The Pianist

by Wladyslaw Szpilman

  When the trampling down below moved away I crawled out of the attic, where I had almost been suffocated by the smoke coming up through the ventilation shafts from the flats below, and went back to my room. I indulged in the hope that only the ground-floor flats, set on fire as a deterrent, would burn, and the tenants would come back as soon as their papers had been checked. I picked up a book, made myself comfortable on the sofa, and began to read, but I could not take in a single word. I put the book down, closed my eyes, and decided to wait until I heard human voices somewhere near me.

  I did not make up my mind to venture out on the landing again until dusk. My room was filling up with fumes and smoke now, and the red glow of firelight came in through the window from outside. The smoke on the stairway was so thick that you couldn’t see the banisters. The loud, explosive crackle of the fire as it burnt more fiercely rose from the floors below, together with the crack of splitting wood and the crash of household items falling over. It would be impossible to use the stairs now. I went to the window. The building was surrounded by an SS cordon some distance away. There were no civilians in sight. Obviously the entire building was now burning, and the Germans were simply waiting for the fire to reach the upper floors and the roof timbers.

  So this was to be my death in the end – the death I had been expecting for five years, the death I had escaped day after day until now it had finally caught up with me. I had often tried to imagine it. I expected to be captured and ill-treated, then shot or suffocated in the gas chamber. It had never occurred to me that I would burn alive.

  I had to laugh at the ingenuity of fate. I was perfectly calm now, with a calm arising from my conviction that there was nothing more I could do to change the course of events. I let my glance wander round the room: its contours were indistinct as the smoke became thicker, and it looked strange and uncanny in the deepening twilight. I was finding it harder and harder to breathe. I felt dizzy, and there was a rushing sound in my head – the first effects of carbon-monoxide poisoning.

  I lay down on the sofa again. Why let myself be burnt alive when I could avoid it by taking the sleeping tablets? How much easier my death would be than the deaths of my parents, sisters and brother, gassed in Treblinka! At these last moments I tried to think only of them.

  I found the little tube of sleeping tablets, tipped the contents into my mouth and swallowed them. I was going to take the opium too, to make perfectly sure I died, but I had no time to do it. The tablets worked instantly on an empty, starved stomach.

  I fell asleep.

  16 ∼ Death of a City

  I did not die. Obviously the tablets had not been strong enough after all. I woke at seven in the morning, feeling nauseous. There was a roaring in my ears, the pulse at my temples was hammering painfully, my eyes were starting from their sockets and my arms and legs felt numb. It was a tickling sensation on my throat that had actually woken me. A fly was crawling over it, numbed as I was by the events of the night, and like me half dead. I had to concentrate and summon up all my strength to move my hand and swat it away.

  My first emotion was not disappointment that I had failed to die, but joy to find myself alive. A boundless, animal lust for life at any price. I had survived a night in a burning building – now the main thing was to save myself somehow.

  I lay where I was for a while to recover my senses a little more, then slipped off the sofa and crawled to the door. The room was still full of smoke, and when I reached for the door handle it was so hot that I let go of it again at once. At a second attempt, I mastered the pain and opened the door. There was less smoke on the stairway now than in my room, since it could easily find its way out through the charred openings of the tall landing windows. I could see the stairs; it would be possible to climb down them.

  Summoning up all my willpower, I forced myself to stand up, clutched the banisters, and began going downstairs. The floor below me was already burnt out and the fire had died down there. The door frames were still burning, and the air in the rooms beyond shimmered with heat. Remains of furniture and other possessions were still smouldering on the floors, leaving white heaps of ashes as the glow died out where they had stood.

  As I came down to the first floor I found the burnt corpse of a man lying on the stairs; its clothes had carbonized on it, and it was brown and horribly bloated. I had to get past it somehow if I was to go on. I thought I would be able to raise my legs high enough to step over it as they dragged me forward. But at my first attempt my foot struck the stomach of the corpse and I stumbled, lost my balance, fell and rolled half a floor further down, together with the charred body. Fortunately the corpse was now behind me, and I could pick myself up and go on down to the ground floor. I came out into the yard, which was surrounded by a small wall covered with a creeper. I crawled over to this wall and hid in a niche in the corner, two metres from the burning building, camouflaging myself with the tendrils of the creeper and the leaves and stalks of some tomato plants growing between the wall and the building.

  The shooting still did not let up. Bullets flew above my head, and I heard German voices close to me on the other side of the wall. They came from men walking down the pavement beside the road. Around evening cracks appeared in the wall of the burning building. If it collapsed I would be buried underneath it. However, I waited to move until it was dark, and until I had made more of a recovery from last night’s poisoning. I went back to the stairway in the dark, but I dared not go up again. The interiors of the flats were still burning, just as they had been that morning, and the fire might reach my floor any moment. I thought hard, and devised a different plan: the huge, unfinished hospital building where the Wehrmacht kept its stores stood on the other side of Aleja Niepodległości. I would try to get there.

  I went out into the street through the other entrance to my building. Although it was evening it was not completely dark. The broad roadway was lit up by the red glow of the fires. It was covered with corpses, and the woman I had seen killed on the second day of the rebellion still lay among them. I lay down on my stomach and began crawling towards the hospital. Germans were constantly passing by, alone or in groups, and when they did I stopped moving and pretended to be another corpse. The odour of decay rose from the dead bodies, mingling with the smell of the fires in the air. I tried to crawl as fast as I could, but the width of the road seemed endless and crossing it took for ever. At last I made it to the dark hospital building. I staggered through the first entrance I saw, collapsed on the floor and went to sleep at once.

  Next morning I decided to explore the place. Much to my dismay, I found that the building was full of sofas, mattresses, pots and pans and china, items of everyday use, which meant the Germans would certainly be dropping in for them quite often. On the other hand, I found nothing to eat. I discovered a lumber room in a remote corner, full of old iron, pipes and stoves. I lay down and spent the next two days there.

  On 15 August by my pocket calendar, which I kept with me, later on carefully crossing off day after day in it, I felt so unbearably hungry that I decided I must go and look for food of some kind whatever happened. In vain. I clambered up on the sill of a boarded-up window and began observing the street through a small crack. Flies were swarming over the bodies in the road. Not far away, on the corner of Filtrowa Street, stood a villa whose inhabitants had not yet been thrown out of their home. They were leading an extraordinarily normal life, sitting on their terrace drinking tea. A detachment of Wlassov soldiers commanded by the SS moved up from 6 August Street. They collected the corpses from the road, made a heap of them, poured petrol over it and set it alight. At some point I heard steps coming my way along the hospital passage. I got down from the window sill and hid behind a crate. An SS man came into the room where I was, looked round and went out again. I hurried out into the passage, went to the staircase, ran up it and hid in my lumber room. Soon afterwards a whole detachment entered the hospital building to search all the rooms one by one. They did not find my hiding pl
ace, although I heard them laughing, humming to themselves and whistling, and I also heard the vital question, ‘Have we looked everywhere, then?’

  Two days later – and five days since I had last eaten anything – I set out in search of food and water once more. There was no running water in the building, but buckets were standing around in case of fire. The water they contained was covered with an iridescent film and it was full of dead flies, midges and spiders. I drank thirstily, all the same, but I had to stop soon, for the water stank, and I could not avoid swallowing dead insects. Then I found some crusts of bread in the carpenter’s workshop. They were mouldy, dusty and covered with mouse droppings, but to me they were a treasure. Some toothless carpenter would never know he was saving my life when he cut them off.

  On 19 August the Germans threw the people in the villa on the corner of Filtrowa Street out of their house, amidst much shouting and firing. I was now alone in this quarter of the city. The SS were visiting the building where I was hiding more and more often. How long could I survive in these conditions? A week? Two weeks? After that, suicide would be my only way of escape once again, and this time I had no means of committing suicide apart from a razor blade. I would have to cut my veins. I found a little barley in one of the rooms, and cooked it on the stove in the carpenter’s workshop, which I heated by night, and that gave me something to eat for another few days.

  On 30 August I decided to go back to the ruins of the building over the road, since it seemed to have finally burnt out now. I took a jug of water from the hospital with me and stole across the street at one in the morning. At first I thought of going down to the cellar, but the fuel there, coke and coal, was still smouldering because the Germans had kept setting fire to it again, so I hid in the ruins of a flat on the third floor. Its bathtub was full to the brim with water: dirty water, but still water. The fire had spared the larder, and I found a bag of rusks there.

  After a week, visited by a terrible foreboding, I changed my hiding place again and moved up to the attic, or rather its bare boards, for the roof above them had fallen into the flames. That same day Ukrainians entered the building three times to search for loot in the undamaged parts of the flats. When they had gone I went down to the flat where I had been hiding for the last week. The fire had spared nothing but its tiled stove, and the Ukrainians had smashed that stove tile by tile, probably in search of gold.

  Next morning the entire length of the Aleja Niepodległości was surrounded by soldiers. People carrying bundles on their backs, mothers with children clutching at them, were driven into this cordon. The SS and the Ukrainians brought many of the men out of the cordon and killed them in front of everyone for no reason at all, just as they did in the ghetto while it still stood. Had the rebellion ended in our defeat, then?

  No: day by day heavy shelling tore the air again, making a sound like the flight of a horsefly – or to me, at close quarters, like the sound of old clocks being wound up – and then series of loud explosions could be heard coming rhythmically from the city centre.

  Later, on 18 September, squadrons of aircraft flew over the city, parachuting supplies down to the rebels – whether of men or war material I don’t know. Then aircraft bombed the parts of the city of Warsaw under German control and carried out airdrops over the city centre by night. The artillery fire from the east was getting stronger at the same time.

  Not until 5 October did detachments of the rebels begin marching out of the city, surrounded by Wehrmacht men. Some were in uniform, some had only red and white armbands on their sleeves. They formed a curious contrast with the German detachments escorting them, who were in impeccable uniform, well-fed and self-confident, mocking and jeering at the failure of the rebellion as they filmed and photographed their new prisoners. The rebels, on the other hand, were thin, dirty, often ragged, and could keep on their feet only with difficulty. They paid no attention to the Germans, ignoring them entirely, as if they had chosen to march along the Aleja Niepodległości of their own free will. They kept discipline in their own ranks, supporting those who had difficulty in walking, and they did not so much as glance at the ruins, but marched on looking straight ahead. Although they were such a wretched sight beside their conquerors, you felt it was not they who were defeated.

  After that, the exodus of the remaining civilian population from the city in ever smaller groups took another eight days. It was like seeing the life-blood flow from the body of a murdered man, first vigorously and then more slowly. The last people left on 14 October. Twilight had long fallen when a little company of laggards, their SS escorts urging them to make haste, passed the building where I was still hiding. I leaned out of the window, which was burnt out by the fire, and watched the hurrying figures bowed under the weight of their bundles until the darkness had swallowed them up.

  Now I was alone, with a tiny quantity of rusks at the bottom of the bag and several bathtubs of dirty water as my entire stock of provisions. How much longer could I hold out in these circumstances, in view of the coming autumn with its shorter days and the threat of approaching winter?

  17 ∼ Life for Liquor

  I was alone: alone not just in a single building or even a single part of a city, but alone in a whole city that only two months ago had had a population of a million and a half and was one of the richer cities of Europe. It now consisted of the chimneys of burnt-out buildings pointing to the sky, and whatever walls the bombing had spared: a city of rubble and ashes under which the centuries-old culture of my people and the bodies of hundreds of thousands of murdered victims lay buried, rotting in the warmth of these late autumn days and filling the air with a dreadful stench.

  People visited the ruins only by day, riff-raff from outside the city furtively slinking about with shovels over their shoulders, scattering through the cellars in search of loot. One of them chose my own ruined home. He mustn’t find me here; no one was to know of my presence. When he came up the stairs and was only two floors below me, I roared in a savage, threatening voice, ‘What’s going on? Get out! Rrraus!’

  He shot away like a startled rat: the last of the wretched, a man scared off by the voice of the last poor devil left alive here.

  Towards the end of October I was looking down from my attic and saw the Germans picking up one of these packs of hyenas. The thieves tried to talk their way out of trouble. I heard them repeating again and again, ‘From Pruszków, from Pruszków,’ and pointing to the west. The soldiers stood four of the men up against the nearest wall and shot them with their revolvers, despite their whimpering pleas for their lives. They ordered the rest to dig a grave in the garden of one of the villas, bury the bodies and get out. After that even the thieves kept away from this part of the city. I was the only living soul here now.

  The first day of November was approaching, and it was beginning to get cold, particularly at night. To keep myself from going mad in my isolation, I decided to lead as disciplined a life as possible. I still had my watch, the pre-war Omega I treasured as the apple of my eye, along with my fountain pen. They were my sole personal possessions. I conscientiously kept the watch wound and drew up a timetable by it. I lay motionless all day long to conserve what little strength I had left, putting out my hand only once, around midday, to fortify myself with a rusk and a mug of water sparingly portioned out. From early in the morning until I took this meal, as I lay there with my eyes closed, I went over in my mind all the compositions I had ever played, bar by bar. Later, this mental refresher course turned out to have been useful: when I went back to work I still knew my repertory and had almost all of it in my head, as if I had been practising all through the war. Then, from my midday meal until dusk, I systematically ran through the contents of all the books I had read, mentally repeating my English vocabulary. I gave myself English lessons, asking myself questions and trying to answer them correctly and at length.

  When darkness came I fell asleep. I would wake around one in the morning and go in search of food by the light of matches �
� I had found a supply of them in the building, in a flat that had not been entirely burnt out. I looked in cellars and the charred ruins of the flats, finding a little oatmeal here, a few pieces of bread there, some dank flour, water in tubs, buckets and jugs. I don’t know how many times I passed the charred body on the stairs during these expeditions. He was the sole companion whose presence I need not fear. Once I found an unexpected treasure in a cellar: half a litre of spirits. I decided to save it until the end of the war came.

  By day, as I lay on the floor, Germans or Ukrainians would often come into the building in search of loot. Each of these visitations was another strain on my nerves, for I was mortally afraid they would find me and murder me. Yet somehow or other they always left the attic alone, although I counted more than thirty such flying visits.

  The fifteenth of November came, and the first snow fell. The cold weather troubled me more and more under the pile of rags I had collected to keep myself warm. Now they were thickly covered with soft white snow when I woke in the morning. I had made my bed in a corner under a part of the roof that was still intact, but the rest of it was gone, and large quantities of snow blew in from all sides. One day I stretched a piece of fabric under a broken window pane I had found and examined myself in this improvised mirror. At first I could not believe that the dreadful sight I saw was really myself: my hair had not been cut for months, and I was unshaven and unwashed. The hair on my head was thickly matted, my face was almost covered with a growth of dark beard, quite heavy by now, and where the beard did not cover it my skin was almost black. My eyelids were reddened, and I had a crusted rash on my forehead.

  But what tormented me most was not knowing what was happening in the battle areas, both on the front and among the rebels. The Warsaw rebellion itself had been put down. I could cherish no illusions about that. But perhaps there was still resistance outside the city, in Praga on the other side of the Vistula. I could still hear artillery fire over there now and then, and shells would explode in the ruins, often quite near me, echoing harshly in the silence amidst the burnt-out buildings. What about resistance in the rest of Poland? Where were the Soviet troops? What progress was the Allied offensive making in the west? My life or death depended on the answer to these questions, and even if the Germans did not discover my hiding place it was soon going be my death – of cold if not starvation.