The Pianist

by Wladyslaw Szpilman

  It was seven in the evening on Saturday, 27 February, when we left the Gębczyńskis’ flat. Thank heavens it was pitch dark. We took a rickshaw in the Plac Unii, reached Puławska Street without mishap and raced up to the fourth floor, hoping not to meet anyone on the stairs.

  The bachelor flat turned out to be comfortable and elegantly furnished. You went through a hall to get to the lavatory, and there was a large wall cupboard and a gas cooker on the other side of the hall. The room itself contained a comfortable divan, a wardrobe, a small bookshelf, a little table and some comfortable chairs. The small library was full of sheet music and scores, and there were some academic books as well. I felt I was in paradise. I did not sleep much that first night; I wanted to relish the comfort of lying on a real, well-sprung couch.

  * * *

  Next day Lewicki came with a friend, a doctor’s wife called Mrs Malczewska, to bring my things. We discussed how I was to be fed and how I should manage about the census when it took place next day. I would have to spend all day in the lavatory, with the door locked on the inside, just as I had locked the alcove doors in the studio. Even if the Germans broke into the flat during the census, we concluded that they would be unlikely to notice the small door behind which I was hiding. At most, they would take it for the door of a locked cupboard.

  I kept strictly to this strategic plan. Taking plenty of books, I went into the lavatory in the morning and waited patiently until evening – it was not exactly comfortable for a long period of time, and by that point I had dreamed of nothing since midday but being able to stretch my legs out. The entire manoeuvre proved superfluous; no one came except Lewicki, who looked in towards evening, both curious and anxious to find out how I was. He brought vodka, sausage, bread and butter with him, and we ate like kings. The idea of the census was to allow the Germans to track down all Jews hiding in Warsaw in one fell swoop. They had not found me, and I felt a new confidence.

  Lewicki lived some way off, and he and I agreed that he would visit only twice a week, bringing food. I had to occupy the time between his eagerly awaited visits somehow or other. I read a great deal and learned to prepare delicious dishes, following the culinary advice of the doctor’s wife. Everything had to be done without a sound. I moved about in slow motion, on tiptoe – God forbid I should knock a hand or foot against anything! The walls were thin, and any careless movement might give me away to my neighbours. I could hear what they were doing only too clearly, particularly the people next door on the left. Judging by their voices, the tenants of that flat were a young married couple who used to begin their conversation every evening with tender pet names for each other – ‘Kitten’ and ‘Puppy-dog’. After about a quarter of an hour, however, domestic harmony would be disturbed, their voices rose, and the epithets they used were now drawn from the entire range of domesticated animals, ending with the pig. There was then what was presumably a reconciliation; the voices would be silent for some time, and then I would hear a third voice, the sound of a piano on which the young woman played with feeling – although she struck a number of wrong notes. However, her tinkling did not usually last long either. The music would stop, and an irritated female voice resumed the quarrel. ‘Oh, very well, then, I’m not playing any more! You always turn away when I start playing.’

  And they would begin running through the animal kingdom again.

  As I listened, I often thought sadly how much I would give, and how happy I would be, if I could only get my hands on the tinny, out-of-tune old piano that caused such trouble and strife next door.

  The days passed by. Either Mrs Malczewska or Lewicki visited me regularly twice a week, bringing food and news of the latest political developments. They were not encouraging: I was sorry to hear that the Soviet troops had withdrawn from Kharkow again, and the Allies were retreating from Africa. Doomed to inactivity, spending most days alone with my gloomy thoughts, brooding over and over again on my family’s dreadful fate, I found my doubts and depression becoming worse. When I looked out of the window at the traffic, always the same, and saw the Germans moving about down there as calmly as ever, it seemed to me quite likely that this state of affairs might never end. And then what would become of me? After years of pointless suffering I would be discovered one day and killed. The best I could hope for was to commit suicide rather than fall into German hands alive.

  My mood did not start to improve until the big Allied offensive in Africa began and was crowned by success after success. One hot day in May I was just making some soup for my midday meal when Lewicki appeared. Panting from running up to the fourth floor, he paused for breath just until he could gasp out the news he had brought: the German and Italian resistance in Africa had finally collapsed.

  If only it had all started earlier! If the Allied troops had been winning victories in Europe rather than Africa at this point, perhaps I could have summoned up some enthusiasm. Perhaps the rising plotted and organized by the small remnant of Jews left in the Warsaw ghetto would have had at least a tiny chance of success then. Parallel to the increasingly good news that Lewicki brought were the increasingly dreadful details he had also heard of the tragic actions of my brothers: the handful of Jews who had decided to offer at least some active resistance to the Germans at this last, hopeless stage. From the underground papers I received I learned of the Jewish uprising, the battles for every building, for every section of every street, and the great losses suffered by the Germans. Even though artillery, tanks and the air force were called in during the battles in the ghetto it was weeks before they could suppress the rebels who were so much weaker than themselves. No Jew was willing to be taken alive. Once the Germans had captured a building the women still inside it carried the children up to the top floor, where they threw themselves and the children off the balconies into the street below. If I leaned out of the window in the evening, when it was time to sleep, I could see the firelight to the north of Warsaw, and heavy masses of smoke drifting over the clear, starry sky.

  In early June Lewicki came to see me unexpectedly one day, not at his accustomed time but at midday. This time he was not the bearer of good news. He was unshaven, his eyes were rimmed with dark circles as if he hadn’t slept all night, and his expression was visibly distressed.

  ‘Get dressed!’ he told me in a whisper.

  ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘The Gestapo sealed my room at Dr and Mrs Malczewski’s yesterday evening. They could be here any moment. We must get away at once.’

  Get away? In broad daylight, at noon? It amounted to suicide, at least as far as I was concerned. Lewicki was getting impatient.

  ‘Come on, come on!’ he urged me, as I just stood there instead of doing as he expected and packing a bag. He decided to encourage and cheer me. ‘Don’t worry,’ he began nervously. ‘Everything’s been seen to. There’s someone waiting for you not far off, ready to take you somewhere safe.’

  I was still unwilling to move from the spot. What will be will be, I thought. Lewicki would escape anyway and the Gestapo would not find him. If the worst came to the worst, I would rather put an end to my life here than risk wandering the city again. I simply did not have the strength left for it. Somehow I explained all this to my friend, and we embraced, all but sure we would never meet again in this life. Then Lewicki left the flat.

  I began pacing up and down the room that had seemed one of the safest places on earth, although now it felt like a cage. I was caught there like an animal, and it was only a matter of time before the slaughterers came to find and kill me. They would be delighted with their catch. I had never smoked before, but that day, as I waited for death, I smoked the whole pack of a hundred cigarettes Lewicki had left. But death delayed its coming hour by hour. I knew the Gestapo usually came in the evening or early in the morning. I did not undress, and put no lights on, but stared at the balcony rail visible through the window and listened for the slightest sound coming up from the street or the staircase. Lewicki’s parting words still rang in my e
ars. His hand was already on the door-knob when he turned once more, came up to me, embraced me again and said, ‘If they do come up and storm the flat, throw yourself off the balcony. You don’t want them to get you alive!’ And he added, to make it easier for me to decide on suicide, ‘I have poison on me. They won’t get me either.’

  By now it was late. The traffic in the streets had died down entirely, and all the windows in the building opposite were darkened one by one. And still the Germans did not come. My nerves were stretched to breaking point. Sometimes I found myself wishing that if they had to come they would do so as soon as possible. I didn’t want to suffer these torments any more. At some time that night I changed my mind about the manner of my suicide. It had suddenly occurred to me that I could hang myself instead of jumping off the balcony, and although I can’t say why, this death seemed to me easier, a quiet way to go. Still without putting a light on, I began searching the room for something to serve as a rope. Finally I found a long and quite stout piece of cord behind the books on the shelf.

  I took down the picture hanging above the bookshelf, checked that the hook was firmly in the wall, made my noose ready – and waited. The Gestapo did not come.

  They did not come in the morning either, and they stayed away for the next few days. But at eleven on Friday morning, as I was lying on the couch after an almost sleepless night, I heard shooting in the street. I hurried to the window. A line of police was strung out right across the entire width of the street, including the pavements, shooting chaotically and at random into the fleeing crowd. After a while some SS trucks drove up, and a large section of the street was surrounded – the section where my building stood. Groups of Gestapo officers went into all the buildings in that section and brought men out of them. They entered my building too.

  There could be no doubt that they would find my hiding place now. I pushed a chair over to the bookshelf so that I could reach the picture hook more easily, prepared my noose and went to the door to listen. I could hear Germans shouting on the stairs a couple of floors lower down. Half an hour later all was still again. I looked out of the window. The blockade had been lifted, the SS trucks had driven away.

  They had not come.

  14 ∼ Szałas’ Betrayal

  A week had passed since Lewicki’s flight. Still the Gestapo did not come, and gradually my nerves calmed down. But there was another threat: my food supplies were running low. I had nothing left except a small quantity of beans and oatmeal. I limited my meals to two a day, and when I made soup I used only ten beans and a spoonful of oatmeal each time, but even portioned out in this way my provisions would not last beyond a few more days. One morning another Gestapo car drove up to the building where I was hiding. Two SS men carrying a piece of paper got out and entered the building. I was convinced they were looking for me, and I prepared for death. Yet again, however, I was not their quarry.

  My provisions were all gone now. I had had nothing but water for two days. I had two alternatives: to die of starvation or risk going out to buy a loaf from the nearest street seller. I opted for the second. I shaved carefully, dressed, and left the building at eight in the morning, trying to walk in a casual way. No one took any notice of me, despite my obviously ‘non-Aryan’ features. I bought the loaf and went back to the flat. This was 18 July 1943. I lived on that single loaf – my money would not stretch to more – for ten whole days, until 28 July.

  On 29 July, early in the afternoon, I heard a soft knocking at the door. I did not react. After a while a key was carefully put in the lock and turned, the door opened and a young man I did not know came in. He closed the door behind him quickly and asked, in a whisper, ‘Nothing suspicious going on?’

  ‘No.’

  Only then did he turn his attention to me. He looked me up and down, amazement in his eyes. ‘You’re alive, then?’

  I shrugged my shoulders. I supposed I looked sufficiently alive not to need to answer. The stranger smiled, and rather belatedly introduced himself: he was Lewicki’s brother, and had come to tell me that food would be delivered next day. Some time in the next few days I would be taken elsewhere, for the Gestapo were still in search of Lewicki and might yet come here.

  Sure enough, next day the engineer Gębczyński turned up with another man, whom he introduced to me as a radio technician called Szałas, a trustworthy underground activist. Gębczyński threw himself into my arms; he had been sure that I must have died of starvation and weakness by now. He told me all our mutual friends had been worried about me, but they could not approach the building, which was under constant observation by secret agents. As soon as the agents had moved off, he had been told to deal with my mortal remains and make sure I had a decent burial.

  Szałas was to take care of me on a permanent basis from now on, a task assigned to him by our underground organization.

  He proved a very dubious protector, however. He looked in every ten days with a tiny amount of food, explaining that he had been unable to scrape up the money for more. I gave him some of the few possessions I still had left to sell, but it nearly always transpired that they were stolen from him, and he turned up once again with a tiny quantity of food, only enough for two or three days, although it sometimes had to last two weeks. When I was finally lying on my bed, utterly exhausted by starvation and convinced I was about to die, Szałas would put in an appearance with a little food for me, just enough to keep me alive and give me the strength to continue tormenting myself. Beaming, evidently with his mind on something else, he would always enquire, ‘Still alive, then, are you?’

  I was still alive, even though the combination of malnutrition and grief had given me jaundice. Szałas did not take that too seriously, and told me the cheering tale of his grandfather, whose girlfriend jilted him when he suddenly went down with jaundice. Jaundice was nothing to speak of, in Szałas’ opinion. By way of consolation, he told me that the Allies had landed in Sicily. Then he said goodbye and left. That was our last meeting, for he never turned up again, although ten days passed; and then the time stretched to twelve days, and then two weeks.

  I was eating nothing, and had not even enough strength to get up and drag myself to the water tap. If the Gestapo had come now I would not have been able to hang myself. I dozed for most of the day, and when I woke it was only to suffer unbearable pangs of hunger. My face, arms and legs were already beginning to swell up when Mrs Malczewska came, unhoped for: I knew that she, her husband and Lewicki had been forced to leave Warsaw and go into hiding. She had firmly believed I was perfectly all right, and simply meant to look in for a chat and a cup of tea. I learned from her that Szałas had been collecting money for me all over Warsaw, and since no one would grudge it when a man’s life was to be saved, he had amassed a handsome sum. He had assured my friends that he was visiting me almost daily and I wanted for nothing.

  The doctor’s wife left Warsaw again a few days later, but before she went she provided me with lavish food supplies, and promised me more reliable care. Unfortunately, it did not last long.

  At midday on 12 August, just as I was making soup for myself as usual, I heard someone trying to break into the flat. This was not the way my friends knocked when they came to visit me; it was a hammering on the door. The Germans, then. However, after a while I identified the voices accompanying the banging as female. One woman shouted, ‘Open this door at once, or we’ll call the police!’

  The hammering became more and more insistent. There could be no doubt about it; the other people in the building had found out that I was hidden there, and had decided to hand me in to avoid risking accusations of harbouring a Jew.

  I hastily dressed and put my compositions and a few other things in a bag. The hammering stopped for a moment. No doubt the angry women, annoyed by my silence, were prepared to put their threat into action and were probably on their way to the nearest police station already. I quietly opened the door and slipped out into the stairway, only to come face to face with one of the women. She had obvio
usly taken up her post there to make sure I did not escape. She barred my way.

  ‘Are you from that flat in there?’ She pointed at the door. ‘You’re not registered!’

  I told her the tenant of the flat was a colleague of mine, and I’d just missed finding him at home. My explanation made no sense, and naturally it did not satisfy the bellicose woman.

  ‘Let me see your pass, please! Your pass – at once!’ she shouted even louder. Here and there other tenants of the building were putting their heads out of their doors, alarmed by the noise.

  I pushed the woman aside and ran downstairs. I heard her screeching behind me. ‘Shut the front door! Don’t let him out!’

  On the ground floor I rushed past the caretaker. Mercifully, she had failed to catch what the other woman was shouting down the stairs. I reached the entrance and ran out into the street.

  I had escaped death yet again, but it still lay in wait for me. It was one o’clock in the afternoon, and here I stood in the street: unshaven, my hair uncut for many months, wearing a crumpled, shabby suit. Even without my Semitic features, I was bound to attract attention. I turned down a side street and hurried on. Where was I to go? The only acquaintances I had in the neighbourhood were the Boldoks, who lived in Narbutt Street. However, I was so nervous that I lost my way, although I knew the area well. For almost an hour I wandered through little streets until I finally reached my destination. I hesitated for a long time before I made up my mind to ring the bell in the hope of finding shelter behind that door, for I knew only too well how dangerous my presence would be to my friends. If I was found with them they would be shot too. Yet I had no alternative. No sooner had they opened the door than I instantly assured them I would not stay long; I just wanted to make some phone calls to see where I could find a new, permanent hiding place. But my phone calls were unsuccessful. Several of my friends could not take me in, others could not leave home because our organizations had successfully raided one of the biggest Warsaw banks that day, and the whole city centre was surrounded by police. In view of this the Boldoks, an engineer and his wife, decided to let me sleep in an empty flat on a lower floor to which they had the keys. Next morning my former radio colleague Zbigniew Jaworski arrived. He was going to let me stay with him for a few days.