Heartbreaking, poignant, and thought provoking especially in today’s era in which we swore we’d never forget what happened then.

The Pianist is a memoir by Wladyslaw Szpilman, a Polish Jewsish Pianist chronicling his sometimes surreal and miraculous survival after being marched into the Warsaw ghetto by the German occupiers.
As Szpilman, a pianist in a café in Warsaw, begins describing the survival during the early days of the German takeover, a melancholic despair sets in.
‘I remember a whole series of days when we had to stay in bed because the temperature in the flat was too cold to survive.’
While his entire family is killed, he goes on to have one of the most remarkable and incredulous survival in the Warsaw ghetto.

Each page reveals newer brutalities, horrors and cruelty.

It is the last stretch of August 1945 which is the most gut wrenching. With defeat looming near, Hitler orders Warsaw to be razed.

When the entire city of Warsaw is emptied, he is hiding alone.

At this time he is hiding alone running from his burnt apartment to the remains of a hospital (drinking flies-infested water and molded bread) and back to the smoldering apartment …… a frightening account of a lonely, human, anguished existence.

But when you have to live, you live and survive to tell the tale.

His narrow lucky escape each time affirms our faith in the power above us and the human instinct of survival.

The book ends with a moving diary of Wilm Hosenfield, the German officer, his saviour in his final nerve wrecking days in hiding who smuggles him food and keeps his existence a secret.

What really separates this book for me from the others I have read on the Holocaust are two things.

First is the setting. My major books have centred around the concentration camps, but this book is about the ghetto.

Secondly, what really surprised me and made me curious was the calm detachment with which Wladyslaw Spzilman has written the book.

Survival. Betrayal. Kindness. Deceit. Cruelty.

Hunger. Malnutrition. Sickness. Freezing temperatures.

He faces this all, but writes about this in a matter-of-fact tone. Maybe because a sense of shock yet prevailed while writing this…this memoir was released soon after the end of World War II in 1946 as “Death of a City”. The wounds were yet raw and emotions yet on a leash.

Turned into a film by Roman Polanski, (which I have not seen), this book is a must-read, a lesson on human endurance.

I read Anne Frank back in school in 2002 or 2003. Since then, I've read Weisel, Levi, and Spiegelman. I've even read Frankl, Sebald and Styron. If I had gotten to Szpilman's The Pianist earlier, I can see myself giving it 5 stars. It's a very good book. But I've read very good books before. And I seem to have reached a threshold.

I read the book after watching the movie, because The Pianist is among my top three favorite movies.

Needless to say, the book was equally haunting. Although the movie was impeccable, Szpilman's words in the book touched me more than his character in the movie, which is a big deal.

The book is a cold reminder of Nazi atrocities and everyone should read it once in their life.

Desperately sad yet also positive in that it tells the strength of the human spirit amidst unbelievable suffering. There is a very interesting extra section that makes this more than just a holocaust memoir. The book is very well crafted and reads well in translation.