The Pianist
Image taken from wikipedia.org
There have been many amazing stories of survival during the Holocaust. We have all heard of Elie Wiesel’s courageous fortitude as a prisoner in his book Night. Yet, there are numerous other stories that have not been told or are not very well-known. One such story is that of a Polish pianist named Wladislaw Szpilman.
Szpilman was born and raised in Warsaw, Poland. He made a living as a pianist on the Warsaw radio. When the Germans invaded Poland in 1939, he and his family were relocated to the Polish ghetto. Here they faced tremendous hardships due to small living spaces and barely any food. When his family was deported to a concentration camp, Szpilman was saved by a friend who pulled him out of the line and told him to run.
After surviving the deportation, he stayed in the ghetto and worked as a laborer carrying bricks. He eventually decided he wanted to escape the confines and feel life on the outside once again. With the help of a few other clever Jews, Szpilman escaped and took refuge in an abandoned apartment, where he survived for the majority of the war. When the war came to Warsaw, he escaped near death from the Germans on multiple occasions.
He spent the last days of the war living in an attic of the abandoned ghetto. A German battalion began to use the house he was hiding in as a headquarters. The commander took sympathy upon the weakened Szpilamn and gave him food and news of the war. When the Germans left, the Russians arrived in Warsaw where he was liberated and was able to play the piano once again.
