In the most effective Judeo-Christian blend I can convey I give you John 11:35. Jesus wept.

As did I.

We watched this film in English and when I found out it was a book and that we owned it, I wanted to read it. The author is not an writer, he's a pianist, which meant that there weren't really any terribly gruesome descriptions or anything like that. I'm really glad that I watched the movie beforehand, because there were lots of things that I don't think I would have understood as well.

This book is so violent and horrific and brutal, and written in such a matter-of-fact way, that I had to block my heart off from feeling all that I could towards the people Szpilman describes just so I could read it.

He describes bodies upon bodies upon bodies. He describes the favoured way of Germans of killing children. He describes how he tries to pull a child through a hole in the ghetto wall, with a German on the other side, and he pulls so hard the child's spine shatters and he dies. The child had been trying to climb through after a bundle of items he had been smuggling in. A woman is sitting in the area the Jews are waiting in before being put on a train. She keeps saying "Why did I do it?" The protagonist learns the woman smothered her crying baby with her own hands to keep her and her husband from being discovered. The baby's death rattle is heard and gets them caught.

This man is unbelievably lucky. There are plenty of times in the novel where the group he is in is divided into two, and one half is told to lie down and then each person is shot in the back of the head. And it is by sheer luck that Szpilman is not on that side. Despite being a pianist, he is tenacious and resourceful and has an amazing instinct to survive. He takes sleeping pills in a burning building and survives. He is saved by one of the most heroic men I have ever heard of. Wilm Hosenfeld. This German soldier feeds him bread and jam for months. He gives him a coat. Hosenfeld is then caught by Russian soldiers and dies years later after undergoing torture.

This hero was a teacher, and used to carry two handkerchiefs in his pocket - one for himself, one for his pupils' snotty noses. I am proud to have heard of him fifty years after his death. I hope his small legacy lasts as long as the legacy of the Second World War.

The novel is told in an unvarnished, plain, melancholy but ultimately peaceful way. There is little desire for revenge. There are just little comments here and there about the fact that Szpilman's family are all sent to a concentration camp and are undoubtedly dead. Or small anecdotes about immensely talented musicians he knows and who are killed senselessly and arbitrarily.

This is a book to cherish.

[In a ghetto cafe] "On one occasion a guest sent a waiter over to tell me to stop playing... because the music made it impossible for him to test the gold twenty-dollar coins he had just acquired... he knocked the coins gently on the marble surface of the table, picked them up in his fingertips, raised them to his ear and listened hard to their ring - the only music in which he took any interest."

"The dignity the city had suddenly lost could not be restored. THAT was defeat."

Upon hearing a child has been taking: "I will not describe his parents' despair."

"The greatest ideal on earth is human love."

[An escapee] "showed my acquaintance a twenty-zloty note he had taken from the pocket of a corpse; he wrapped the note up carefully so that the stench of the corpses would cling to it, as a constant reminder to him to avenge his brothers."

Incredible book, stunning story and an important eyewitness account of the terror the Jewish people in the Warsaw ghetto endured. The pianist Wladislav Spielman was one of the only people who were still inside the city of Warsaw while it was burned to the ground by the Nazi occupation.
His survival story is absolutely unbelievable and it would take incredible courage and a lot of luck to achieve it.