Book Description
On September 23, 1939, Wladyslaw Szpilman, a young Warsaw
pianist, played Chopin's Nocturne in C sharp minor live on
the radio, while German shells exploded outside--so loudly
that he couldn't hear his piano. It was the last live music
broadcast from Warsaw: later that day, a German bomb
destroyed the power station, and Polish Radio went off the
air.
The war cast Warsaw onto the horror of occupation, the
ghetto, the rounding up of the Jews, the uprising and the
evacuation of the city--events that killed most of Szpilman's
friends and all of his family. But incredibly he survived
among the ruins of his beloved city. The Pianist is
both an extraordinary story of one man's tenacity in the face
of death, and a testament to the resilience of humanity
itself--Szpilman's life was saved by a German officer who
heard him play the same Chopin Nocturne on a piano found
among the rubble. That officer died in a Russian POW camp,
but he left behind a diary expressing his fierce despair at
the barbarity of National Socialism. Extracts from the diary
are published here for the first time, alongside Szpilman's
memoir.
After the war ended, Szpilman never spoke of his wartime
experiences, not even to his son. But in 1945, he wrote about
them, more for himself than for any audience, to enable him
to work through his shattering trauma. Suppressed by the
communist authorities in Poland, this gripping and vivid
memoir is now published in the United States for the first
time. A bestseller in Germany and a major publishing event, The
Pianist is a testimony to the power of music, the will to
live, and the courage to stand against evil.
