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A review by korrick
The Pianist: The Extraordinary True Story of One Man's Survival in Warsaw, 1939-1945 by Władysław Szpilman
4.0
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.
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.