There's not really much to say about this book. It needs no commentary. It's amazing that Szpilman survived the war at all. He depended on the kindness of others and some divine intervention, not to mention his own instincts. Szpilman's story is an incredibly powerful one.

An intense, deeply personal and unforgettable book.

Highly recommended, and worthy to be on the shelf with works by Wiesel and Frankl.

As the life of a piano-player goes, Szpilman's was a good one. He lived in Warsaw with his loving and supportive family, making music and enjoying relationships with other musicians. And then Poland becomes a part of Nazi Germany and Szpilman's entire world turns upside down in the worst way. His beloved Warsaw is divided into the "Aryan" side and an extensive Ghetto, which bursts at the seams with the Jewish population of the entire city. Szpilman watches as everything he knows is slowly and systematically destroyed under the thumb of the Nazis. Soon, Warsaw is no longer the city he knew and there isn't safety anywhere.

This is an incredible, true story. Written right after the world, apparently while still in shock, Szpilman writes in first person in a detached and yet brutally honest way. He explores his own emotions as well as he describes all that happens to him and his family. There is no overarching plot, nothing he is trying to prove. It's just his story, his own experience, in all its horrifying detail. What makes it unique among the books I've read of the time period is that he never leaves Warsaw during the war - he manages to escape the concentration camps all together. It is astonishing to me how he does it and there were a few twists along the way that make his life really feel like a movie. As a witness to the atrocities of Warsaw as well as to the resilience of the people of this beleaguered city, The Pianist is a very good read.

A man is playing Chopin's Nocturne in C# Minor on the piano on September 23, 1939 in a Polish Radio broadcasting building. The Germans have invaded Warsaw and the broadcast is interrupted and the lives of people in Warsaw are changed forever.

The man playing the piano was Jewish and his name was Wladyslaw Szpilman. He turns out to be one of the few Jewish survivors of the war. To say his music saved him is true, while his family, with him included are about to be shipped off to Treblinka and exterminated, a music loving policeman grabs Wladyslaw from the crowd and thus saves his life, but it is excruciating to Wladyslaw to lose his family. The work to learn how to play the piano to the degree that Wladyslaw did is an extremely long and patience filled road, which I am sure molded Wladyslaw's character and made it possible for him to survive the war. Wladyslaw often retreated into his mind to survive the long hours and days without end, he went over measure by measure music scores in his head. While he starved and lost touch with humanity (if it still existed where he was) he still used his mind and his music training was a blessing. He often contemplated suicide, but never committed the act.

When Warsaw's Jewish ghetto is demolished and Wladyslaw is barely hanging on in hiding a German officer named Wilm Hosenfeld finds him and feeds him and brings him eiderdown and encourages him to hang on. Wladyslaw survives and lives on to write his memoirs for us to read and to study and to learn from.

The diary of Wilm Hosenfeld at the end of Wladyslaw's memoir is intriguing. It is a relief to see a hope in humanity, to read his words and how he felt about his country being at war and what they were doing to the Jews.

The book ends six years later with Wladyslaw playing Chopin's Nocturne in C# Minor. Of 3.5 million Jews at the beginning of the war in Poland only 240,000 remained at the end, Wladyslaw was one of the survivors.

A very moving tale that really manages to capture the extent to which one man's survival of the Holocaust was due to good luck and the intervention of a few decent people. Highly recommended.

L