The Pianist

by Wladyslaw Szpilman

  We were trying to work as slowly as possible on the demolition of the wall, so that the job would last a long time. The Jewish foremen did not harrass us, and even the SS men did not behave as badly here as inside the ghetto. They stood a little way off, deep in conversation, letting their eyes wander.

  The truck passed the square and disappeared. The traders went back to their previous positions, and the square looked as if nothing had happened. My companions left our group one by one to buy things at the stalls and stow them in bags they had brought, or up their trouser legs and in their jackets. Unfortunately I had no money and could only watch, although I felt faint with hunger.

  A young couple approached our group, coming from Ogród Saski. They were both very well dressed. The young woman looked charming; I couldn’t tear my eyes away from her. Her painted mouth was smiling, she swayed slightly from the hips, and the sun turned her fair hair to gold in a shimmering halo around her head. As she passed us the young woman slowed her pace, crying, ‘Look – oh, do look!’

  The man did not understand. He looked enquiringly at her.

  She pointed at us. ‘Jews!’

  He was surprised. ‘So?’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Are those the first Jews you’ve ever seen?’

  The woman smiled in some embarrassment, pressed close to her companion, and they went on their way in the direction of the market.

  That afternoon I managed to borrow fifty złoty from one of the others. I spent it on bread and potatoes. I ate some of the bread and took the rest of it and the potatoes back to the ghetto. I did the first commercial deal of my life that evening. I had paid twenty złoty for the bread; I sold it for fifty in the ghetto. The potatoes had cost three złoty a kilo; I sold them for eighteen. I had enough to eat for the first time in ages, and a little working capital still in hand to make my purchases next day.

  The demolition work was very monotonous. We left the ghetto early in the morning and then stood around a heap of bricks looking as if we were working until five in the afternoon. My companions passed the time by engaging in all kinds of transactions as they acquired goods and speculated on what to buy, how to smuggle it into the ghetto and how to sell it most profitably there. I bought the simplest things, just enough to earn my keep. If I thought of anything it was of my family: where they were now, what camp they had been taken to, how they were getting on there.

  One day an old friend of mine passed our group. He was Tadeusz Blumental, a Jew, but one whose features were so ‘Aryan’ that he did not have to admit his origins and could live outside the ghetto walls. He was glad to see me, but distressed to find me in such a difficult situation. He gave me some money and promised to try to help me. He said a woman would come next day, and if I could slip away unobserved she would take me to a place where I could hide. The woman did come, but unfortunately with the news that the people with whom I was to have stayed would not agree to take in a Jew.

  Another day the leader of the Warsaw Philharmonic, Jan Dworakowski, saw me as he was crossing the square. He was genuinely moved to see me. He embraced me and began asking how I and my family were. When I told him that the others had been taken away from Warsaw he looked at me with what struck me as particular sympathy, and opened his mouth as if to say something. But at the last minute he did not.

  ‘What do you think will have happened to them?’ I asked in great anxiety.

  ‘Władysław!’ He took my hands and pressed them warmly. ‘Perhaps it’s best for you to know … so you can be on your guard.’ He hesitated for a moment, pressed my hand, and then added quietly, almost in a whisper, ‘You’ll never see them again.’

  He turned quickly and hurried away. After a couple of paces he turned again and came back to embrace me, but I was not strong enough to return his cordiality. Subconsciously, I had known from the first that the German fairytales of camps for Jews where ‘good working conditions’ awaited them on resettlement were lies – that we could expect only death at the hands of the Germans. Yet like the other Jews in the ghetto, I had cherished the illusion that it could be different, that this time German promises meant what they said. When I thought of my family I tried to imagine them alive, even if they were living in terrible conditions, but alive anyway: then we might see each other again some day after all. Dworakowski had destroyed the structure of self-deception I had so arduously maintained. Only much later could I convince myself that he had been right to do so: the certainty of death gave me the energy to save myself at the crucial moment.

  I spent the next few days as if in a dream, automatically getting up in the morning, automatically moving about, lying down automatically in the evening to sleep on a plank bed in the Jewish furniture warehouse that had been assigned to the Council. Somehow or other I had to come to terms with what I now knew was the certain death of Mother, Father, Halina, Regina and Henryk. There was a Soviet air raid on Warsaw. Everyone went into the bunkers. The Germans were alarmed and angry, the Jews delighted, although they could not show it. Every time we heard the drone of bombers our faces lit up; to us, they were the sound of approaching aid and the defeat of Germany, the only thing that could save us. I did not go down into a bunker – it was all the same to me whether I lived or died.

  Meanwhile our working conditions as we demolished the walls had deteriorated. The Lithuanians now guarding us made sure we bought nothing in the market, and we were inspected more and more thoroughly at the main guard station and on our return to the ghetto. One afternoon, quite unexpectedly, a selection was made in our group. A young policeman stationed himself outside the main guard station with his sleeves rolled up and began dividing us up according to the lottery system, just as he thought best: those on the left to die, those on the right to live. He ordered me over to the right. Those on the left had to lie face-down on the ground. Then he shot them with his revolver.

  After about a week announcements of a new selection from all the Jews left in Warsaw were pasted on the ghetto walls. Three hundred thousand had already been ‘resettled’; about a hundred thousand were now left, and only twenty-five thousand of these were to remain in the city, all of them professional people and other workers indispensable to the Germans.

  The Council functionaries had to go to the yard of the Jewish Council building on the appointed day, the rest of the population to the section of the ghetto between Nowolipki and Gęsia Streets. To make matters doubly sure, one of the Jewish policemen, an officer called Blaupapier, stood in front of the Council building with a whip in his hand, personally using it on anyone who tried to get in.

  Numbers stamped on bits of paper were handed out to those who were to stay in the ghetto. The Council had a right to keep five thousand of its own officials. I was not given a number that first day, but none the less I slept all night, resigned to my fate, although my companions were almost out of their minds with anxiety. Next morning I did get a number. We were stationed in rows, four abreast, and had to wait until the SS control commission under Untersturmführer Brandt condescended to come and count us, in case too many of us might be going to escape death.

  Four by four, marching in step and surrounded by police, we made for the gate of the Council building to go to Gęsia Street, where we were to be lodged. Behind us, the crowd of people condemned to death flung themselves about, screaming, wailing and cursing us for our own miraculous escape, while the Lithuanians who were supervising their passage from life to death shot into the crowd to calm it in what was now their usual manner.

  So I had been given a chance to live yet again. But to live how long?

  11 ∼ ‘Marksmen arise!’

  I had moved house once more, the latest of I don’t know how many moves since we were living in Śliska Street and the war broke out. This time we were given shared rooms, or rather cells containing only the most essential household equipment and plank beds. Mine was shared with the three members of the Prόżański family and Mrs A, a silent lady who kept herself to herself, although she had to do so in the same ro
om as the rest of us. The very first night there I had a dream that utterly discouraged me. It seemed to be final confirmation of my assumptions about the fate of my family. I dreamed of my brother Henryk, who came up to me, leaned over my bed and said, ‘We are dead now.’

  We were woken at six in the morning by much coming and going in the passage outside. There was loud talk and a lot of activity. The privileged labourers working on the conversion of the Warsaw SS commandant’s palace in Aleje Ujazdowskie were off to work. Their ‘privileged’ status meant that they were given nourishing soup with meat in it before they set out; it was satisfying, and the effects would last some hours. We went out soon after them, our bellies almost empty after some watery broth. Its poor nutritional value matched the importance of our work: we were to clean the yard of the Jewish Council building.

  Next day they sent me, Prόżański and his half-grown son to the building which housed the Council storerooms and the flats of Council functionaries. It was two in the afternoon when the familiar German whistle and the customary German yell were heard summoning everyone to the yard. Although we had already suffered so much at the hands of the Germans we froze like pillars of salt. Only two days ago we had been allotted the numbers that meant life. Everyone in this building had one, so surely this could not be another selection. In which case, what was it? We hurried down: yes, it really was a selection. Yet again I saw people cast into despair and listened to the SS men shouting and fuming as they tore families apart and sorted us to right and left, cursing and beating us. Once more, our working group was destined to live, with a few exceptions. Among the exceptions was Prόżański’s son, a delightful boy with whom I had made friends. I had already grown very fond of him, even though we had been living in the same room for only two days. I will not describe his parents’ despair. Thousands of other mothers and fathers in the ghetto were equally desperate during those months. There was an even more characteristic aspect to the selection: the families of prominent personalities in the Jewish community bought their freedom from the supposedly incorruptible Gestapo officers on the spot. To make up the correct numbers carpenters, waiters, hairdressers and barbers and other skilled workers who really could have been useful to the Germans were sent to the Umschlagplatz instead, and taken away to their deaths. Incidentally, young Prόżański escaped from the Umschlagplatz and thus survived a little longer.

  One day soon afterwards our group leader told me he had succeeded in getting me assigned to the group working on the building of the SS barracks in the remote Mokotow district. I would get better food and be much better off in general there, he assured me.

  The reality was very different. I had to get up two hours earlier and walk about a dozen kilometres through the middle of the city to get to work on time. When I arrived, exhausted from my long trek, I had to get straight down to labour which was far beyond my strength, carrying bricks stacked on top of each other on a board on my back. In between times I carried buckets of lime and iron bars. I might have done all right but for the SS overseers, the future occupants of this barracks, who thought we were working too slowly. They ordered us to carry the piles of bricks or iron bars at a run, and if anyone felt faint and stopped they beat him with hide whips that had balls of lead set into the leather.

  In fact, I don’t know how I would have coped with this first bout of hard physical labour if I had not gone to the group leader again and pleaded, successfully, to be transferred to the group building the SS commander’s little palace in Aleje Ujazdowskie. Conditions were more tolerable there, and I managed somehow. They were tolerable chiefly because we were working with German master masons and skilled Polish artisans, some of whom were forced labour, although some were working on contract. As a consequence, we were less conspicuous and could take turns to have a break now that we were not always an obviously self-contained Jewish group. Moreover, the Poles made common cause with us against the German overseers and gave us a hand. Another helpful factor was that the architect in charge of the building was himself a Jew, an engineer called Blum, with a staff of other Jewish engineers under him, all outstanding professionals. The Germans did not officially recognize this situation, and the master mason Schultke, described for form’s sake as architect-in-charge and a typical sadist, had the right to beat the engineers as often as he liked. But without the skilled Jewish artisans nothing would really have been achieved. Because of this we were all treated relatively gently – apart from the beatings mentioned above, of course, but such things hardly counted in the climate of the times.

  I was hod carrier to a mason called Bartczak, a Pole and a decent fellow at heart, although of course there was bound to be some friction between us. Sometimes the Germans breathed down our necks, and we had to try working the way they wanted. I did my best, but inevitably I would tip the ladder over, spill the lime, or push bricks off the scaffolding, and Bartczak was told off too. He would be angry with me in turn, going scarlet in the face, muttering to himself and waiting for the Germans to go away, when he would push his cap back from his forehead, put his hands on his hips, shake his head over my clumsiness as a mason, and begin his tirade:

  ‘How do you mean, you used to play music on the radio, Szpilman?’ he marvelled. ‘A musician like you – can’t even handle a shovel and scrape lime off a board – you must have sent them all to sleep!’

  He would then shrug his shoulders, look suspiciously at me, spit, and venting his anger one last time would shout at the top of his voice, ‘Idiot!’

  However, when I had fallen into gloomy contemplation of my own affairs and stopped work, forgetting where I was, Bartczak never failed to warn me in time if a German overseer was on his way.

  ‘Mortar!’ he would bellow, the word echoing over the site, and I would snatch up the first bucket that came to hand, or a brick trowel, and pretend to be working industriously.

  The prospect of winter, which was nearly on us now, caused me particular anxiety. I had no warm clothes to wear, and of course no gloves. I have always been rather sensitive to the cold, and if my hands were frostbitten while I was doing such heavy physical labour I could write off any future career as a pianist. With mounting gloom, I watched the leaves on the trees in Aleje Ujazdowskie turn colour, as the wind blew colder day by day.

  At this point the numbers which had meant provisional permission to live were given permanent status, and at the same time I was moved to new quarters in the ghetto, in Kurza Street. Our place of work was also changed, to the Aryan side of the city. Work on the little palace in the Aleje was coming to an end, and fewer workers were needed now. Some of us were transferred to 8 Narbutt Street to prepare accommodation for a unit of SS officers.

  It was getting colder and colder, and my fingers went numb more and more frequently as I worked. I don’t know how it would have ended if chance had not come to my aid – a lucky stroke of bad luck, so to speak. One day I stumbled carrying lime and sprained my ankle. I was now useless for work on the building site, and Blum the engineer assigned me to the stores. This was the end of November and the very last moment when I could hope to save my hands. In any case it was warmer in the stores than out of doors.

  More and more labourers who had been working in Aleje Ujazdowskie were now transferred to us – and more and more of the SS men who had been our overseers there were moved to the Narbutt Street site too. One morning we found among them the man who was the bane of our lives: a sadist whose surname we did not know, but we had called him Thwick-Thwack. He took an almost erotic pleasure in mistreating people in a certain way: he would order the delinquent to bend over, put the man’s head between his thighs, press hard, and thrash the unfortunate man’s behind with a kourbash, pale with fury and hissing through clenched teeth, Thwick-thwack, thwick-thwack.’ He never let his victim go until the man had fainted with pain.

  Once again rumours of further ‘resettlement’ were circulating in the ghetto. If they were true, it was clear that the Germans meant to exterminate us utterly. After all,
there were only some sixty thousand of us left, and for what other purpose could they intend to remove this small number from the city? The idea of offering resistance to the Germans was broached with increasing frequency. Young Jewish men were particularly determined to fight, and here and there a start was made on secretly fortifying buildings in the ghetto so that they could be defended from inside if the worst happened. Obviously the Germans had got wind of these developments, for decrees went up on the ghetto walls assuring us warmly that there was not going to be any further resettlement. The men guarding our group volunteered the same information every day, and to make their assurances even more convincing they officially allowed us to buy five kilos of potatoes and a loaf of bread apiece on the Aryan side from now on, and bring them back into the ghetto. The benevolence of the Germans even persuaded them to allow a delegate from our group to move freely about the city every day and make these purchases on our behalf. We chose a brave young man known as ‘Majorek’, little major. The Germans had no idea that Majorek, following our instructions, would become a link between the underground resistance movement in the ghetto and similar Polish organizations outside.

  Our official permission to bring a certain amount of food into the ghetto set off some busy trading around our group. There would be a crowd of dealers waiting every day when we left the ghetto. They bartered ciuchy, second-hand clothes, with my companions in exchange for food. I was less interested in this trade than in the news the dealers brought us at the same time. The Allies had landed in Africa. Stalingrad was now in the third month of its defence, and there had been a conspiracy in Warsaw: grenades were thrown into the German Café-Club. Each of these items of news raised our spirits, strengthening our powers of endurance and our belief that Germany would be defeated in the near future. Very soon the first armed reprisals began in the ghetto, first of all against the corrupt elements among ourselves. One of the worst of the Jewish police was murdered: Lejkin, notorious for his industry in hunting people down and delivering his quotas to the Umschlagplatz. Soon after him a man called First, who acted as liaison between the Gestapo and the Jewish Council, died at the hands of Jewish assassins. For the first time the spies in the ghetto began to feel afraid.