The Pianist

by Wladyslaw Szpilman

  So I was safe for a while in the home of kind people who wished me well! That first evening I took a bath, and then we ate a delicious supper washed down with schnapps, which unfortunately did my liver no good. None the less, despite the pleasant atmosphere and, above all, the chance to talk to my heart’s content after months of enforced silence, I planned to leave my hosts as soon as possible for fear of endangering them, although Zofia Jaworska and her courageous mother Mrs Bobrownicka, an old lady of seventy, urged me to stay with them as long as necessary.

  All my attempts to find a new hiding place, meanwhile, were frustrated. I came up against refusals on all sides. People were afraid to take in a Jew; after all, the death penalty was mandatory for the offence. I was feeling more depressed than ever when providence came to my aid again at the last moment, this time in the form of Helena Lewicka, Mrs Jaworska’s sister-in-law. We had not known each other before, and this was the first time she had met me, but when she heard of my previous experiences she instantly agreed to take me in. She shed tears over my plight, although her own life was not an easy one, and she herself had plenty of reasons to mourn the fate of many of her friends and relations.

  On 21 August, after my last night with the Jaworskis, while the Gestapo were roaming the neighbourhood and keeping everyone on edge with worry and anxiety, I moved to a large block of flats in Aleja Niepodległości. This was to be my last hiding place before the Polish rebellion and the complete destruction of Warsaw – a roomy fourth-floor bachelor flat entered direct from the stairway. It had electric light and gas, but no water; water was fetched from a communal tap on the landing, and the communal lavatory was there too. My neighbours were intellectuals, from a higher class than the tenants in Puławska Street. My immediate neighbours were a married couple active in the underground; they were on the run and did not sleep at home. This fact entailed some risk for me too, but I felt I would rather have such people as neighbours than semi-educated Poles loyal to their masters who might hand me over out of fear. The other buildings nearby were mainly occupied by Germans and housed various military authorities. A large unfinished hospital building with some kind of storeroom in it stood opposite my windows. Every day I saw Bolshevist prisoners of war hauling heavy crates in and out. This time I had ended up in one of the most German parts of Warsaw, right in the lion’s den, which may in fact have made it a better, safer place for me.

  I would have felt quite happy in my new hiding place if my health had not been going downhill so rapidly. My liver was giving me a great deal of trouble, and finally, in early December, I suffered such an attack of pain that it cost me a huge effort not to scream out loud. The attack lasted all night. The doctor called by Helena Lewicka diagnosed acute inflammation of the gall bladder and recommended a strict diet. Thank heaven I was not dependent on the ‘care’ of someone like Szałas this time; I was being looked after by Helena, the best and most self-sacrificing of women. With her help I gradually recovered my health.

  And so I entered the year 1944.

  I did all I could to lead as regular a life as possible. I studied English from nine to eleven in the morning, read from eleven to one, then made my midday meal, and returned to my English studies and my reading from three to seven.

  Meanwhile the Germans were suffering defeat after defeat. Talk of counter-attacks had long since ceased. They were conducting a ‘strategic withdrawal’ from all fronts, an operation represented in the press as the surrender of unimportant areas so that the front line could be curtailed to German advantage. However, despite their defeats at the front the terror they spread within the countries they still occupied increased. Public executions in the streets of Warsaw had begun in the autumn and now took place almost every day. As ever, with their usual systematic approach to everything, they still had time to demolish the masonry of the ghetto, now ‘cleansed’ of its people. They destroyed building after building, street after street, and had the rubble taken out of the city by narrow-gauge railway. The ‘masters of the world’, whose honour had been injured by the Jewish uprising, were determined not to leave a stone standing.

  At the beginning of the year an entirely unexpected event disturbed the monotony of my days. One day someone began trying to get in through my door – working on it at length, slowly and with determination, with pauses in between. At first I was not sure what this could mean. Only after much thought did I realize it was a burglar. This posed a problem. In the eyes of the law we were both criminals: I by the mere biological fact of being a Jew, he as a thief. So should I threaten him with the police once he got in? Or was it more likely that he would make the same threat to me? Should we hand each other over to the police, or make a non-aggression pact between criminals? In the end he did not break in; a tenant in the building had scared him away.

  On 6 June 1944 Helena Lewicka visited me in the afternoon, beaming and bringing me the news that the Americans and the British had landed in Normandy; they had broken the German resistance and were advancing. Sensationally good news now came thick and fast: France was taken, Italy had surrendered, the Red army was on the Polish border, Lublin had been liberated.

  Soviet air raids on Warsaw came more and more frequently; I could see the fireworks display from my window. There was a growling noise in the east, scarcely audible at first, then growing stronger and stronger: Soviet artillery. The Germans evacuated Warsaw, including the contents of the unfinished hospital building opposite. I watched with hope, and with a growing belief in my heart that I would live, and be free. On 29 July Lewicki came bursting in with the news that the rebellion in Warsaw would begin any day now. Our organizations were hastily buying weapons from the retreating, demoralized Germans. The purchase of a consignment of sub-machine guns had been entrusted to my never-to-be-forgotten host in Fałat Street, Zbigniew Jaworski. Unfortunately he met some Ukrainians, who were even worse than the Germans. On the pretext of handing over the weapons he had bought, they took him into the yard of the agricultural college and shot him there.

  On 1 August Helena Lewicka came in just for a minute at four in the afternoon. She wanted to take me down to the cellar, because the rebellion was to begin in an hour’s time. Guided by an instinct that had already saved me many times before, I decided to stay where I was. My protectress took leave of me, as if I were her son, with tears in her eyes. Her voice catching, she said, ‘Shall we ever meet again, Władek?’

  15 ∼ In a Burning Building

  Despite Helena Lewicka’s assurances that the rebellion was to begin at five o’clock, in only a few minutes’ time, I simply could not believe it. During the years of occupation political rumours had constantly circulated in the city, announcing events that never materialized. The evacuation of Warsaw by the Germans – something I had been able to observe from my window myself – the panic-stricken flight westward of overloaded trucks and private cars, had come to a halt in the last few days. And the thunder of the Soviet artillery, so close a few nights earlier, was now clearly moving away from the city and becoming weaker.

  I went to the window: peace reigned in the streets. I saw the normal pedestrian traffic, perhaps rather less of it than usual, but this part of Aleja Niepodległości had never been very busy. A tram coming down the street from the technical university drew up at the stop. It was almost empty. A few people got out: women, an old man with a walking stick. And then three young men got out too, carrying long objects wrapped in newspaper. They stopped outside the first tramcar; one looked at his watch, then cast a glance around him, and suddenly he knelt down in the road, put the package he was carrying to his shoulder, and a series of rapid clattering sounds was heard. The newspaper at the end of packet began to glow, and revealed the barrel of a machine gun. At the same time the other two men nervously shouldered their own weapons.

  The young man’s shots were like a signal given to the neighbourhood: soon afterwards there was shooting everywhere, and when the explosions in the immediate vicinity died down you could hear shots coming from th
e city centre, any number of them. They followed close upon one another, never stopping, like the sound of water boiling in a huge kettle. It was as if the street had been swept clean. Only the elderly gentleman was still hurrying awkwardly along with the aid of his stick, obviously gasping for breath; it was difficult for him to run. Finally he too reached the entrance of a building and disappeared inside it.

  I went to the door and put my ear against the wood. There was confused movement on the landing and in the stairway. Doors were flung open and slammed again, and people were running about in all directions. One woman cried, ‘Jesus and Mary!’ Another called in the direction of the stairs, ‘Do be careful, Jerzy!’ An answer came up from the lower floors. ‘Yes, all right!’ Now the women were weeping; one of them, obviously unable to control herself, was sobbing nervously. A deep bass voice tried calming her, in an undertone. ‘It won’t take long. After all, everyone’s been waiting for this.’

  This time Helena Lewicka’s prediction had been correct: the rebellion had begun.

  I lay down on the sofa to think what to do next.

  When Mrs Lewicka had left she locked me in as usual, using the key to the flat and the padlock. I went back to the window. Groups of Germans were standing in the doorways of the buildings. Others came to join them from the direction of Pole Mokotowskie. They were all armed with semi-automatics, they wore helmets and had hand grenades in their belts. No fighting was going on in our part of the street. The Germans fired from time to time, but only at windows and people looking out of them. There was no return fire from the windows. Only when the Germans reached the corner of 6 August Street did they open fire both in the direction of the technical university and the opposite way, towards the ‘filters’ – the city waterworks. Perhaps I would be able to find my way to the city centre from the back of the building by making straight for the waterworks, but I had no weapon, and in any case I was locked in. If I began hammering on the door, would the neighbours take any notice, concerned as they were with their own affairs? And I would then have to ask them to go down to Helena Lewicka’s friend, the only person in the building who knew I was hiding in this room. She held the keys so that if the worst came to the worst she could unlock the door and let me out. I decided to wait until morning and make up my mind what to do then, depending on what happened in the meantime.

  By now there was a great deal more shooting. The rifle fire was interspersed with the louder explosions of hand grenades – or if artillery had been brought into action perhaps I was hearing shells. In the evening, as dark fell, I saw the first glow of the fires. The reflection of the flames, still infrequent, glowed here and there in the sky. They lit it up brightly, and then were extinguished. Gradually the shooting died down. There were only a few isolated explosions to be heard, and the brief rattle of machine-gun fire. The activity in the stairway of the building had died down too; the tenants had obviously barricaded themselves into their flats, so as to absorb their impressions of this first day of the rebellion in private. It was late when I suddenly fell asleep without undressing, and I slept the deep sleep of nervous exhaustion.

  I woke equally suddenly in the morning. It was very early, and morning twilight had only just broken. The first sound I heard was the clatter of a horse-drawn cab. I went to the window. The cab passed by at an easy trot, its hood back, as if nothing had happened. Otherwise, the street was empty except for a man and a woman walking along the pavement under my windows with their hands in the air. From where I stood I could not see the Germans escorting them. Suddenly they both leaped forward and began to run. The woman cried out, ‘Left, turn left!’ The man was the first to turn aside, and disappeared from my field of vision. At that moment there was a volley of gunfire. The woman stopped, clutched her stomach and then fell gently to the ground like a sack, her legs folding under her. She did not really fall so much as sink to her knees, her right cheek coming to rest on the asphalt of the road, and she remained in this complicated acrobatic position. The brighter the daylight became, the more gunfire I heard. When the sun came up in the sky, a very clear sky in those days, the whole of Warsaw was echoing to rifle fire again, and the sound of heavy artillery began to mingle with it more and more frequently.

  Around midday Mrs Lewicka’s friend came upstairs with some food and news for me. So far as our quarter was concerned, the news was not good: it had been in German hands almost from the start, and there had only just been time for the young people of the resistance organizations to make their way through to the city centre as the rebellion began. Now there could be no question of even venturing out of the house. We would have to wait until detachments from the city centre relieved us.

  ‘But I might be able to slip through somehow,’ I protested.

  She cast me a pitying look. ‘Listen, you haven’t been out of doors for a year and a half! Your legs would give way before you were even halfway there.’ She shook her head, held my hand and added soothingly. ‘You’d better stay here. We’ll see it through somehow.’

  Despite everything her spirits were high. She took me to the window in the stairway, which gave a view from the side of the building opposite my own window. The whole residential complex of bungalows on the Staszic estate, right up to the waterworks, was in flames. You could hear the hissing of burning beams, the sound of ceilings falling in, people screaming, and shots. A reddish-brown pall of smoke covered the sky. When the wind briefly drove it aside, you could see the red and white flags on the distant horizon.

  The days passed by. No help came from the city centre. For years now I had been used to hiding from everyone except a group of friends who knew that I was alive and where I was. I could not bring myself to leave the room, letting the other people in the block know I was here and having to enter into community life with them in our besieged flats. Knowing about me would only make them feel worse; if the Germans discovered, on top of everything else, that they were hiding a ‘non-Aryan’ in the building, they would be punished twice as severely. I decided to go on confining myself to eavesdropping through the door on the conversations in the stairway. The news did not improve: bitter battles were being fought in the city centre, no support was coming from outside Warsaw, and the German terror was growing in our part of the city. In Langiewicz Street, Ukrainians let the inhabitants of a building burn to death in its flames, and they shot the occupants of another block of flats. The famous actor Mariusz Mszyński was murdered quite close to this area.

  The neighbour down below stopped visiting me. Perhaps some family tragedy had driven my existence out of her mind. My provisions were running out: they now consisted of nothing but a few rusks.

  On 11 August the nervous tension in the building rose perceptibly. Listening at the door, I could not make out what was going on. All the tenants were on the lower floors, talking in raised voices which they then suddenly hushed. From the window I saw small groups of people slipping out of the surrounding buildings now and then and secretly making their way to ours. They left again later. Towards evening the tenants of the lower floors unexpectedly came running upstairs. Some of them were on my floor. I learned from their frightened whispering that there were Ukrainians in the building. On this occasion, however, they had not come to murder us. They were busy in the cellars for some time, took away the provisions stored down there and disappeared again. That evening I heard keys turn in the lock of my door and the padlock. Someone unlocked the door and removed the padlock, but did not come in; whoever it was ran quickly downstairs instead. What did that mean? The streets were full of leaflets that day. Someone had scattered them, but who?

  On 12 August, about midday, panic broke out on the stairway again. Distracted people kept running up and down. I concluded, from scraps of conversation, that the building was surrounded by Germans and had to be evacuated at once because the artillery were about to destroy it. My first reaction was to get dressed, but next moment I realized that I could not go out into the street in view of the SS men unless I wanted to be shot on
the spot. I heard firing from the street, and a sharp voice pitched unnaturally high calling, ‘Everyone out, please! Leave your flats at once, please!’

  I cast a glance at the stairway: it was quiet and empty. I climbed halfway down the stairs and went over to the window looking out on Sędziowska Street. A tank was pointing its gun at my floor of our building. Soon afterwards there was a spurt of fire, the gun jerked back, there was a roaring noise and a nearby wall fell over. Soldiers with their sleeves rolled up and tin cans in their hands were running about. Clouds of black smoke began rising up the outer wall of the building and through the stairway, from the ground floor up to my fourth floor. Some SS men ran into the building and hurried upstairs. I locked myself into the room, shook the contents of the small tube of strong sleeping tablets I had been taking while I had liver trouble out on my palm, and put my little bottle of opium ready to hand. I meant to swallow the tablets and drink the opium as soon as the Germans tried to open my door. But shortly afterwards, guided by an instinct that I could hardly have analysed rationally, I changed my plan: I left the room, hurried to the ladder leading from the landing to the attic, climbed up it, pushed the ladder away and closed the attic trapdoor after me. Meanwhile, the Germans were already hammering on the doors of the third-floor flats with the butts of their rifles. One of them came up to the fourth floor and entered my room. However, his companions presumably thought it dangerous to stay in the building any longer and began calling to him. ‘Get a move on, Fischke!’