The Pianist

by Wladyslaw Szpilman

  There is outright terror and fear everywhere, the use of force, arrests. People are taken away and shot daily. The life of a human being, let alone his personal freedom, is a matter of no importance. But the love of freedom is native to every human being and every nation, and cannot be suppressed in the long term. History teaches us that tyranny has never endured. And now we have blood-guilt on our conscience for the dreadful injustice of murdering the Jewish inhabitants. There is an action going on here to exterminate the Jews. That has been the aim of the German civilian administration ever since the occupation of the eastern regions, with the assistance of the police and the G.Sta.Po, but apparently it is to be applied on a huge, radical scale now.

  We hear credible reports from all kinds of different sources that the ghetto in Lublin has been cleared, the Jews brought out of it and murdered en masse, or driven into the forests, and that some of them have been imprisoned in a camp. People from Lietzmannstadt and Kutno say that the Jews – men, women and children – are poisoned in mobile gas vehicles, the dead are stripped of their clothes, thrown into mass graves, and the clothing goes to textiles factories for reprocessing. Dreadful scenes are said to go on there. Now the reports say they are emptying the Warsaw ghetto in the same way. There are some four hundred thousand people in it, and Ukrainian and Lithuanian police battalions are used for the purpose instead of the German police. It is hard to believe all this, and I try not to, not so much out of anxiety for the future of our nation, which will have to pay for these monstrous things some day – but because I can’t believe Hitler wants such a thing and there are Germans who will give such orders. If it is so, there can be only one explanation: they’re sick, abnormal or mad.

  25 July 1942

  If what they are saying in the city is true – and it does come from reliable sources – then it is no honour to be a German officer, and no one could go along with what’s happening. But I can’t believe it.

  The rumours say that thirty thousand Jews are to be taken from the ghetto this week and sent east somewhere. In spite of all the secrecy, people say they know what happens then: somewhere near Lublin, buildings have been constructed with rooms that can be electrically heated by heavy current, like the electricity in a crematorium. Unfortunate people are driven into these heated rooms and burnt alive, and thousands can be killed like that in a day, saving all the trouble of shooting them, digging mass graves and then filling them in. The guillotine of the French Revolution can’t compete, and even in the cellars of the Russian secret police they haven’t devised such virtuoso methods of mass slaughter.

  But surely this is madness. It can’t be possible. You wonder why the Jews don’t defend themselves. However, many, indeed most of them, are so weak from starvation and misery that they couldn’t offer any resistance.

  Warsaw, 13 August 1942

  A Polish shopkeeper expelled from Posen at the beginning of the war has a business here in Warsaw. He often sells me fruit, vegetables and so on. During the First World War he fought as a German soldier for four years, on the Western Front. He showed me his pay-book. This man sympathizes strongly with the Germans, but he is a Pole and always will be. He is in despair at the dreadful cruelties, the animal brutality of what the Germans are doing in the ghetto.

  You can’t help wondering again and again how there can possibly be such riff-raff among our own people. Have the criminals and lunatics been let out of the prisons and asylums and sent here to act as bloodhounds? No, it’s people of some prominence in the State who have taught their otherwise harmless countrymen to act like this. Evil and brutality lurk in the human heart. If they are allowed to develop freely they flourish, putting out dreadful offshoots, the kind of ideas necessary if the Jews and the Poles are to be murdered like this.

  The Polish shopkeeper I mentioned has Jewish acquaintances in the ghetto and visits it often. He says the sights there are intolerable, and he is afraid to go now. Going down the street in a rickshaw, he saw a G.Sta.Po man forcing a number of Jews, both men and women, into the doorway of a building and then shooting into the crowd at random. Ten people were killed or wounded. One man ran away, and the G.Sta.Po man aimed at him too, but the magazine of his pistol was empty. The wounded died. No one helped them; the doctors have already been taken away or killed, and anyway they were supposed to die. A woman told my Polish acquaintance that several of the G.Sta.Po made their way into the Jewish maternity hospital, took the babies away, put them in a sack, went off and threw them into a hearse. These wicked men were unmoved by the crying of the infants and their mothers’ heart-rending wails. You would hardly believe it, and yet it’s true. Two such animals were on a tram with me yesterday. They had whips in their hands and they were coming from the ghetto. I would have liked to push them under the tram wheels.

  What cowards we are, thinking ourselves above all this, but letting it happen. We shall be punished for it too. And so will our innocent children, for we are colluding when we allow these crimes to be committed.

  After 21 August 1942

  Lying is the worst of all evils. Everything else that is diabolical comes from it. And we have been lied to; public opinion is constantly deceived. Not a page of a newspaper is free of lies, whether it deals with political, economic, historical, social or cultural affairs. Truth is under pressure everywhere; the facts are distorted, twisted and made into their opposite. Can this turn out well? No, things can’t go on like this, for the sake of human nature and the free human spirit. The liars and those who distort the truth must perish and be deprived of their power to rule by force, and then there may be room for a freer, nobler kind of humanity again.

  1 September 1942

  Why did this war have to happen at all? Because humanity had to be shown where its godlessness was taking it. First of all Bolshevism killed millions, saying it was done to introduce a new world order. But the Bolshevists could act as they did only because they had turned away from God and Christian teaching. Now National Socialism is doing the same in Germany. It forbids people to practise their religion, the young are brought up godless, the Church is opposed and its property appropriated, anyone who thinks differently is terrorized, the free human nature of the German people is debased and they are turned into terrified slaves. The truth is kept from them. They can play no part in the fate of their nation.

  There are no commandments now against stealing, killing or lying, not if they go against people’s personal interest. This denial of God’s commandments leads to all the other immoral manifestations of greed – unjust self-enrichment, hatred, deceit, sexual licence resulting in infertility and the downfall of the German people. God allows all this to happen, lets these forces have power and allows so many innocent people to perish to show mankind that without him we are only animals in conflict, who believe we have to destroy each other. We will not listen to the divine commandment: ‘Love one another’. Very well, then, says God, try the Devil’s commandment, the opposite: ‘Hate one another’. We know the story of the Deluge from Holy Scripture. Why did the first race of men come to such a tragic end? Because they had abandoned God and must die, guilty and innocent alike. They had only themselves to blame for their punishment. And it is the same today.

  6 September 1942

  A Special Commando Unit officer taking part in the fencing tournament told me about the dreadful things the unit has done in the town of Sielce, an administrative centre. He was so upset and indignant that he entirely forgot we were in quite a large company including a top G.Sta.Po man. One day the Jews were driven out of the ghetto and taken through the streets: men, women and children. A number of them were shot publicly in front of the Germans and the Polish population. Women were left writhing in their blood in the summer heat, and given no help. Children who had hidden were thrown out of the windows. Then all these thousands of people were taken to a place near the railway station, where trains were supposed to be ready to take them away. They waited there for three days in the heat of summer, without food or drink. If
anyone rose to his feet he was shot at once, and that was done publicly too. Then they were taken away, two hundred people crammed into a cattle truck only large enough for forty-two. What happened to them? Nobody will admit to knowing, but it can’t be concealed. More and more people are managing to escape, and they make these dreadful things known. The place is called Treblinka, in the east of German-ruled Polish territory. The trucks are unloaded there; many people are already dead. The whole place is enclosed by walls, and the trucks go right in before they are unloaded. The dead are heaped up beside the railway tracks. When healthy men arrive they have to take the mountains of corpses away, dig new graves and cover them when they are full. Then they themselves are shot. Other transports come bringing men to deal with their predecessors. The thousands of women and children have to undress, and then they are taken into a mobile hut and gassed there. The hut is driven up to a pit, and a device opens up the side wall and raises the floor, tipping the corpses into their grave. This has been going for on a long time. Unfortunate people from all over Poland are being assembled. Some are killed on the spot because there isn’t enough loading capacity available, but if there are too many for that they are taken away. A dreadful stench of corpses hangs over the whole Treblinka area. My confidant was told all this by a Jew who escaped. He and seven others managed to get away, and now he is living in Warsaw; I’m told there are quite a number of them in the city. He showed my acquaintance a twenty-złoty note he had taken from the pocket of a corpse; he wrapped the note up carefully so that the stench of the corpses would cling to it, as a constant reminder to him to avenge his brothers.

  Sunday, 14 February 1943

  On a Sunday, when you can indulge in your own thoughts and forget the army and its demands, all the ideas you usually hide in your unconscious mind come up. I feel great anxiety about the future. Then again, looking back over this wartime period, I just cannot understand how we have been able to commit such crimes against defenceless civilians, against the Jews. I ask myself again and again, how is it possible? There can be only one explanation: the people who could do it, who gave the orders and allowed it to happen, have lost all sense of decency and responsibility. They are godless through and through, gross egotists, despicable materialists. When the terrible mass murders of Jews were committed last summer, so many women and children slaughtered, I knew quite certainly that we would lose the war. There was now no point in a war that might once have been justified as a search for free subsistence and living space – it had degenerated into vast, inhuman mass slaughter, negating all cultural values, and it can never be justified to the German people; it will be utterly condemned by the nation as a whole. All the torturing of Poles under arrest, the shooting of prisoners of war and their bestial treatment – that can never be justified either.

  16 June 1943

  A young man came to see me this morning. I had met his father in Obersig. He works in a field hospital here, and he was an eyewitness of the shooting of a civilian by three German police officers. They demanded the man’s papers and found out that he was a Jew, whereupon they took him into a doorway and shot him. They took his coat away with them and left the body lying there.

  Here is another eyewitness account, from a Jew: ‘We were in a building in the ghetto. We held out in the cellar for seven days. The building burnt above us, the women ran out and so did we men, and some of us were shot. Then we were taken to the Umschlagplatz and loaded into cattle trucks. My brother took poison, our wives were taken to Treblinka and burnt there. I was sent to a labour camp. We were treated dreadfully, got almost nothing to eat and had to work hard.’ He has written to his friends saying, ‘Send me poison; I can’t endure this. So many people are dying.’

  Mrs Jait worked as a domestic servant for the secret service for a year. She often saw the terrible way they treated the Jews who worked there. They were savagely beaten. One Jew had to spend a whole day standing on a heap of coke in terrible cold, without warm clothing. A secret service man passing by just shot him down. Innumerable Jews have been killed like that, for no reason, senselessly. It’s beyond understanding.

  Now the last remnants of the Jewish inhabitants of the ghetto are being exterminated. An SS Sturmführer boasted of the way they shot the Jews down as they ran out of the burning buildings. The entire ghetto has been razed by fire.

  These brutes think we shall win the war that way. But we have lost the war with this appalling mass murder of the Jews. We have brought shame upon ourselves that cannot be wiped out; it’s a curse that can’t be lifted. We deserve no mercy; we are all guilty.

  I am ashamed to go into the city. Any Pole has a right to spit at us. German soldiers are being shot daily. It will get worse, and we have no right to complain, for we deserve nothing else. Every day I’m here I feel worse and worse.

  6 July 1943

  Why does God permit this terrible war with its dreadful human sacrifices? Think of the terrible air raids, the awful fear of the innocent civilian population, the inhumanity of the treatment of prisoners in the concentration camps, the murder of hundreds of thousands of Jews by the Germans. Is it God’s fault? Why doesn’t he step in, why does he let it all happen? We might ask such questions, but we will get no answer. We are so willing to blame others instead of ourselves. God allows evil to come about because mankind has espoused it, and now we are beginning to feel the burden of our own evil and imperfections. When the Nazis came to power we did nothing to stop them; we betrayed our own ideals. Ideals of personal, democratic and religious freedom.

  The workers went along with the Nazis, the Church stood by and watched, the middle classes were too cowardly to do anything, and so were the leading intellectuals. We allowed the unions to be abolished, the various religious denominations to be suppressed, there was no freedom of speech in the press or on the radio. Finally we let ourselves be driven into war. We were content for Germany to do without democratic representation and put up with pseudo-representation by people with no real say in anything. Ideals can’t be betrayed with impunity, and now we must all take the consequences.

  5 December 1943

  The last year has seen one setback after another. Now we are fighting on the Dnieper. The whole of the Ukraine is lost. Even if we retained the remnant we still have in that area, there could surely be no question of economic gain. The Russians are so strong that they will always drive us out of their territory. The British offensive in Italy has begun, and there again we are giving up position after position. German cities are being destroyed one by one. It is Berlin’s turn now, and there have been air raids on Leipzig since 2 September. The U-boat war is a total failure. What do the people who still speak of victory think they can expect? We haven’t been able to win over a single country that we have occupied to our cause. Our allies, Bulgaria, Romania and Hungary, can provide only local help. They are glad enough if they can cope with their own internal problems, and they’re preparing for the enemy powers to attack their borders. They can’t do anything for us except through economic help – for instance, Romanian oil deliveries. In military terms their aid is practically worthless. Since the overthrow of the Fascist government in Italy the country is nothing to us but a theatre of war outside the borders of the Reich, where fighting is still going on, for the moment.

  The superior force of our enemies knocks the weapons from our hands. Anyone who tries standing upright is felled. That’s the present state of things, so how can we think we might yet make the war turn out in our favour?

  No one in Germany believes we will win the war any more either, but what way out is there? There’ll be no revolution at home because no one has the courage to risk his life by standing up to the G.Sta.Po. And what use would it be if a few did try? The majority of people might agree with them, but the majority is fettered. There’s been no chance for the last ten years for individuals, far less the population at large, to express free will. G.Sta.Po bullets would start flying at once. And we can’t expect an army coup. The army is willing
ly being driven to its death, and any idea of opposition that might set off a mass movement is quickly suppressed there too. So we must go on to the bitter end. Our entire nation will have to pay for all these wrongs and this unhappiness, all the crimes we have committed. Many innocent people must be sacrificed before the blood-guilt we’ve incurred can be wiped out. That’s an inexorable law in small and large things alike.

  1 January 1944

  The German newspapers are indignantly reporting the confiscation and removal of art treasures by the Americans in the south of Italy. Such an outcry over other people’s crimes is truly ludicrous – as if the enemy didn’t know about the art treasures we’ve appropriated and exported from Poland, or those we have destroyed in Russia.

  Even if we adopt the ‘my country right or wrong’ view and accept what we have done with equanimity, such hypocrisy is out of place and can only make us look ridiculous.

  11 August 1944

  The Führer is to issue a decree that Warsaw is to be razed to the ground. A start has been made already. All the streets liberated in the uprising are being destroyed by fire. The inhabitants have to leave the city, and are going westward in crowds of many thousands. If the news of this decree is true then it’s clear to me that we have lost Warsaw, and with it Poland and the war itself. We are giving up a place we held for five years, extending it and telling the world it was a forfeit of war. Monstrous methods were used here. We acted as if we were the masters and would never go away. Now we can’t help seeing that all is lost, we’re destroying our own work, everything of which the civil administration was so proud – it saw its great cultural tasks as being here and wanted to prove their necessity to the world. Our policy in the east is bankrupt, and we are erecting a final memorial to it with the destruction of Warsaw.