Excellent 1st person story of surviving the Holocaust. Better than the movie.

Everything about this book was really really devastating and heartbreaking. It's really ugly how low can human go and be. The amount of brutality that they used against an entire nation was just so sick. They had no mercy in a shocking ways. Not for the elders not for the women and not even for the children. They slaughter them without any hesitation, as if they were nothing. As If they've never been humans before. It's really scary to see how disgusting and ferocious people can be. And the ways that they were creating to torture and scare an innocent beings , just because they can, it just makes me sick to my stomach.
I've read a book about a survivors befor, but this one uncovered and revealed the nasty truth as the way it was, ugly, brutal and merciless.

Five stars because I will think about this for the rest of my life.

I read The Pianist in less than 24 hours. I had work to do. I did not do it. I just read and cried for like an entire day.

It seems insane to make a movie about this and make money off of someone else's nightmare of a life, but...that's the way of the world I guess. I recommend this to anyone who enjoys knowing things, but I also urge you to read it at home and not on your lunch break. Too upsetting.

3.5/5

We're nearly halfway through 2024, and that's always a good time to change up the reading trajectory a tad. While I'm forever continuing to make my way through the oldest parts of my TBR, I decided to reign in my public library loans balancing act and target some of the most popular works in my personal collection. This particular piece is that special combination of topics and motifs that both attracts and repels, which explains why it's spent the last eleven years clinging to my shelves. The horrors of facts, the transcendence of aesthetics, the unusual view of the Holocaust from outside of the camps, and then there's Szpilman's writing in and of itself, which if the translation can be trusted strikes that devastatingly enthralling balance between objective observation and subjective despair. Add in the final, almost fairy tale denouement, as well as the film adaptation (whose mixed reputation due to its sordid director still hasn't completely killed my curiosity) that spawned this edition, and you have a work that can be easily argued to be a hallmark of 20th century literature. And yet, the splicing together of the notebooks of the German official who essentially saved Szpilman after (because?) the latter could still perform Chopin (whose antisemitism was not insignificant) after years of being hounded by genocide knocked down my rating a half star due to the discombobulation and, may I even say it, tackiness of the editorial decision. All in all, this is another work that recounts a time when the inhumanity of 16th century colonialism met the brutality of 20th century technology, and while I'm not so quick to pin the blame on communism and whatever 'sexual sterility threatening the German race' that officer was talking about (or refuse to see the commonalities between that time and now), I did learn something about urban warfare, fascism, and other symptoms of a civilization that turns Chronos when faced with the future. Whether the world has learned from this remains to be seen.

Of the sixteen thousand Aryans remembered in Yad Vashem, the central Jewish place of remembrance in Jerusalem, one-third were Polish. Why work it out so accurately? Because 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.

Ay, realmente amé esta historia. Luego de verme la película El Pianista (2002) tenía que leerme el libro. Tanto el libro como la película fueron lo mejor que me ha pasado en estos últimos días, agradezco a la vida haberme topado con ellos.

After reading the book, I definitely would like to watch the movie. A good read. Its easy to understand, but the accounts are very vivid and real.

5.7.2007
Szpilman, Wladyslaw: Pianisti (The Pianist - The extraordinary story of one man's survival in Warsaw 1939-45 / Smierc Miasta, 1946/1998)
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- Jälleen juutalaisten selviytymistarina natsien vallan alla Puolassa. Silti tuo edelleen lisää näkökulmaa ym. omalla henk.koht. tarinallaan. Leffa oli hieno, vaik asioita oli tietty hieman muutettu.