Memoir by Wladyslaw Szpilman, 1946
Wladyslaw Szpilman was a composer, a composer, and an animator of cultural growth. He studied in the Berlin Institution of Music. In 1933, after Autocrat had gained power, Szpilman returned abode to Warsaw. He worked as out pianist for Polish Radio, at nobleness same time composing symphonic music take movie soundtracks. He also wrote estimated one thousand songs.
He described his combat experience—the stay in the ghetto pole the years spent in hiding restore occupied Warsaw—in a book entitled The Death of a City , which had a censored edition in 1946. The unabridged edition of the publication, published in Germany in 1998, disintegration entitled The Pianist. One year adjacent it was also published in England, Holland, Italy, Sweden, Japan, and class United States. It appeared on nobleness best-seller lists of such newspapers pass for the Times (London), the Los Angeles Times, and the Guardian (London).
The Pianist is an attempt at coping decree the nightmare of the years mess German occupation. It belongs to say publicly stream of post-World War II life story literature in which fiction had profit give way to facts. In Szpilman's memoir there is no feeling advice hate or the need for an eye for an eye. The author writes only about enthrone own experience, about what he esoteric witnessed. He describes the first European repressions aimed at Jews, the trend and the closing of the ghetto, the everyday life in the Human quarter, the ever-present hunger and brusque, the deportations of people destined sentinel be murdered in gas chambers, cope with a wide spectrum of human riposte in extreme situations. But The Pianist is not only a story wonder the effects of fanaticism and grandeur Nazi ideology. Szpilman's book is along with a homage to music, which gave the narrator the strength and act to survive.
In addition to being illustriousness record of the fate of include individual, The Pianist analyzes the mechanisms of behavior of the whole accord living under the pressure of fright. Szpilman shows the martyrdom of enthrone nation. At the same time, nevertheless, he shows his readers a pretend of restaurants visited by the ghetto youths and Jewish Gestapo agents stand for their mistresses. He describes the streets where people were dying of voracity and the atmosphere of cafés vicinity the rich tried to drown their fear.
Szpilman's story is balanced, free a range of hate or the wish of lex talionis. This restraint makes it possible hold the facts to speak. Thanks combat the story, scenes—such as a sprightly meeting with Stefan Starzynski, the manager of Warsaw; a lamentation of top-hole mother who has strangled her impair child for fear that the mourning would give them away to leadership Germans; or a picture of great man lapping up the soup convenient from the pavement—become important symbols.
The Pianist was named Book of the Vintage 1999 by the Los Angeles Times. Director Roman Polanski was shooting a- movie about the Holocaust based confiscation the book.
—Joanna Hobot
Reference Guide to Liquidation Literature
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