Polish filmaker Roman Polanski who was born and raised in Poland by Catholic parents, was there to see what it was really like, unlike many others who were never there, but make ignorent anti-Polish judgements. It's funny how those who were actually there, like Wladislaw, tell a completely different story that the Hollywood/Media tells. Wladyslaw told the truth. Read the book, and see the movie. Get this book and movie to your schools and libraries - Please. This story has healing qualities that brings people together, and not apart.

This book is an incredible story of survival. I have seen the movie also. I would recommend both!

One of those amazing stories that makes you realize just how much the human spirit can take, and still survive. And just how inhumane we humans can be towards each other. Once you start reading, you won't be able to put this down.

Szpilman reveals the tragedy of Jewish life in Warsaw under the German occupation from 1939-1946. Szpilman's autobiographical work was first published in postwar Poland in 1946 but then quickly removed from circulation by Polish authorities. An accomplished pianist before the war, Szpilman played for Polish Radio during the siege of Warsaw and later within the Jewish ghetto to provide food for his parents and siblings. With the systematic liquidation of Jewish life in Warsaw and separation from his family, Szpilman's life took a series of surprising twists. As the reader views life in the ghetto through the eyes of a survivor, his escape from the ghetto before the Jewish up-rising and his ultimate survival consistently depended upon a timely combination of luck and sympathetic acquaintances B including a German army officer.

Included with Szpilman's memoirs are excerpts from Captain Wilm Hosenfeld's diaries and Wolf Biermann's own brief commentary. Hosenfeld's equating of National Socialism with Stalinist Communist and Biermann's emphasis on Szpilman's willingness to break with his past detracts from the overall quality of this work. Nevertheless, this work is well written and will retain the reader's attention to the end.

I could not put down this book, and read it in two sittings. Wladyslaw Szpilman, the famed pianist and composer, describes his harrowing account of life under Nazi terror. As a Polish Jew, the Nazis considered him entirely subhuman, and it is a miracle he survived the persistent and random acts of violence that surrounded him. He was nearly sent to a death camp along with his five family members, and somehow was pulled off the Birkenau-bound train to a grim prospect of survival. The images in this book are harrowing, such as the depiction of the shattered skulls of little girls, victims of the Nazis' "preferred" method of killing children by picking them up by their legs and swinging them into a brick wall. Imagine the horror....Szpilman's account is so matter-of-fact at times that you wonder how he survived. The fact that he did is a testament of human endurance, but also the ways of fate. There were occasions when he survived simply by the luck of the draw in a Godless universe.

The Pianist is the story of Wladyslaw Szpilman and his remarkable story survival in Warsaw during the years of Nazi occupation from 1939 to 1945.
It tells how he survived against the odds , hiding in various parts of the city , before his life was saved by a German officer , who despised the Nazis brutality and genocide , a true righteous gentile , Captain Wilm Hosenfeld.
Unlike many personal holocaust accounts , which are of concentration and death camps , this one is an account of life and death in the Warsaw ghetto.
Szpilman describes life and death in the ghetto : the disease , the starvation and the Nazi mass murders of hundreds of thousands of men , women and children , including how the Nazis killed Jewish children , by seizing them by the legs and swinging their heads into brick walls.


Next to Szpilman's account are moving extracts from Hosenfeld's diary.

In his diary Wilm Hosenfeld described his conscience and his hatred of totalitarian brutality , describing the horrors of the French Revolution and the horrific atrocities of the Bolshevik revolution , who'se leaders and footsoldiers acted without compassion or conscience , believing in the totality and infinite importance of their causes. It was a war against Christianity and against descency , as was the Nazi war to destroy the Jews and other entire nations. He speaks of the total moral bankruptcy of Nazism and his disgust at it's rotten moral core and bloodthirsty savage evil.

Hosenfeld was captured by the Soviets after the war and died seven years later in a hideous Soviet Gulag.

Similarly voices of conscience have arisen from time to time against evil systems , such as Andrei Sakharov , who challenged the ultimate tyranny of the Soviet Union and more recently Walid Shoebat , a former Arab terorist turned Christian apostle of love and co-existence , who now condemmns Arab terror , and the war of destruction and hideous propaganda against Israel.

In the epilogue by Wolf Biermann , Biermann describes how "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".

Lastly Hosenfeld makes the plea that a tree is planted at Yad Vashem in the honor of Wilm Hosenfeld , among those of the thousands of other righteous gentiles honoured at the holocaust museum in Jerusalem.