W. szpilman biography

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The book has since been translated into more than 30 languages.

In 2002, Roman Polanski directed a film based on Szpilman's book, also titled "The Pianist." Unfortunately, Szpilman did not live to see the film's release, as he passed away on July 6, 2000, at the age of 88. He was deployed as a forced laborer outside the ghetto. We shall be punished for it too.

Now 88, the writer still lives in Warsaw.

"It is the only city in the world where I can live" says Szpilman, a small, elegantly dressed man who sits very upright with one leg crossed neatly over the other.

Strange though this may sound, Szpilman's love of Warsaw-the city where half a million Jews were murdered - makes more sense when you learn that he feels "first Polish and then Jewish ."

Nevertheless, it still seems confusing that he seems unable, or unwilling, to grant that there could be any tension between these two parts of his heritage.

"The Polish people helped me; without them I wouldn't have survived" he says, adding, "and don't forget Poland was an occupied country"

His refusal to criticise Poland, a country where anti-Semitism had been embedded for years before the Nazis invaded, may derive from the fact that his family was neither religious nor Zionist.

He played piano concertos for Polish radio until the city was occupied by the German Wehrmacht in 1939.
In the summer of 1942, over 250,000 Jews were deported from the Warsaw ghetto to Treblinka extermination camp. The genius of Chopin symbolised the triumph over darkness. In November 1944 the Wehrmacht officer Wilm Hosenfeld discovered him in a hiding place.

For, during the Nazi occupation, the erection of the ghetto, the round-ups of Jews, and the demolition of his beloved city, Szpilman was to lose all his family and most of his friends.

His survival was due to a series of terrifyingly narrow escapes, uncannily good judgments and, in the final instance, the humanity of a German officer for whom Szpilman played the same Chopin Nocturne on a piano found in the ruins of a Warsaw Villa.

Immediately after the war, Szpilman recorded his dance with death in a diary.

The result is "The Pianist," an emotionally harrowing, compelling work which was suppressed by the Communist authorities in Poland following its original publication in 1946 but which has recently been re-issued to great acclaim in Germany.

The new British edition includes extracts from the wartime diary of Wilm Hosenfeld, the German who saved Szpilman and whose writing rages against the savagery of the Third Reich.

In the film, Szpilman was portrayed by Adrien Brody.

Early Life and Education:
Władysław Szpilman was born on December 5, 1911, in Sosnowiec, Congress Poland, Russian Empire. In 1961, he initiated and organized the Sopot International Song Festival and founded the Polish Union of Popular Music Authors. During his Polish tours with violinist Bronisław Gimpel, he composed numerous musical works and soundtracks.

On April 1, 1935, Szpilman began working at Polish Radio, playing jazz and classical music until Warsaw was occupied by the Germans, and Polish Radio ceased broadcasting on September 1, 1939.

The recording of his good deeds - not only towards Szpilman - in The Pianist may be of some, belated comfort to his family. And, although much has been written about the Warsaw Ghetto, rarely has the sheer claustrophobic sense of living in it been so vividly conveyed as it is by Szpilman: "You could walk out into the street and maintain the illusion of being in a perfectly normal city ...

Władysław Szpilman and his family were also due to be deported. Unfortunately, none of his family members survived the war.

Post-War Career:
When Szpilman resumed his work at Polish Radio in 1945, he opened his first performance with Chopin's Nocturne in C-sharp minor, specifically from the part that he was interrupted six years earlier on September 23, 1939, when German bombs hit the Polish Radio studio.

At the end of a grim sequence of wanderings and escapes - conveyed here in gripping, economic prose - another unlikely saviour emerged in the shape of a sympathetic German soldier. It was to be another six years until Polish Radio found its voice again.

Though he did not know it at the time, it was also to be another six years before Szpilman would be a free man ­ except that his post-war freedom would be a paler, tainted version of is former self.

His parents, two sisters and brother were, however, accomplished members of the Polish intelligentsia, people whose murder was a loss in cultural as well as human terms.

Szpilman says that he thinks about them much more now that he is retired and his days relatively unoccupied.