Wladyslaw szpilman biography pianist rubinstein wife

Wladyslaw Szpilman was a composer, a pianist, and an animator of cultural life. He studied in the Berlin Academy of Music.

Janina the pianist

In , after Hitler had gained power, Szpilman returned home to Warsaw. He worked as a pianist for Polish Radio, at the same time composing symphonic music and movie soundtracks. He also wrote about one thousand songs. He described his war experience—the stay in the ghetto and the years spent in hiding in occupied Warsaw—in a book entitled The Death of a City , which had a censored edition in The unabridged edition of the book, published in Germany in , is entitled The Pianist.

The Pianist is an attempt at coping with the nightmare of the years under German occupation. It belongs to the stream of post- World War II memoir literature in which fiction had to give way to facts. In Szpilman's memoir there is no feeling of hate or the need for revenge. The author writes only about his own experience, about what he had witnessed.

He describes the first German repressions aimed at Jews, the creation and the closing of the ghetto, the everyday life in the Jewish quarter, the ever-present hunger and death, the deportations of people destined to be murdered in gas chambers, and a wide spectrum of human reaction in extreme situations. But The Pianist is not only a story about the effects of fanaticism and the Nazi ideology.

Szpilman's book is also a homage to music, which gave the narrator the strength and motivation to survive. In addition to being the record of the fate of an individual, The Pianist analyzes the mechanisms of behavior of the whole community living under the pressure of fear.