The Pianist

by Wladyslaw Szpilman

  Epilogue

  A Bridge Between Władysław Szpilman and Wilm Hosenfeld

  Wolf Biermann

  Wolf Biermann is one of Germany’s best-known poets, song-writers and essayists. He was born in Hamburg in 1936, the son of a communist family. His father, a Jewish shipyard worker and a resistance fighter, was murdered in Auschwitz in 1943. As a teenager, Biermann went east, against the stream of refugees going the other way to West Germany. In 1965 his works were banned in East Germany because of their attacks on the government, and in 1976 Biermann was forced by the authorities to emigrate to West Germany. He now lives in Hamburg.

  This book needs neither a foreword nor an afterword, and indeed it does not really require any commentary. However, the author, Władysław Szpilman, asked me to provide some annotations for his readers – half a century after the events he describes.

  He wrote his story, as it is printed here, in Warsaw directly after the war, that is to say in the heat of the moment, or more accurately in deep shock. There are many books in which people have set down their memories of the Shoah. Most accounts of survival, however, were not written until some years or decades after the events they describe. I imagine that several obvious reasons will spring to mind.

  Readers will notice that although this book was written amidst the still smouldering ashes of the Second World War, its language is surprisingly cool. Władysław Szpilman describes his recent sufferings with an almost melancholy detachment. It seems to me as if he had not really come back to his senses yet after his journey through all the various circles of the inferno; as if he were writing in some surprise about another person, the person he became after the German invasion of Poland.

  His book was first published in Poland in 1946 under the title of one of its chapters, Death of a City. It was very soon withdrawn from circulation by Stalin’s Polish minions, and has not been reissued since, either in Poland or outside. As the countries conquered by the Red Army gradually became more firmly caught in the stranglehold of their liberators, the nomenklatura of Eastern Europe in general were unable to tolerate such authentic eyewitness accounts as this book. They contained too many painful truths about the collaboration of defeated Russians, Poles, Ukrainians, Latvians and Jews with the German Nazis.

  Even in Israel, people did not want to hear about such things. That may sound odd, but it is understandable: the subject was intolerable to all concerned, victims and perpetrators alike, although obviously for opposite reasons.

  * * *

  He who counted our hours

  counts on.

  What is he counting, tell me?

  He counts and counts …

  (Paul Celan)

  Numbers. More numbers. Of all the three and a half million Jews who once lived in Poland, two hundred and forty thousand survived the Nazi period. Anti-Semitism was flourishing long before the German invasion. Yet some three to four hundred thousand Poles risked their lives to save Jews. Of the sixteen thousand Aryans remembered in Yad Vashem, the central Jewish place of remembrance in Jerusalem, one-third were Polish. Why work it out so accurately? Because everyone knows how horribly the infection of anti-Semitism traditionally raged among ‘the Poles’, but few know that at the same time no other nation hid so many Jews from the Nazis. If you hid a Jew in France, the penalty was prison or a concentration camp, in Germany it cost you your life – but in Poland it cost the lives of your entire family.

  One thing strikes me: Szpilman’s emotional register seems to include no desire for revenge. We once had a conversation in Warsaw; he had toured the world as a pianist and was now sitting, exhausted, at his old grand piano, which needed tuning. He made an almost childish remark, half ironically but half in deadly earnest. ‘When I was a young man I studied music for two years in Berlin. I just can’t make the Germans out … they were so extremely musical!’

  This book paints a picture of life in the Warsaw ghetto on a broad canvas. Władysław Szpilman describes it in such a way that we can get a deeper understanding of something we already suspected: prisons, ghettos and concentration camps, with their huts and watchtowers and gas chambers, are not designed to ennoble the character. Hunger does not bestow an inner radiance. To put it bluntly: a scoundrel will still be a scoundrel behind barbed wire. But such a simple approach did not always apply. Certain low-life crooks and many admitted rogues behaved more bravely and helpfully in the ghetto or the concentration camp than a good many educated, respectable middle-class people.

  At times Władysław Szpilman describes the Shoah in plain prose as densely written as poetry. I think of the scene at the Umschlagplatz, when Szpilman was already doomed to destruction, selected for transport to an uncertain future which everyone suspected would be certain death. The author, his parents and his brother and sisters share a cream caramel cut into six, their last meal together. And I recall the dentist’s impatience as they waited for the death train: ‘It’s a disgrace to us all! We’re letting them take us to our death like sheep to the slaughter! If we attacked the Germans, half a million of us, we could break out of the ghetto, or at least die honourably, not as a stain on the face of history!’; and the response given by Szpilman’s father: ‘Look, we’re not heroes! We’re perfectly ordinary people, which is why we prefer to risk hoping for that ten per cent chance of living.’ As can happen in a genuine tragedy, both the dentist and Szpilman’s father were right. Jews have argued this unanswerable question of resistance among themselves thousands of times, over and over again, and they will be doing so for generations to come. A more practical consideration occurs to me: how could these people, all civilians, how could women and children and old folk abandoned by God and the world, how could starved, sick men in fact have defended themselves against such a perfect extermination machine?

  Resistance was impossible, but all the same there was Jewish resistance. The armed fighting in the Warsaw ghetto and thousands of brave deeds performed by Jewish partisans show that it was a very capable resistance too. There were the risings in Sobibór and even in Treblinka. I think also of Lydia Vago and Sarah Ehrenhalt in Israel, who survived as slaves in the Union ammunition factory in Auschwitz, where the explosives to blow up one of the crematoria came from.

  Władysław Szpilman’s story shows that he played a direct part in the brave resistance. He was among those who were taken out daily in labour columns to the Aryan side of the city, and smuggled not just bread and potatoes but ammunition for the Jewish resistance back into the ghetto. He mentions this brave deed modestly and only in passing.

  The appendix publishes, for the first time, entries from the diary of Wilm Hosenfeld, a Wehrmacht officer without whom Szpilman, a Polish Jew, would probably not have survived at all. Hosenfeld, a teacher, had already served as a lieutenant in the First World War, and may therefore have been considered too old for service in the front line at the beginning of the Second. That could have been the reason why he was made officer in charge of all the Warsaw sports facilities taken over by the Wehrmacht so that German soldiers could keep fit there with games and athletics. Captain Hosenfeld was taken prisoner by the Soviet army in the final days of the war, and died in captivity seven years later.

  At the beginning of the tale of Szpilman’s wanderings, one of the hated Jewish police saved him. At the end it was Captain Hosenfeld who found the half-dead pianist in the ruined city of Warsaw, now empty of its inhabitants – and did not kill him. Hosenfeld even brought food, an eiderdown and an overcoat to the Jew’s hiding place. This is like some Hollywood fairy-tale, yet it is true: one of the hated master race played the part of guardian angel in this dreadful story. Since Hitler’s Germany had obviously lost the war anyway, the fugitive, with forethought, gave his anonymous helper a useful piece of information. ‘If anything happens to you, if I can help you then in any way, remember my name: Szpilman, Polish Radio.’ I know from Szpilman that he began looking for his saviour at once in 1945 – unsuccessfully. When he went to the place where his violinist friend had seen
the man, the camp had been moved.

  Hosenfeld finally died in a prisoner of war camp at Stalingrad, a year before Stalin’s death. He had been tortured in captivity because the Soviet officers thought his claim to have saved a Jew a particularly outrageous lie. He then suffered several cerebral strokes. By the end he was in a confused state of mind, a beaten child who does not understand the blows. He died with his spirit utterly broken.

  Hosenfeld just managed to send his diaries to Germany. His last home leave was at Whitsun 1944; there is an attractive picture of the officer home from the dirty war, wearing his bright white uniform, with his wife and his beloved children around him. It looks like an idyll of eternal peace. The Hosenfeld family kept the two densely written notebooks containing the diary. The last entry bears the date 11 August 1944, which means that Hosenfeld sent his most explosive comments by the ordinary army post. Suppose those two volumes had fallen into the hands of the dreaded gentlemen in leather coats … it hardly bears thinking of. They would have taken the man apart.

  Hosenfeld’s son gave me an account which provides a vivid picture of his dead father:

  ‘My father was an enthusiastic, warm-hearted teacher. In the period after the First World War, when beating children was still the usual means of discipline in schools, his kindness to his pupils was very unconventional. He used to take the children in the youngest class of the Spessart village school on his knee if they were having difficulty with the alphabet. And he always had two handkerchiefs in his trouser pocket, one for himself and one for his youngest pupils’ snotty noses.

  ‘In the winter of 1939 to 1940 my father’s unit, which had left Fulda for Poland in the autumn of 1939, was stationed in the little town of Wegrow, east of Warsaw. Earlier on the German commissariat had appropriated supplies of hay there which belonged to the Polish army. One cold winter’s day my father happened to come by as an SS man was taking a schoolboy away. The boy had been caught stealing some of the requisitioned hay in a barn, probably just an armful. Obviously the child was about to be shot as a punishment for his offence and to deter others.

  ‘My father told me he rushed at the SS man shouting, “You can’t kill that child!” The SS man drew his pistol, pointed it at my father and said menacingly, “If you don’t get out at once we’ll kill you too!”

  ‘It took my father a long time to recover from this experience. He spoke of it just once, two or three years later when he was on leave. I was the only member of the family to hear the story.’

  * * *

  Władysław Szpilman began working for Radio Warsaw again as a pianist at once. He opened the broadcasting service after the war with the same Chopin piece he had been playing live on the radio that last day, amidst a hail of German artillery and bombs. You could say that the broadcast of Chopin’s Nocturne in C sharp minor was only interrupted, briefly, so that in the six-year interval Herr Hitler could play his part on the world stage.

  Władysław Szpilman heard no more of his rescuer until the year 1949. In 1950, however, there was a further development. A Polish Jew, one Leon Warm, emigrated from Poland and visited the Hosenfelds in West Germany on the way. One of Wilm Hosenfeld’s sons writes, of Leon Warm:

  ‘In the first few years after the war my mother was living with my younger brother and sister in part of our former accommodation at the school in Thalau, a little village in the Rhön region. On 14 November 1950 a pleasant young Pole turned up and asked for my father, whom he had met in Warsaw during the war.

  ‘On the way to the extermination camp of Treblinka, this man had managed to open a hatch closed with barbed wire in the cattle truck where he and his companions in misfortune were locked. Then he jumped out of the moving train. Through a family he knew in Warsaw he met our father, who got him a pass with a false name and took him on as a worker at the sports centre. Since then he had been working as a chemist in Poland, and now he intended to start a firm of his own in Australia.’

  This man, Leon Warm, learned from his visit to Frau Hosenfeld that her husband was still alive. She had received some letters and cards. Frau Hosenfeld even showed him a list of Jews and Poles whom her husband had saved, on a postcard dated 15 July 1946. He had asked his wife to go to these people for help. Number four on the list could be deciphered as ‘Wladislaus Spielmann, pianist with Warsaw Radio’.

  Three members of a family called Cieciora had a Hosenfeld story of their own to tell. The first days of the German blitzkrieg saw the following scene take place: the wife of a Pole called Stanisław Cieciora went to a prisoner of war camp in Pabianice where she had been told her wounded husband, a soldier in the defeated army, was being held; he must have been afraid he would be killed by the victors. On her way she met a German officer riding a bicycle. He asked where she was going. Paralysed by fear, she stammered out the truth. ‘My husband’s a soldier – he’s sick in the camp there, I’m soon going to have our child, and I’m frightened for him.’ The German wrote down the man’s name and sent his wife back, promising her, ‘Your husband will be home again in three days’ time.’ And so he was.

  After that, Hosenfeld visited the Cieciora family on occasion and they made friends. This extraordinary German began learning Polish. Being a devout Catholic, Hosenfeld even sometimes went to church with his new friends, wearing his Wehrmacht uniform and attending the ordinary Polish service. What a picture: a German, very correct in the ‘coat of the murderers’, kneeling before a Polish priest, while the ‘subhuman Slav’ laid the wafer representing the body of Christ on a German tongue.

  One thing led to another: the Cieciora family were anxious about the husband’s brother, a priest in the political underground wanted by the Germans. Hosenfeld saved him too. Thirdly, he saved a relation of the Ciecioras by rescuing him from an army truck. I found out how both rescues happened in an account by Captain Hosenfeld’s daughter:

  ‘In the spring of 1973 we had a visit from Maciej Cieciora of Posen [Poznań]. His uncle, a Catholic priest, had to flee from the Gestapo after the German invasion in the autumn of 1939. My father, who was then officer in charge of the sporting facilities of the city of Warsaw appropriated by the Wehrmacht, protected him by giving him work at his office under the false name of “Cichocki”. It was through Father Cieciora, with whom he soon became close friends, that my father met the priest’s brother-in-law Koschel.

  ‘Maciej Cieciora told us that, probably in 1943, Polish freedom fighters had shot some German soldiers in the part of Warsaw where the Koschel family lived. Thereupon an SS unit in that quarter arrested a number of men – including Mr Koschel – and loaded them up on a truck. The unfortunate men were to be executed immediately outside the city in reprisal.

  ‘As chance would have it my father met this truck at a road junction when he was walking through the city centre. Mr Koschel recognized an officer he knew on the pavement and waved to him vigorously and desperately. My father took in the situation at once, and with great presence of mind stepped into the road and gestured to the driver to stop. The driver came to a halt. “I need a man!” my father said in commanding tones to the SS leader in charge. He went up to the truck, inspected the occupants, and picked out Koschel as if at random. They let him out, and so he was saved.’

  It’s a small world. Today, in the eighth year after the collapse of the Eastern bloc, Stanisław Cieciora’s son is the Polish consul in Hamburg. He told me a moving little story: his grateful parents in Samter-Karolin sent the fatherless Hosenfeld family food-parcels of sausage and butter, from starving Poland to Hitler’s Germany, even during the war itself. It’s a strange world too.

  * * *

  Leon Warm got in touch with Szpilman in Warsaw, care of Polish Radio, conveying to him the names of the people Hosenfeld had saved and passing on his urgent request for help. That was nearly half a century ago.

  In 1957 Władysław Szpilman toured West Germany with the brilliant violinist Gimpel. The two musicians visited Wilm Hosenfeld’s family in Thalau: his wife Annemarie and his two
sons Helmut and Detlef. Their mother gave her visitor a photograph of her husband. It is printed in this book. Last summer, when it was decided that this almost forgotten book was to be reissued in German, I asked the old man about the background of the Hosenfeld story.

  ‘You know, I don’t like to talk about it. I’ve never discussed it with anyone, not even my wife and my two sons. Why not, you ask? Because I was ashamed. You see, when I finally found out the German officer’s name at the end of 1950 I wrestled with my fears and overcame my distaste, and I went as a humble petitioner to a criminal whom no decent person in Poland would speak to: one Jakub Berman.

  ‘Berman was the most powerful man in Poland, head of the Polish NKWD, and a bastard, as everyone knew. He was more influential than the minister of the interior. But I was determined to try, so I went to see him and told him everything, adding that I wasn’t the only one Hosenfeld had saved: he had saved Jewish children too, and he bought shoes for Polish children at the very beginning of the war and gave them food. I also told him about Leon Warm and the Cieciora family, emphasizing the fact that a great many people owed their lives to this German. Berman was friendly, and promised to do something. After a few days he even called at our home in person: he was sorry, but there was nothing to be done. “If your German were still in Poland, then we could get him out,” he said. “But our comrades in the Soviet Union won’t let him go. They say your officer belonged to a detachment that was involved in spying – so there’s nothing we can do about it as Poles, and I’m powerless,” he concluded – a man who was all-powerful by the grace of Stalin. So I approached the worst rogue of the lot, and it did no good.’