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Summary: RARE LOOK AT LIFE IN THE WARSAW GHETTO
Review: The are several books detailing the horrors of the Holocaust and although each and every person's story is important, this book is very unique. One man's story of survival in Warsaw during World War II offers a new perspective on the Holocaust. Although this perspective is none the less chilling, it does help break stereotypes which continue today and shows that good and evil existed among both the German and Jewish populations.
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Summary: An Unforgettable Story of Survival
Review: The Pianist is a moving eye-witness account of one man's survival in Nazi-occupied Warsaw. Wladyslaw Szpilman--a Jew and famed pianist for Polish Radio--relates his memories of the unutterable and unrelenting horrors of the Holocaust in Warsaw--the random executions, starving children, mass deportations--with a sober, almost uncanny detachment. And though the machinery of extermination is all around him, he somehow evades his pursuers through friends willing to risk their lives to hide him. His father, mother, two sisters and a brother are all deported and sent to their deaths in concentration camp. And, when it appears, near war's end, that he is at the end of luck, trying to still keep himself concealed in a part of Warsaw that his been systematically destroyed by the Germans, he finds an unexpected saviour: Wilm Hosenfeld, a German Army captain who, rather than kill Szpilman, provides him with a hiding place and necessities to kept him alive until the Soviet Army finally liberates the city. This slim volume written with in a kind of terse, no-nonsense style that will keep the reader riveted to each episode in Szpilman's incredible Odyssey, is probably one of the best books I have read in the area of Holocaust literature.
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Summary: ESCAPING THE LIONS IN THE COLISSEUM THAT WAS WARSAW
Review: On my first visit to Warsaw my 81-year old cousin, a friend of the author, recommended this book. I was told that as Smierc Miasta it was poorly written: in English Anthea Bell has made it poetic, and truly evocative.The story of the herding into the ghetto; the parasitical class conspiring with the Nazis to be at the top of the pyre, gaining extra weeks of life. The symbolic of slicing a toffee as a last meal at Umschlagplatz before the family go off to cremation; the escape by random selection of the author; the hiding, the fear, the isolation and sense of being alone. The suicidal streak, and yet survival. To hide, and yet be discovered against the backdrop of the Warsaw Rising of August 1944, and to be discovered by a German Officer....and fed, and saved. An officer who lost his own life in a Soviet camp. The path to redemption of the German officer, ashamed of what his people have done, and saving one life amidst the loss of so many. Do not forget 250.000 people died in that August Rising, and the rest taken to Pruschkow for transport to concentration camps. It is a story of poignancy: you begin to wonder what he has survived for; family gone, friends gone; city gone; culture gone. How does one rebuild after peering into the Abyss ? And, it should not be forgotten - visit Pawiak, the remnants of the Nazi Gaol - 40.000 Poles were executed for hiding Jews in a country where whole apartment blocks were executed for common humanity. This was the story of a Polish Jew, a pianist trained in Germany, and the utter barbarity of demonic forces of destruction.
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Summary: Wrenching personal account of incredible happenings
Review: As a child of Survivors, I've had my fill of Holocaust tales, but this was the choice of my book club, so I reluctantly picked it up. And was immediately drawn into it. The author tells a story that is so full of what we, from our comfortable distance, would term impossibilities that I found myself becoming numb to the next horror. It's hard for us to imagine events like this - I've often tried to imagine what it would be like, what I would do, if my government turned on me with such murderous intent, and find that I have no frame of reference through which to process that idea. Yet millions of people found themselves in that situation, in which the unthinkable became commonplace. And they dealt with it, as best they could, until they died, some sooner, some later, but all with the knowledge that they had done the best they could in a world turned upside down, for which nothing in human experience could have prepared them. Szpilman tells his story in what appears to be an entirely objective, emotionless way, except for occasional flashes of fury or biting wit. This is an account of What Happened, not how he felt about it. That makes for strange reading; What Happened was so extraordinary that it's hard to imagine that he could just write it all down without more emotion. But he wrote this book for his own purposes, rather than publication, right after the events described herein occured, and continued to live in Warsaw and continue his work, so I assume that it was written for cathartic effect - to let the paper be his memory so he could get on with living. Toward the end, as he writes of his succession of hiding places and deepening hunger, I found myself rushing to get through it - I was done with burned out buildings and scavenging for oatmeal and fly-studded water - I wanted to know how he survived. The account of his meeting the SS officer who saved him was entirely unexpected and helped put the rest of the story into sharper focus. In a way, it personalized the entire story - it ceased to be yet another too-familiar account of extreme privation and became one of personal redemption. And it made his assertion that he was the last person left alive in Warsaw when the Germans retreated more believable. There are a lot of Holocaust survival stories out there, and they are all harrowing. This one is equally so, and made the more so by the objective way in which it is told - the horror is simply stated, and the interpretation of it is left to the reader - and our own imaginations are much more powerful than other peoples' statements. This is a book that will stay with you for a long. time.
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Summary: A life set to music
Review: As a Jew I can rarely bring myself to read books on the Holocaust, as they are usually so full of despair. But I am glad I made an exception for this book. It is among the handful of truly special books I have read. One to treasure and remember, and pass on. It will hold it's place on your bookshelf like the score of great music, or a classic photograph. It is less a book than a life rendered vividly and sensitively on your imagination. It is a read which arrested me with it's first few pages, and which enthralled me with it's hollow beauty. It describes a bitter life, yet one where there are still kernels of surprising sweetness. It sets a powerful record of the ability of 'ordinary' human survival. The author was no hero, no role model, and had little except for his decency, talent for music, and strange unexplained desire to survive. Perhaps it's noblest moments are where it sets our slanted popular histories straight. There were good Germans and self-sacrifcing Poles. There were unnumbered hundreds of thousands who put themselves at risk, and ignored the anti-semitism all around them - to help Jews. The history of these ordinary people - pople who were neither , rich like Schindler, nor well placed like Foley - rests largely unrecorded. The deafening silence of our historians about this ordinary heroism is a disgrace to all of us. This short book begins to undo this great injustice.
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Summary: Do You Like Being Amazed?
Review: Out of literally millions of Polish Jews this one man, the author,survived and stayed in the same geographical place while all others were sent to death camps. This is his story of how he survived and it is a dandy. I will never understand how other human beings can become so brutal and mean to their brethern. This is a small book with a big story.
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Summary: 'The Pianist' plays out as Polanski pic
Review: PARIS/REUTERS, January 14, 2000 - Roman Polanski has acquired film rights to Wladyslaw Szpilman's autobiographical bestseller "The Pianist." The book details musician Szpilman's survival in Warsaw between 1939 and 1945 and was hailed by the Los Angeles Times as the "best nonfiction of 1999." Polanski is set to adapt and direct the pic, with Paris-based Studio Canal Plus financing the development and co-producing. "Pianist" has echoes of his own youth in Poland's war-torn Krakow. "For many years I have been encouraged to find a project that relates to my personal history but, until 'The Pianist,' I have never read a piece so moving that I felt I had to bring it to the screen and, in doing so, face again that nightmarish period."
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Summary: WHERE IS THE ORIGINAL REVIEW ? THERE IS ONLY THE ADDENDUM
Review: Why did you post my Addendum but not the original review
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Summary: Addendum to my review posted earlier
Review: Of course the original title was not Stare Miast, but SMIERC MIASTA please adjust the text of my review accordingly.
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Summary: WARSAW - Nazi Occupation to Soviet Liberation
Review: My Polish cousins know the author: one recommended the book as i wanted to know about their lives under Occupation. Anthea Bell translated it beautifully: I hear in Polish it is not well-written as Stare Miast. It was a human story; all too human, the parasitical nature of the Nazi inspuired feeding chain in the Ghetto as man is set against man until they are exterminated in turn, each living a few more weeks. The quiet dignity of cutting a toffee at Umschlagplatz. The humanity and shame of a German soldier in juxtaposition to the barbarity of the rank and file. I was left wondering: how had he survived this madness; and then, I wondered what is it you live for when you have been denuded of all that is dear ? I am overwhelmed by the "beauty" of this short book: it says so much, so simply, and it makes the everyday "banality of evil" so clear, so vivid, and so hurtful in the present day. My 81 year-old cousin recommended this book, about a man he knew well, and who had lived through this mess himself. It is a pity a film of quality, simple magnificence like Spencer Tracy in "The Seventh Cross" was not made about this.
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