The Pianist

Books that are turned into films always excite debate, usually over whether the writer has had justice done to his words. Roman Polanski's film of the same name has been an overwhelming advantage for this little-known and tragic memoir, both because the movie has been acclaimed and also because anything that can have helped bring the book to the attention of a wider audience has to be a good thing. Stalin's often-quoted remark that one man's death is a tragedy while that of a million men is a statistic is particularly true when today's readers struggle to engage with the reality of the events of the Second World War. The numbing statistics and the sheer horror of the millions wiped out in the concentration camps is rendered more immediate when translated into individual stories. Szpilman was a classical pianist working for Polish Radio at the beginning of the war. His life was an ordinary middle-class Jewish one, in which the importance of culture and family values was paramount. Szpilman himself escaped Auschwitz, pulled back from the transport convoy at the last moment by an unseen hand. But he took little comfort in his narrow escape, as his father, mother, brother and two sisters were wrenched away from him to die there, their last family meal a shared bar of chocolate cut up with a penknife. In sparse, unemotional language, Szpilman explains how, as the ghetto was shut off from the rest of Warsaw under German occupation and gradually emptied, normal lives became increasingly desperate, people fighting over scraps of food and selling off their family treasures, all the while holding on to the hope that the Allies would defeat Germany before any more of their people died. After his family were taken, he managed to eke out a strange existence, more or less on his own in the abandoned ghetto, moving from burned-out building to burned-out building and foraging for scraps of food. Just as it seems his luck - if you can call it that - is about to run out, a platoon of German soldiers set up base in the latest abandoned building he has chosen. Yet, incredibly, the first German he encounters is a kindly former schoolteacher, Wilm Hosenfeld, who was sickened by the actions of his own side and not only helped Szpilman escape, but also brought him food and even an eiderdown. This edition of the book, which should be compulsory reading, contains excerpts from Hosenfeld's diaries, and a foreword by Szpilman's son. (Kirkus UK)