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A New Film Tells the Story of a Musician Who Survived the Silence of the Holocaust

27/12/2002 |

 

Roman Polanski's new film The Pianist isn't about music — it is about memory, with music as a potent leitmotif. The director based his hauntingly realistic film on a memoir by Polish pianist/composer Wladislaw Szpilman, a Jew who survived the Warsaw Ghetto during World War II through incredible luck, personal strength and the bravery of people who helped hide him — including a German army officer.

Winner of the Palme d'Or for best picture at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival, The Pianist opens in New York and Los Angeles on 27 Dececember, with wider U.S. release in January. The film stars American actor Adrien Brody as Szpilman; the hands you see on the keyboard, though, belong to a contemporary Polish pianist, Chopin specialist Janusz Olejniczak; he also provides the playing heard on film and on the Sony Classical soundtrack album.

The music of Chopin is integral to Szpilman's story. On 23 September 1939, he performed the last live music heard on Polish Radio — Chopin's Nocturne in C-sharp minor — before the Nazi blitzkrieg knocked the network off the air. Although he played salon piano for money during the Ghetto's early days, Szpilman was later forced to abandon music-making through the rest of his horrific ordeal — except for the silent, mental rehearsal of his entire repertoire during long episodes of isolation.

Near the end of the war, though, Szpilman's long-dormant musicianship helped save his life. While holed up in the winter of 1944 in one of the few houses left standing in the Ghetto, Szpilman was discovered by a German Wehrmacht officer, Wilm Hosenfeld; the sympathetic captain asked Szpilman to prove that he was an artist by playing the piano still in the villa's parlor. Despite the cold and his extreme privation, Szpilman made his hands remember Chopin's C-sharp minor Nocturne. Hosenfeld became the Polish pianist's secret savior in the war's final days, bringing him food and keeping his hiding place safe.

Szpilman was the only member of his family to survive the war: his mother, father, two sisters and younger brother all perished in Nazi death camps. Hosenfeld himself survived the war, only to die in a Soviet prison camp in 1952 despite efforts by Szpilman and others to negotiate his release. Szpilman was not the only Jew helped by Hosenfeld. The captain's early disillusionment with the "National Socialist revolution" and his revulsion at the Nazi's Final Solution are made plain in his wartime diaries, excerpts from which are now included as a postscript in Szpilman's book.

After the war, Szpilman inaugurated the restored Polish Radio with the same Chopin nocturne that had been interrupted by the Luftwaffe six years before. He wrote his memoir immediately, publishing it under the title Death of a City. But Polish Communist authorities soon suppressed the book, and the ban lasted for decades. Szpilman's son Andrzej finally arranged for its republication in 1999 as The Pianist: The Extraordinary True Story of One Man's Survival in Warsaw, 1939–45. A bestseller in Poland, the book was then translated into German, French and English.

In the years after the war, Szpilman served as director of music for Polish Radio and resumed his career as a concert pianist and composer. Many of his songs became pop standards in Poland. He also toured the world with the Warsaw Piano Quintet, which he founded in 1963 with violinist Bronislaw Gimpel. It was in Los Angeles while on one of these tours that he first met Polanski, long before the director conceived the film. Sadly, Szpilman did not live to see the movie completed; he died in 2000 at the age of 88, survived by his wife and two middle-aged sons.

Polanski himself was a refugee from the Nazi invasion of Poland, surviving the bombing of Warsaw and escaping the Kraków Ghetto at the age of seven by squeezing through a hole in a barbed-wire fence. In the film's production notes, he says that "avoiding Hollywood-style make-believe" was paramount for him, adding that he remembers the war years "all too well" and that his memories were integral to visualizing Szpilman's memoirs. In adapting the book with playwright/screenwriter Ronald Harewood, Polanski could also "rely on the authenticity of Szpilman's account. He wrote it just after the war; perhaps that's why the story is so strong, so genuine, so fresh. He describes the reality of this period with surprising — almost cool and scientific — objectivity. There are decent Poles and evil Poles in his book, decent and evil Jews, decent and evil Germans."

Olejniczak, the soundtrack pianist, points out another authentic aspect of the film. "It was a very good idea not to put too much music in the movie," he says, "because it is a story about silence, about a musician who cannot play, who is forced to live in silence. It is almost like being dead for him."

The Sony soundtrack album features Olejniczak playing nocturnes, ballades and other pieces by Chopin; also included is a theme from the incidental score by Polish composer Wojciech Kilar, as well as a 1948 performance of a Chopin mazurka by Szpilman himself. The media attention promised by a Polanski film has also led to other CD releases and a new Boosey & Hawkes publishing deal for Szpilman's own compositions. A Hip-O/Universal album by Canadian singer Wendy Lands features a selection of Szpilman's romantic songs, with newly written English lyrics and contemporary pop arrangements. Out in Europe via Sony (and due in the U.S. from the independent BCI Eclipse label), there is a collection of vintage Polish Radio recordings by Szpilman, including his Gershwin-esque Concertino for Piano and Orchestra and pieces by Bach, Debussy, Rachmaninoff and Chopin. And Olejniczak, a key contributor to Opus 111's anniversary Chopin edition of 1999, has had his two-disc set of Chopin polonaises and mazurkas reissued by Naïve.

Szpilman's son Andrzej praises the performances of Adrien Brody as his father and Thomas Kretschmann as Hosenfeld, a person to whom he feels "a special emotional connection — I am very close to this memory of a man I never met." And he calls Polanski's film "a masterpiece of realism." He adds, "Some people I know who were there in those days said to me, 'I had to keep reminding myself that it wasn't a documentary.'"

The film, Andrzej Szpilman reports, has been a hit in Poland. "Since September, more than one million people have seen The Pianist, and only 400,000 saw [the Spielberg thriller] Minority Report. I think the timing is appropriate, too. With the growing intolerance in parts of Europe, the film can be another important reminder of where such feelings can lead."

Bradley Bambarger
andante.com