The Pianist by Wladyslaw Szpilman

[SoonerShankle]

The Pianist: The Extraordinary True Story of One Man's Survival in Warsaw, 1939-1945 by Wladyslaw Szpilman is a truly amazing book.

The book is a quick read (I read it in two days despite having a full load at work and home). I was quickly absorbed into Szpilman's life as he recounted the brutality of the Nazi regime in Poland, and I actually learned something new about the German occupation of Poland (how they used mercs and how the liquidation of the ghettos took place systematically instead of all at once).

Reading the first person narrative was only part of the power of this book. The true power of this book lies in that the memories are relatively recent, as Szpilman wrote the book right after the war instead of decades later. It reminds me more of Anne Frank's diary in that it feels more a record of the time than a memoir.

I highly recommend this book for lovers of nonfiction.

[Warpy]

1. I'll look for it

because I adored the movie made from that book. It really caught what was happening, and how soon people got used to the most horribly grotesque conditions. It showed why people who had been ordinary citizens took so long to fight back, and just how awful things had to become before they did.

It's quite a cautionary tale. The problem is that too many people believe it can't happen here. It can. It is beginning to.

[sui generis]

2. If this is the same one adapted for the movie

I hated the movie.

I know it was autobiographical, but without his internal commentary on the observation of the events around him such as you would find in a book, the movie was just a subjective milieu story, and his character didn't grow or change or even do much more than just "get by" until the end of the story. It felt incomplete, and I didn't ever really "connect" to the guy.

Although I enjoy historical detail, a STORY has to have character movement, not just background.

And you can't just sit down after a year and tear through the Chopin Ballade in G Minor on a piano that hasn't been in a controlled environment. It would be like doing a gold medal gymnastics routine on a sheet of plywood without working out or even stretching first . . . for about a year.

[SoonerShankle]

3. Szpilman discusses the piano's condition...

in the book. As well as his own condition. He had not played in two years when Hosenfeld asked him to play. The book also contains some of Hosenfeld's diary excerpts. One of the morals of the book is that in desparate times there really are no stereotypes -- there were good Germans and bad Jews, etc. It is an amazing book.

[Sequoia]

4. You might like "Five Marks", by James Jes Harmon

FIVE MARKS began, with urging from my beloved wife, shortly after I was honorably discharged from the U.S. Army. Many tides and versions of the German’s barbaric crusade followed through the years. So it is, my final work may add a few revelations to that ghastly history not heretofore available.

Facts can be soft as picked cotton or granite hard. Still, the truth is indivisible or it is nothing.

Holocaust is a word I associated with fire – ultimate, consummate destruction.

German death camps, designed and constructed with precision by architects and engineers – Treblinki, Dachau, Maidonek and many other death camps defiled and poisoned the ground, the air, the dead and the living.

<snip>

http://www.authorhouse.com/BookStore/ItemDetail.aspx?bookid=15816

I spoke to the author about his book about a year ago. I wanted him to come on our show for an interview but he's down in Southern Cal. Sharp as a tack though. This is a very good story. The people of Poland would not eat food from their gardens because of the stoot from the death camps. Horrid.

[SoonerShankle]

5. Sounds interesting...

thanks for the reference. I'll look into it.

[applegrove]

6. Too sad. Perhaps in a few decades I'll be up for that. n/t