The Pianist
Wladyslaw Szpilman, in his book The Pianist, relives the numerous encounters with death, starvation, and struggle for freedom as a Jew in Warsaw during the World War II. World War II and the Holocaust proved to be a devastating and tragic time for all of the Jewish population. But Szpilman, a well known pianist and composer in the non-western half of Poland, was able to use his talent as a musician to escape the inevitable that plagued a majority of the Jewish population, including that of his mother, father, sisters and brother. Szpilman, his father, and brother, Henryk, first avoided death by the Germans in November of the first year of the war. Very determined to make it home safely one evening shortly after curfew, the three were confronted by police patrol. The police, after discovering that the three were Jews, faced the men towards a wall and raised their guns to the backs of the soon to be executed men. Only after Henryk relayed to the policemen the occupations of all three men, were they allowed to live and remain “free.” The sympathetic officer, during this first brush with death, was also a musician.