about … ‘because there really isn’t any sense in it, is there?’

  He said this with comic and rather helpless conviction, as if the utter pointlessness of what was going on was obviously an argument showing that it would end.

  Unfortunately, it did not. Indeed, matters became even worse when Lithuanians and Ukrainians were brought in over the next few days. They were just as venal as the Jewish police, although in a different way. They took bribes, but as soon as they had received them they killed the people whose money they had taken. They liked killing anyway: killing for sport, or to make their work easier, as target practice or simply for fun. They killed children before their mothers’ eyes and found the women’s despair amusing. They shot people in the stomach to watch their torments. Sometimes several of them would line their victims up in a row and throw hand grenades at them from a distance to see who had the best aim. Every war casts up certain small groups among ethnic populations: minorities too cowardly to fight openly, too insignificant to play any independent political part, but despicable enough to act as paid executioners to one of the fighting powers. In this war those people were the Ukrainian and Lithuanian Fascists.

  Roman Kramsztyk was one of the first to die when they began taking a hand in the resettlement action. The building where he lived was surrounded, but he did not go down to the yard when he heard the whistle. He preferred to be shot at home among his pictures.

  At about this time the Gestapo agents Kon and Heller died. They had not established their position skilfully enough, or perhaps they were too thrifty. They only paid one of the two SS headquarters in Warsaw, and it was their bad luck to fall into the hands of men from the other. The authorizations they produced, being made out by the rival SS unit, enraged their captors even further: they were not content with simply shooting Kon and Heller, but had the dustcarts brought, and on these, amidst the refuse and filth, the two magnates took their last journey through the ghetto to a mass grave.

  The Ukrainians and Lithuanians paid no attention to any certificates of employment. My six days spent acquiring ours had been a waste of effort. I felt one really had to work; the question was how to go about it. I lost heart entirely. I lay on my bed all day now, listening to the sounds coming up from the street. Every time I heard the rumble of wheels on the tarmac I panicked again. These vehicles were taking people to the Umschlagplatz. But they did not all pass straight through the ghetto, and any one of them could stop outside our building. We might hear the whistle in the yard any moment now. I kept jumping out of bed, going to the window, lying down again, getting up again.

  I was the only one of the family to act with such shameful weakness. Perhaps it was because I alone might somehow be able to save us, through my popularity as a performer, and so I felt responsible.

  My parents, sisters and brother knew there was nothing they could do. They concentrated entirely on staying in control of themselves and maintaining the fiction of ordinary daily life. Father played his violin all day, Henryk studied, Regina and Halina read and Mother mended our clothes.

  The Germans hit upon yet another bright idea to ease their task. Decrees appeared on the walls stating that all families who voluntarily came to the Umschlagplatz to ‘emigrate’ would get a loaf of bread and a kilo of jam per person, and such volunteer families would not be separated. There was a massive response to this offer. People were anxious to take it up both because they were hungry and in the hope of going the unknown, difficult way to their fate together.

  Unexpectedly, Goldfeder came to our aid. He had the chance to employ a certain number of people at the collection centre near the Umschlagplatz where the furniture and belongings from the homes of Jews who had already been resettled were sorted. He got me, my father and Henryk accommodation there, and we then succeeded in getting my sisters and mother to join us, although they did not work at the collection centre but looked after our new ‘home’ in the building which was our barracks. The rations were nothing special: we each got half a loaf of bread and quarter of a litre of soup a day, and we had to portion it out cleverly to satisfy our hunger as best we could.

  It was my first work for the Germans. I carted furniture, mirrors, carpets, underclothes, bedclothes and clothing around from morning to night: items that had belonged to someone only a few days ago, had shown that an interior was the home of people with or without good taste, prosperous or poor, kind or cruel. Now they belonged to no one; they were downgraded into stacks and heaps of objects, they were roughly handled, and only occasionally, when I was carrying an armful of underclothes, did the faint scent of someone’s favourite perfume rise from them very delicately, like a memory, or I might glimpse coloured monograms on a white background for a moment. But I had no time to think of these things. Every moment of contemplation, even of inattention, brought a painful blow or kick with a policeman’s iron-tipped boot or rubber truncheon. It could cost you your life, as it did the young men who were shot on the spot because they dropped a drawing-room mirror and it broke.

  Early on the morning of 2 August the order came out for all Jews to leave the small ghetto by six in the evening that day. I succeeded in getting time off to fetch some clothes and bedding from Śliska Street, along with my compositions, a collection of reviews of my performances and my creative work as a composer, and Father’s violin. I took them to our barracks in a handcart, which was hard work. This was all we owned.

  One day, around 5 August, when I had taken a brief rest from work and was walking down Gęsia Street, I happened to see Janusz Korczak and his orphans leaving the ghetto.

  The evacuation of the Jewish orphanage run by Janusz Korczak had been ordered for that morning. The children were to have been taken away alone. He had the chance to save himself, and it was only with difficulty that he persuaded the Germans to take him too. He had spent long years of his life with children, and now, on this last journey, he would not leave them alone. He wanted to ease things for them. He told the orphans they were going out into the country, so they ought to be cheerful. At last they would be able to exchange the horrible, suffocating city walls for meadows of flowers, streams where they could bathe, woods full of berries and mushrooms. He told them to wear their best clothes, and so they came out into the yard, two by two, nicely dressed and in a happy mood.

  The little column was led by an SS man who loved children, as Germans do, even those he was about to see on their way into the next world. He took a special liking to a boy of twelve, a violinist who had his instrument under his arm. The SS man told him to go to the head of the procession of children and play – and so they set off.

  When I met them in Gęsia Street the smiling children were singing in chorus, the little violinist was playing for them and Korczak was carrying two of the smallest infants, who were beaming too, and telling them some amusing story.

  I am sure that even in the gas chamber, as the Cyclon B gas was stifling childish throats and striking terror instead of hope into the orphans’ hearts, the Old Doctor must have whispered with one last effort, ‘It’s all right, children, it will be all right,’ so that at l
east he could spare his little charges the fear of passing from life to death.

  Finally, on 16 August 1942, our turn came. A selection had been carried out at the collecting centre, and only Henryk and Halina were passed as still fit to work. Father, Regina and I were told to go back to the barracks. Once we were there the building was surrounded, and we heard the whistle in the yard.

  It was no use struggling any more. I had done what I could to save my loved ones and myself. It had obviously been impossible from the start. Perhaps at least Halina and Henryk would fare better than the rest of us.

  We dressed quickly, as shouts and shots were heard down in the yard, urging us to hurry. Mother packed a little bundle with anything that came to hand, and then we went down the stairs.

  9 ∼ The Umschlagplatz

  The Umschlagplatz lay on the border of the ghetto. A compound by the railway sidings, it was surrounded by a network of dirty streets, alleys and pathways. Despite its unprepossessing appearance, it had contained riches before the war. One of the sidings had been the destination of large quantities of goods from all over the world. Jewish businessmen bargained over them, later supplying them to the Warsaw shops from depots in Nalewki Street and Simon Passage. The place was a huge oval, partly surrounded by buildings, partly fenced, with a number of roads running into it like streams into a lake, useful links with the city. The area had been closed off with gates where the streets reached it, and could now contain up to eight thousand people.

  When we arrived it was still quite empty. People were walking up and down, searching in vain for water. It was a hot, fine day in late summer. The sky was blue-grey, as if it would turn to ashes in the heat rising from the trodden ground and the dazzling walls of the buildings, and the blazing sun squeezed the last drops of sweat from exhausted bodies.

  At the edge of the compound, where one of the streets ran into it, there was an unoccupied space. Everyone was giving this spot a wide berth, never lingering there but casting glances of horror at it. Bodies lay there: the bodies of those killed yesterday for some crime or other, perhaps even for attempting to escape. Among the bodies of men were the corpses of a young woman and two girls with their skulls smashed to pieces. The wall under which the corpses lay showed clear traces of bloodstains and brain tissue. The children had been murdered by a favourite German method: seized by the legs, their heads swung violently against the wall. Large black flies were walking over the dead and the pools of spilt blood on the ground, and the bodies were almost visibly bloating and decaying in the heat.