The Pianist

by Wladyslaw Szpilman

  Gradually I recovered my spirits and my will to survive. I went to Majorek one day and asked him to phone some acquaintances of mine when he was in the city, and ask if they would get me out of the ghetto somehow and hide me. That afternoon I waited with a thudding heart for Majorek’s return. He came back, but with bad news: my acquaintances had said they could not risk hiding a Jew. After all, they explained, rather indignant at my even having suggested such a thing, doing so carried the death penalty! Well, there was no help for it. They had said no; perhaps others would be more humane. I must not on any account give up hope.

  The New Year was upon us. On 31 December 1942 a large convoy carrying coal unexpectedly arrived. We had to unload it all the same day and store it in the cellar of the building in Narbutt Street. It was hard, heavy work and took longer than expected. Instead of setting off for the ghetto at six in the evening, we did not leave until it was almost night.

  We always went the same way, walking in groups of three from Polna Street to Chałubiński Street and then on along Żelazna Street to the ghetto. We had already reached Chałubiński Street, when frantic cries were heard at the head of the column. We stopped. Next moment we saw what had happened. By pure chance we had come upon two SS men, drunk as lords. One of them was Thwick-Thwack. They fell on us, beating us with the whips from which they did not part company even on a drunken spree. They did it systematically, beating each group of three in turn, beginning at the head of the column. When they had finished, they stationed themselves a few paces away on the pavement, drew their pistols, and Thwick-Thwack shouted, ‘Intellectuals, fall out!’

  There was no doubt of their intentions: they were going to kill us on the spot. I found it difficult to decide what to do. Failing to fall out might infuriate them even more. They could end up dragging us out of the column themselves to give us another beating before they killed us, as a punishment for failing to fall out voluntarily. The historian Dr Zajczyk, a university lecturer who was standing next to me, was trembling all over, just like me, and like me he could not make up his mind. But on the second shouted order we fell out of the column. There were seven of us in all. I found myself face to face with Thwick-Thwack again, and he was shouting at me personally now.

  ‘I’ll soon teach you discipline! What made you take so long about it?’ He waved his pistol about under my nose. ‘You were supposed to be here at six, and it’s ten o’clock now!’

  I said nothing, sure that he was going to shoot me next moment anyway. He looked straight at me with cloudy eyes, staggered about under the street-lamp, and then unexpectedly announced in a perfectly steady voice, ‘You seven are personally responsible for marching the column back to the ghetto. You can go.’

  We had already turned away when he suddenly bellowed, ‘Come back!’

  This time he had Dr Zajczyk right in front of him. He seized him by the collar, shook him, and snarled, ‘Know why we beat you?’

  The doctor said nothing.

  ‘Well, do you know why?’ he repeated.

  A man standing rather further off, obviously alarmed, asked timidly, ‘Why?’

  ‘To remind you it’s New Year!’

  When we had re-formed the column we heard a further order: ‘Sing!’

  Surprised, we stared at Thwick-Thwack. He tottered again, belched, and added, ‘Sing something cheerful!’

  Laughing at his own joke, he turned and staggered down the street. After a few paces he stopped and called out threateningly, ‘And sing it good and loud!’

  I don’t know who was the first to strike up the tune, or why this particular soldier’s song came into his head. We joined in. After all, it hardly mattered what we sang.

  Only today, looking back at that incident, do I realize how much tragedy was mingled with its ridiculous aspect. That New Year’s Eve a small group of utterly exhausted Jews walked through the streets of a city where declarations of Polish patriotism had been forbidden for years on pain of death, singing at the top of our voices and with total impunity the patriotic song, ‘Hej, strzelcy wraz!’ – ‘Hey, marksmen, arise!’

  12 ∼ Majorek

  January the first, 1943. The year in which Roosevelt had announced that the Germans would be defeated. And indeed they were clearly less successful on the front lines now. If only the front lines had been closer to us! News of the German defeat at Stalingrad arrived; it was too important a piece of news to be hushed up or easily dismissed with the usual press claim that even this was ‘of no significance for the victorious course of the war’. This time the Germans had to admit to it, and they announced three days of mourning, the first free time we had enjoyed for months. The more optimistic among us rubbed their hands with glee, firmly convinced that the war would soon be over. The pessimists thought otherwise: they believed the war would last for some time yet, but at least there could no longer be the slightest doubt of its ultimate outcome.

  In parallel to the increasingly good political news, the ghetto underground organizations stepped up their activities. My group was involved too. Majorek, who delivered sacks of potatoes to our group from the city daily, smuggled in ammunition underneath the potatoes. We shared it out between us and brought it into the ghetto hidden up our trouser legs. This was a risky business, and one day it nearly ended tragically for all of us.

  Majorek had delivered the sacks to my storehouse as usual. I was to empty them, hide the ammunition, and divide it out among my colleagues that evening. But no sooner had Majorek put down the sacks and left the storehouse than the door was flung open and Untersturmführer Young burst in. He looked round, noticed the sacks and marched up to them. I felt weak at the knees. If he inspected their contents we were done for, and I would be the first to get a bullet in the head. Young stopped in front of the sacks and tried to untie one. However, the string had become entangled, and it was difficult to undo it. The SS man cursed impatiently and looked at me.

  ‘Undo that!’ he snapped.

  I went over to him, trying to calm my nerves. I untangled the knot with intentional slowness, apparently quite calm. Hands on his hips, the German watched.

  ‘What’s inside it?’ he asked.

  ‘Potatoes. We’re allowed to bring some back to the ghetto every day.’

  The sack was now open. His next order came. ‘Take them out and let me see.’

  I put my hand into the sack. No potatoes. As luck would have it, Majorek had bought a small amount of oatmeal and beans today instead of some of the potatoes. They were on top and the potatoes were underneath. I displayed a handful of fairly long yellow beans.

  ‘Potatoes, eh?’ Young laughed sarcastically. Then he ordered, ‘Try further down!’

  This time I brought up a handful of oatmeal. Any moment now the German would beat me for deceiving him. In fact I hoped he would; it might take his mind off the rest of the contents of the sack. However, he did not even slap me. He turned on his heel and left. Soon afterwards he burst in again, as if he expected to catch me committing some new offence. I was standing in the middle of the storeroom, trying to recover from my fright. I had to pull myself together. Only when I heard Young’s steps growing less distinct as he went down the passage, until at last they died away, did I hurriedly empty the sacks, hiding the ammunition under a heap of lime that had been tipped out in one corner of the storeroom. As we approached the ghetto wall that evening we threw our new consignment of bullets and hand grenades over as usual. We had got away with it!

  On 14 January, a Friday, in their fury at the front-line defeats and the delight they very clearly gave the Poles, the Germans began human-hunting again. This time their hunts ranged all over Warsaw. They went on for three days without stopping. Every day, as we went to work and as we came back, we saw people being pursued and captured in the streets. Convoys of police trucks loaded with prisoners moved towards the gaol and came back empty, ready to pick up more batches of future concentration camp inmates. A number of Aryans sought refuge in the ghetto. These difficult days saw another para
dox of the occupation period: the armband with the Star of David, once the most threatening of symbols, became protection overnight, a form of insurance, since Jews were no longer the quarry.

  After two days, however, our own turn came. When I left the building on Monday morning I did not find the whole of our group out in the road, only a few workers obviously regarded as indispensable. As ‘storeroom manager’ I was among them. We set out, escorted by two policemen, in the direction of the ghetto gate. It was usually guarded only by Jewish police officers, but today a whole German police unit was carefully checking the papers of anyone leaving the ghetto to go to work. A boy of about ten came running along the pavement. He was very pale, and so scared that he forgot to take his cap off to a German policeman coming towards him. The German stopped, drew his revolver without a word, put it to the boy’s temple and shot. The child fell to the ground, his arms flailing, went rigid and died. The policeman calmly put the revolver back in its holster and went on his way. I looked at him; he did not even have particularly brutal features, nor did he appear angry. He was a normal, placid man who had carried out one of his many minor daily duties and put it out of his mind again at once, for other and more important business awaited him.

  Our group was already on the Aryan side when we heard shots behind us. They came from the other groups of Jewish workers, surrounded in the ghetto and answering the German terror with return fire for the first time.

  We went on our way to work in downcast mood, all of us wondering what would happen in the ghetto now. There could be no doubt that a new phase of its liquidation had begun. Little Próżański was walking beside me, anxious about his parents who had stayed behind in our room, wondering whether they would manage to hide somewhere in time to escape resettlement. I had my own worries, and they were of a very specific nature: I had left my fountain pen and my watch, all I owned in the world, lying on the table in our room. If I succeeded in escaping I had planned to turn them into cash and live on the money for a few days, long enough to find somewhere to hide with the help of my friends.

  We did not go back to the ghetto that evening; we were provisionally billeted in Narbutt Street. Only later did we find out what had happened behind the walls, where the people defended themselves as best they could before they were taken away to their deaths. They hid in places prepared in advance, and the women poured water on the steps of the stairways so that it would freeze and make it more difficult for the Germans to reach the upper storeys. Some of the buildings were simply barricaded and the inhabitants exchanged fire with the SS, determined to die fighting, with weapons in their hands, rather than perish in the gas chamber. The Germans had evacuated the patients in the Jewish hospital in their underwear, loaded them into open trucks in the freezing cold, and taken them off to Treblinka. But thanks to this first show of Jewish resistance the Germans took away only some five thousand people in the course of five days, instead of the ten thousand they had planned to transport.

  On the fifth evening Thwick-Thwack informed us that the action to ‘cleanse the ghetto of non-working elements’ had been concluded, and we could go back in again. Our hearts were pounding. The streets of the ghetto were a shattering sight. Pavements were covered with glass from broken windows. The feathers of slashed pillows clogged the gutter; there were feathers everywhere; every breath of wind raised great clouds of them, eddying in the air like a thick snowfall in reverse, going from earth to sky. Every few paces we saw the bodies of murdered people. There was such silence all around that our footsteps echoed back from the walls of the buildings as if we were passing through a rocky ravine in the mountains. We found no one left in our room, but it had not been looted. Everything was just as Próżański’s parents, marked down for the transports, had left it. The plank beds were still unmade from their last night there, and a pot of coffee they had not been able to finish stood on the cold stove. My fountain pen and watch were on the table where I had left them.

  Now I had to act energetically and in great haste. Presumably the next resettlement operation would come very soon, and this time I might be among those listed to go. Through Majorek I got in touch with friends, a young married artistic couple. Andrzej Bogucki was an actor, and his wife was a singer who performed under her maiden name of Janina Godlewska. One day Majorek told me they would be coming about six in the evening. At the moment when the Aryan workers went home I seized my chance to slip out of the gate. They were both there. We exchanged only a few words. I handed them my compositions, my fountain pen and my watch, everything I wanted to take with me. I had already brought these things out of the ghetto and hidden them in the storeroom. We agreed that Bogucki would come for me at five o’clock on Saturday, when an SS general was to inspect the building. I was counting on the fuss that would cause to make it easier for me to get away.

  By now the atmosphere in the ghetto had become increasingly tense and uneasy. There was a feeling of foreboding in the air. The Jewish police commander, Colonel Szeryński, committed suicide. He must have received some very bad news indeed if even he, closer than anyone to the Germans, the man they most urgently needed and who would anyway have been the very last for resettlement, could see no way out but death. Other Jews mingled with us daily as we went out to work, trying to escape to the Aryan side of the wall. They did not always succeed. There were spies over there waiting for the fugitives, and paid agents and willing volunteers who would later attack the Jew they had been observing in some side street, making him hand over any money and jewellery he had on him and threatening to turn him in to the Germans. Then they quite often handed the people they had robbed over to the Germans anyway.

  That Saturday I was faint with nerves from early in the morning onwards. Would it work? Any false step could mean instant death. In the afternoon the general duly turned up to make his inspection. The SS men, fully occupied, took their minds off us for the time being. Around five the Aryan workers stopped work for the day. I put my coat on, took off the armband with the blue star for the first time in three years, and slipped out of the gate with them.

  Bogucki was standing on the corner of Wiśniowa Street. That meant everything had gone to plan so far. When he saw me he began moving off rapidly. I walked a few paces behind him, my coat collar turned up, trying not to lose sight of him in the dark. The streets were empty, and only dimly lit to comply with the regulations in force since the outbreak of war. I merely had to be careful I did not meet a German in the light of a street-lamp, where he might be able to see my face. We took the shortest way, walking very fast, but it still seemed endless. Finally, however, we reached our journey’s end – number 10 Noakowski Street – where I was to hide on the fifth floor in an artist’s studio which was at the disposal of Piotr Perkowski, one of the leaders of the musicians conspiring against the Germans at this time. We hurried up the stairs, taking them three at a time. Janina Godlewska was waiting for us in the studio; she looked nervous and fearful. On seeing us, she breathed a sigh of relief.

  ‘Oh, here you are at last!’ She clasped her hands above her head. And to me, she added, ‘It wasn’t until Andrzej was on his way to fetch you that I realized it’s February the thirteenth today – unlucky thirteen!’

  13 ∼ Trouble and Strife Next Door

  The artist’s studio where I now found myself, and where I would have to stay for a while, was quite large, a spacious room with a glazed ceiling. It had windowless alcoves on both sides, closed off by doors. The Boguckis had got me a camp bed, and after the plank beds I had been sleeping on for so long it seemed wonderfully comfortable. I was very happy simply not seeing any Germans. Now I didn’t have to listen to their yelling, or fear being beaten or even killed by an SS man at any moment. During these days I tried not to think of what still lay ahead of me before the war was over – if I lived until then. I was cheered by the news Mrs Bogucka brought one day: Soviet troops had retaken Kharkow. And yet, what was to become of me? I realized that I could not stay in the studio very long. Perkowski had to
find a tenant in the next few days, if only because the Germans had announced a census which would entail a police search of all homes to see if the occupants were properly registered and had a right to live there. Potential tenants came to look at the room almost every day, and when they did I had to hide in one of the alcoves and lock its door on the inside.

  After two weeks Bogucki came to an agreement with the former music director of Polish Radio, my pre-war boss Edmund Rudnicki, who arrived one evening with an engineer called Gębczyński. I was to move into the home of the engineer and his wife on the ground floor of the same building. That evening I touched a keyboard again for the first time in seven months. Seven months during which I had lost all my loved ones, survived the liquidation of the ghetto and helped to demolish its walls, heaving lime and stacks of bricks around. I resisted Mrs Gębczyńska’s persuasions for some time, but finally gave in. My stiff fingers moved reluctantly over the keys and the sound was irritatingly strange, grating on my nerves.

  The same evening I heard another piece of alarming news. Gębczyński had a phone call from a usually well-informed friend, who told him people were to be hunted down all over the city the next day. We were all extremely uneasy. However, it turned out to be a false alarm; there were many such at the time. Next day a former colleague from the radio station turned up, the conductor Czesław Lewicki, who later became a close friend of mine. He had a bachelor flat at number 83 Puławska Street at his disposal, but was not living there himself, and he had agreed to let me occupy it.