I have always reacted intensely to war stories. No matter how much you read about it in textbooks, nothing makes you experience the horror of war quite as intensely as the real life stories of people who have experienced it. And if you were Jewish and living in Poland during the Second World War, the stories don’t get much worse than yours; although one can never tell with War. The movie The Pianist tells one such story – that of Władysław Szpilman; and the man who made the film, Polish director Roman Polański, has lived through another.
The Pianist is the screen adaptation of the autobiography of Władysław Szpilman, the famous Polish pianist. It is an understated, yet intensely moving account of Szpilman’s survival through the Jewish ghettoes of Warsaw, his separation from his family when he miraculously escapes boarding the train to the concentration camps, and his desperate attempts to survive in hiding as the War goes on. While Szpilman’s story is riveting in itself, what makes the movie so painfully memorable, is the details. Those few second-long scenes, which have nothing to do with the plot as such, but make the sufferings of the Jews so viscerally real for the viewer. And these details come from somewhere within the dark recesses of Roman Polański’s mind, where he has stored the haunting memories of his own childhood in war-torn Poland.
Born to a Polish-Jewish father and a Russian-Catholic mother in Paris, Polański and his parents moved to Kraków in 1936, and were living there when Hitler marched into Poland with his troops in 1939. At the age of six, Polański, like millions of other Jews, was forced to live with his family in the Jewish ghettoes of Kraków. As a boy, he was made to witness his parents’ deportation to concentration camps and was left to fend for himself for the remaining years of the war. In The Pianist, it is these war-time experiences that Polański has drawn on to provide a harrowing portrait of the brutalities of War in Poland as the setting for Szpilman’s story.
The scenes that linger in your mind after having watched the film, the ones which make you shudder at the sheer inhumanity of the times, are instances that Polański has witnessed and experienced first-hand. The scene where a young boy who is attempting to escape through the gutter with food stolen for his family is beaten to death even as Szpilman is trying to rescue him, must reverberate somewhere with Polański’s own memories of slipping through Kraków’s sewers with gangs of Jewish children to steal food for his own starving family. The stories of Nazi brutalities are a re-telling of the experiences shared by both, Polański as well as Szpilman. In his autobiography, Polański recounts one instance in particular:
“I had just been visiting my grandmother… when I received a foretaste of things to come. At first I didn't know what was happening. I simply saw people scattering in all directions. Then I realized why the street had emptied so quickly. Some women were being herded along it by German soldiers. Instead of running away like the rest, I felt compelled to watch. One older woman at the rear of the column couldn't keep up. A German officer kept prodding her back into line, but she fell down on all fours… Suddenly a pistol appeared in the officer's hand. There was a loud bang, and blood came welling out of her back. I ran straight into the nearest building, squeezed into a smelly recess beneath some wooden stairs, and didn't come out for hours. I developed a strange habit: clenching my fists so hard that my palms became permanently calloused. I also woke up the next morning to find that I had wet my bed.”
At the end of the War, both Szpilman and Polański had managed to survive. They had both lived at the mercy of old acquaintances or strangers, as scavengers, tramps, always on the edge of starvation, in a desperate attempt at survival, through the years that would come to be known as one of the most horrifying period for Jews in human history. Both survived, moved on and eventually went on to flourish in their respective fields; but their experiences of the War always stayed with them. It is this similar trajectory of their lives, perhaps, that drew Polański to direct The Pianist. In all the 26 films that Polański made before taking on Szpilman’s story, not one film did he make with the theme of War, despite it being the context of a large and significant part of his childhood. But when he first read Szpilman’s book, he is reported to have said, “This is the story I’ve been looking for, for years…”
Almost 40 years after he left Poland, Polański returned to the country where he grew up, through The Pianist. What the world went on to read in history books, Polański recounted from the first person perspective of both himself, as well as Szpilman. For the first time, he re-visited the horrors of his childhood through his cinema, telling the world, in the process, the story of Władysław Szpilman, of Roman Polański and the tragedy of the Jewish people of Poland.
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