The Pianist (memoir)

The Pianist (memoir)

The Pianist is a memoir of the Polish composer of Jewish origin Władysław Szpilman, written and elaborated by the Polish author Jerzy Waldorff, who met Szpilman in 1938 in Krynica and became a friend of his. The book is written in the first person as the memoir of Szpilman. It tells how Szpilman survived the German deportations of Jews to extermination camps, the 1943 destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto, and the 1944 Warsaw Uprising during World War II.

The book, originally entitled the Death of a City (Śmierć miasta) was first published by the Polish publishing house Wiedza in 1946. In the introduction to its first edition Jerzy Waldorff informed that he wrote "as closely as he could" the story told to him by Szpilman, and that he used his brief notes in the process. In the same year, novelists Jerzy Andrzejewski and Czesław Miłosz wrote a screenplay based on it, for the movie called the Robinson of Warsaw (Robinson warszawski). In the next three years a number of drastic revisions were requested by the communist party prompting Miłosz to quit and withdraw his name from the credits. The movie was released during the Conference of Poland's Filmographers in Wisła on November 19–22, 1949 and met with new wave of political criticism. Further revisions were requested; new music commissioned, and the movie was re-released in popular movie theatres in December 1950 under a different title: the Unsubjugated City (Miasto nieujarzmione).

Because of Stalinist cultural policy, and the ostensibly "grey areas" in which Szpilman (Waldorff) asserted that not all Germans were bad and not all of the oppressed were good, the actual book remained sidelined for more than 50 years. The subsequent prints of Szpilman's memoir omitted the name of Waldorff altogether, and asserted that it was authored by the subject himself. Szpilman was not a writer, according to his own son Andrzej. The latest edition was slightly expanded by Andrzej Szpilman himself and printed under a different title, The Pianist.

In 1998, Szpilman’s son Andrzej Szpilman republished the memoir of his father’s, first in German as Das wunderbare Überleben ("The Miraculous Survival") and then in English as The Pianist. It was later published in more than 30 languages. In 2002, Roman Polanski directed a screen version, also called The Pianist, but Szpilman died before the film was completed. The movie won three Academy Awards, the British Academy of Film and Television Arts Best Film Award, and the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival.