The Pianist

by Wladyslaw Szpilman

  The first hard frosts came in the middle of December. When I went out looking for water on the night of 13 December, I found it frozen everywhere. I fetched a kettle and a pan from a flat near the back entrance of the building that the fire had spared, and returned to my loft. I shaved some ice from the contents of the pan and put it in my mouth, but it did not quench my thirst. I thought of another idea: I got under my eiderdown and put the pan of ice on my naked stomach. After a while the ice began to thaw, and I had water. I did the same over the next few days, for the temperature remained freezing.

  Christmas came, and then the New Year, 1945: the sixth Christmas and New Year celebrations of the war, and the worst I had known. I was not in any condition to celebrate. I lay in the dark, listening to the stormy wind tearing at the roof sheeting and the damaged gutters that dangled down the walls of buildings, blowing down the furniture in those flats that were not entirely destroyed. In the intervals between the gusts that kept howling around the ruins I heard the squeaking and rustling of mice or even rats running back and forth in the attic. Sometimes they scurried over my eiderdown, and when I was asleep they ran over my face, scratching me with their claws as they passed swiftly by. In my mind, I went over every Christmas before and during the war. At first I had a home, parents, two sisters and a brother. Then we had no home of our own any more, but we were together. Later I was alone, but surrounded by other people. And now I was lonelier, I supposed, than anyone else in the world. Even Defoe’s creation, Robinson Crusoe, the prototype of the ideal solitary, could hope to meet another human being. Crusoe cheered himself by thinking that such a thing could happen any day, and it kept him going. But if any of the people now around me came near I would need to run for it and hide in mortal terror. I had to be alone, entirely alone, if I wanted to live.

  On 14 January unusual noises in the building and the street outside woke me. Cars drove up and then away again, soldiers ran up and down the stairs, and I heard agitated, nervous voices. Items were being carried out of the building all the time, probably to be loaded into vehicles. Early in the morning of 15 January, the sound of artillery from the previously silent front on the Vistula was heard. The shells did not reach the part of the city where I was hiding. However, the ground and the walls of the building shook under the constant dull thunder, the metal sheeting on the roof vibrated and plaster flaked from the interior walls. The sound must come from the famous Soviet Katyusha rockets of which we had heard so much even before the rebellion. In my delight and excitement I committed what, in my present circumstances, was an inexcusable piece of folly: I drank a whole pan of water.

  Three hours later the heavy artillery fire died down again, but I was as nervous as ever. I did not sleep at all that night: if the Germans were going to defend the ruins of Warsaw, the street fighting would begin at any moment and I could be killed as the finale to all my earlier tribulations.

  But the night passed peacefully. Around one o’clock I heard the remaining Germans leaving the building. Silence fell, a silence such as even Warsaw, a dead city for the last three months, had not known before. I could not even hear the steps of the guards outside the building. I didn’t understand it. Was there any fighting going on?

  Not until the early hours of the next day was the silence broken by a loud and resonant noise, the last sound I had expected. Radio loudspeakers set up somewhere nearby were broadcasting announcements in Polish of the defeat of Germany and the liberation of Warsaw.

  The Germans had withdrawn without a fight.

  As soon as it began to get light I prepared feverishly for my first venture out. My officer had left me a German military overcoat to keep me from freezing as I went in search of water, and I had already put it on when I suddenly heard the rhythmic footsteps of guards out in the road again. Had the Soviet and Polish troops withdrawn, then? I sank on my mattress, utterly dejected, and lay there until something new came to my ears: the voices of women and children, sounds I had not heard for months, women and children talking calmly just as if nothing had happened. It was like the old days, when mothers could simply walk down the street with their young ones. At all costs, I had to get information. This uncertainty was becoming unbearable. I ran downstairs, put my head out of the front door of the abandoned building, and looked out into Aleja Niepodległości. It was a grey, misty morning. To my left, not far away, stood a woman soldier in a uniform that was difficult to identify at this distance. A woman with a bundle on her back was approaching from my right. When she came closer I ventured to speak to her:

  ‘Hello. Excuse me…’ I called in a muted voice, beckoning her over.

  She stared at me, dropped her bundle and took to her heels with a shriek of, ‘A German!’ Immediately the guard turned, saw me, aimed and fired her machine pistol. The bullets hit the wall and sent plaster flaking down on me. Without thinking, I rushed up the stairs and took refuge in the attic.

  Looking out of my little window a few minutes later, I saw that the whole building was already surrounded. I heard soldiers calling to each other as they went down into the cellars, and then the sound of shots and exploding hand grenades.

  This time my situation was absurd. I was going to be shot by Polish soldiers in liberated Warsaw, on the very verge of freedom, as the result of a misunderstanding. Feverishly, I began to wonder how I could make them realize, very quickly, that I was Polish before they dispatched me to the next world as a German in hiding. Meanwhile, another detachment wearing blue uniforms had arrived outside the building. I learned later that they were a detachment of railway police who happened to be passing and had been recruited to help the soldiers. So now I had two armed units after me.

  I began slowly coming down the stairs, shouting as loud as I could, ‘Don’t shoot! I’m Polish!’

  Very soon I heard swift footsteps climbing the stairs. The figure of a young officer in Polish uniform, with the eagle on his cap, came into view beyond the banisters. He pointed a pistol at me and shouted, ‘Hands up!’

  I repeated my cry of, ‘Don’t shoot! I’m Polish!’

  The lieutenant went red with fury. ‘Then why in God’s name don’t you come down?’ he roared. ‘And what are you doing in a German coat?’

  Only when the soldiers had taken a closer look at me and reviewed the situation did they really believe I wasn’t German. Then they decided to take me back to their headquarters so that I could wash and have a meal, although I was not yet sure what else they meant to do with me.

  However, I could not go with them just like that. First, I had to keep a promise I had made myself that I would kiss the first Pole I met after the end of Nazi rule. Fulfilling my vow proved far from easy. The lieutenant resisted my suggestion for a long time, defending himself with all kinds of arguments except the one he was too kind-hearted to put forward. Not until I had finally kissed him did he produce a small mirror and hold it up to my face, saying with a smile, ‘There, now you can see what a good patriot I am!’

  After two weeks, well cared for by the military, clean and rested, I walked through the streets of Warsaw without fear, a free man, for the first time in almost six years. I was going east towards the Vistula to Praga – it used to be a remote, poor suburb, but it was now all there was of Warsaw, since the Germans had not destroyed what was left of it.

  I was walking down a broad main road, once busy and full of traffic, its whole length now deserted. There was not a single intact building as far as the eye could see. I kept having to walk round mountains of rubble, and was sometimes obliged to climb over them as if they were scree slopes. My feet became entangled in a confused mess of ripped telephone wires and tramlines, and scraps of fabric that had once decorated flats or clothed human beings now long since dead.

  A human skeleton lay by the wall of a building, under a rebel barricade. It was not large, and the bone structure was delicate. It must be the skeleton of a girl, since long blond hair could still be seen on the skull. Hair resists decay longer than any other part of the bod
y. Beside the skeleton lay a rusty carbine, and there were remnants of clothing around the bones of the right arm, with a red and white armband where the letters AK had been shot away.

  There are not even such remains left of my sisters, beautiful Regina and youthful, serious Halina, and I shall never find a grave where I could go to pray for their souls.

  I stopped for a little rest, to draw breath. I looked over to the north of the city, where the ghetto had been, where half a million Jews had been murdered – there was nothing left of it. The Germans had flattened even the walls of the burnt-out buildings.

  Tomorrow I must begin a new life. How could I do it, with nothing but death behind me? What vital energy could I draw from death?

  I went on my way. A stormy wind rattled the scrap-iron in the ruins, whistling and howling through the charred cavities of the windows. Twilight came on. Snow fell from the darkening, leaden sky.

  Postscript

  About two weeks later one of my Polish Radio colleagues, the violinist Zygmunt Lednicki, who had taken part in the rebellion, came back to Warsaw after his wanderings. Like many others he had come on foot, wishing to be back in his own city as soon as possible. He had passed a temporary camp for German prisoners of war on the way. When he told me about it later my colleague added immediately that he did not approve of his own behaviour, but he had simply been unable to restrain himself. He went up to the tangle of barbed wire and said to the Germans, ‘You always claimed to be a cultured people, but you took everything I had from me, a musician – my violin!’ Then an officer rose with difficulty from the place where he was lying and staggered over to the wire. He looked wretched and shabby, with stubble on his face. Fixing despairing eyes on Lednicki, he asked, ‘Do you happen to know a Mr Szpilman?’

  ‘Yes, of course I do.’

  ‘I’m a German,’ the man whispered feverishly, ‘and I helped Szpilman when he was hiding in the attic of the fortress commando unit in Warsaw. Tell him I’m here. Ask him to get me out. I beg you—’

  At that moment one of the guards came up. ‘You’re not allowed to talk to the prisoners. Please go away.’

  Lednicki went away. But next moment it struck him that he did not know the German’s name. So he turned back, but the guard had now led the officer away from the fence.

  ‘What’s your name?’ he called.

  The German turned and shouted something, but Lednicki could not make it out.

  And I did not know the officer’s name myself. I had intentionally preferred to remain in ignorance of it, so that if I were captured and interrogated, and the German police asked who had been supplying me with bread from the army stores, I could not give his name away under torture.

  I did everything in my power to track down the German prisoner, but I never managed to find him. The POW camp had been moved, and its whereabouts was a military secret. But perhaps that German – the one human being wearing German uniform that I met – perhaps he got safely home again.

  I sometimes give recitals in the building at number 8 Narbutt Street in Warsaw where I carried bricks and lime – where the Jewish brigade worked: the men who were shot once the flats for German officers were finished. The officers did not enjoy their fine new homes for long. The building still stands, and there is a school in it now. I play to Polish children who do not know how much human suffering and mortal fear once passed through their sunny schoolrooms.

  I pray they may never learn what such fear and suffering are.

  Extracts from the Diary of Captain Wilm Hosenfeld

  Wilm Hosenfeld, 1944

  18 January 1942

  The National Socialist revolution seems half-hearted in every way. History tells us of dreadful deeds and appalling barbarities during the French Revolution. And the Bolshevik Revolution too allowed terrible atrocities to be perpetrated on the ruling class by the animal instincts of subhuman men who were full of hatred. Though we may deplore and condemn such actions from a humane point of view, we still have to acknowledge their unconditional, relentless and irrevocable nature. No deals were done, there was no pretence, no concessions were made. What those revolutionaries did they did wholeheartedly, resolutely, regardless of conscience, morality or custom. Both the Jacobins and the Bolsheviks butchered the ruling upper classes and executed their royal families. They broke with Christianity and waged war on it, intending to wipe it off the face of the earth. They succeeded in involving the people of their nations in wars fought with energy and enthusiasm – the revolutionary wars of the past, the war against Germany today. Their theories and revolutionary ideas had enormous influence beyond the frontiers of their own countries.

  The methods of the National Socialists are different, but basically they too pursue a single idea: the extermination and annihilation of people who think differently from them. Now and then a certain number of Germans are shot, but the fact is hushed up and kept from public knowledge. People are imprisoned in concentration camps, allowed to waste away there and perish. The public hears nothing about it. If you are going to arrest enemies of the State you should have the courage to accuse them publicly and hand them over to public justice.

  On the one hand, they ally themselves with the ruling classes in capital and industry and maintain the capitalist principle, on the other they preach socialism. They declare themselves in favour of the right to personal and religious freedom, but they destroy the Christian churches and conduct a secret, underground battle against them. They speak of the Führer principle and the rights of capable people to develop their talents freely, but they make everything dependent on Party membership. Even the most able and brilliant are ignored if they stay outside the Party. Hitler says he is offering the world peace, but at the same time he is arming in a disturbing manner. He tells the world he has no intention of incorporating other nations into the German states and denying them the right to their own sovereignty, but what about the Czechs; what about the Poles and the Serbs? Especially in Poland, there can have been no need to rob a nation of sovereignty in its own self-contained area of settlement.

  And look at the National Socialists themselves – see how far they really live by National Socialist principles: for instance, the idea that the common good comes before the individual good. They ask ordinary people to observe that principle but have no intention of doing so themselves. Who faces the enemy? The people, not the Party. Now they are calling up the physically infirm to serve in the army, while you see healthy, fit young men working in Party offices and the police, far from the firing line. Why are they exempt?

  They seize Polish and Jewish property to enjoy it themselves. Now the Poles and the Jews have nothing to eat, they live in want, they are freezing, and the National Socialists see nothing wrong in taking everything for themselves.

  Warsaw, 17 April 1942

  I have spent a number of peaceful days here at the College of Physical Education. I hardly notice the war, but I can’t feel happy. Now and then we hear of this or that. It’s the events in the area behind the front lines that make the news here: the shootings, the accidents, and so on. In Lietzmannstadt [Łódź] a hundred people were killed – executed although innocent, you might say – because some bandits fired on three police officers. The same has happened in Warsaw. The result is to arouse not fear and terror but bitter determination, anger and rising fanaticism. On the Praga bridge two Hitler Youth boys were molesting a Pole, and when he defended himself they called a German policeman to their aid. Thereupon the Pole shot all three of them down. A large military car simply ran down a rickshaw containing three people in the post office square. The driver of the rickshaw was killed at once. The military car drove on, dragging the rickshaw, which still had a passenger in it, along under the vehicle. A crowd of people gathered, but still the car drove on. One German tried to stop it. Then the rickshaw became entangled in the car’s wheels so that it had to stop. The men in the car came to a halt, pulled the rickshaw away and drove on.

  Some of the Poles in Zakopane failed to
hand in their skis. Houses were searched, and two hundred and forty men were sent to Auschwitz, the deeply feared concentration camp in the east. The G.Sta.Po torture people to death there. They drive the unfortunates into a cell and make short work of them by gassing them. People are savagely beaten during interrogation. And there are special torture cells: for instance, one where the victim’s hands and arms are tied to a column which is then pulled up, and the victim hangs there until he becomes unconscious. Or he is put in a crate where he can only crouch, and left there until he loses consciousness. What other diabolical things have they devised? How many totally innocent people are held in their prisons? Food is getting scarcer every day; famine is growing in Warsaw.

  Tomaszów, 26 June 1942

  I hear organ music and singing from the Catholic church. I go in; children in white taking their first communion are standing at the altar. There is a crowd of people in the church. They are just singing the Tantum ergo, and the blessing is being given. I let the priest bless me too. Innocent little children in a Polish city here, in a German city there, or in some other country, all praying to God, and in a few years’ time they will be fighting and killing each other with blind hatred. Even in the old days, when nations were more religious and called their rulers Christian majesties, it was the same as today when people are moving away from Christianity. Humanity seems doomed to do more evil than good. The greatest ideal on earth is human love.

  Warsaw, 23 July 1942

  If you read the newspapers and listen to the news on the radio you might think everything was going very well, peace was certain, the war already won and the future of the German people full of hope. However, I just can’t believe it, if only because injustice cannot prevail in the long run, and the way the Germans rule the countries they have conquered is bound to lead to resistance sooner or later. I only have to look at conditions here in Poland, and I don’t see much of them either, because we are told very little. But we can form a clear picture, all the same, from all the observations, conversations and information we hear every day. If methods of administration and government, the oppression of the local people and the operations of the G.Sta.Po are particularly brutal here, I suppose it’s very much the same in the other conquered countries.