Adrien Brody accepting the Oscar Award:

..."This film would not be possible without the blueprint provided by Wladyslaw Szpilman. This is a tribute to his survival"...

THE PIANIST; By Wladyslaw Szpilman; Picador

'The Pianist,' Wladyslaw Szpilman's remarkable memoir of his survival in Warsaw between the years 1939 and 1945, is a significant contribution to the literature of remembrance, a document of lasting historical and human value. Unforgivably overlooked since its publication (in Polish) in 1946 and translated into English just now for the first time, the book is a relative rarity: an account of the Holocaust written in the immediate aftermath of the experience itself. It has all the rawness and specificity of horrors painfully and uncomprehendingly withstood and afterward just as uncomprehendingly --but necessarily-- recorded. Writing this book would seem to have been a further act of survival by a man who performed more of them in six years than most human beings do in a lifetime. At the center of this book is of the largest hows in all of human inquiry: how one people set about systematically and relentlessly annihilating another. It is a how that Szpilman tells with clarity, intelligence, candor, courage. It is the how that must be told again and again and again.

There are many ways to read a book about the Holocaust, and one of them, surely, inevitably, is to try to answer the unanswerable: What makes one man endure when so many others succumb? We can only learn from those who testify; the others of course are mute. From Szpilman's testimony we learn this: It is an ineffable and wholly unpredictable mixture of fate, determination, accident, instinct. To know Wladyslaw Szpilman is, in the most hopeless of contexts, to know a modicum of hope. L.A.Times Sunday Book Review, December 5, 1999

Three personal favourites just make it into this category. In a year of glorious books, the one which made the deepest impression on me was the shortest, Wladyslaw Szpilman's The Pianist (Phoenix), which tells how, hidden in an attic, he survived the destruction of the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw. It is republished together with the diary of Wilm Hosenfeld, the German officer who saved his life. Szpilman's memoir haunts the mind in tiny, searing cameos; a rich guest in a cafe asks the pianist to stop playing so that he can test the ring of his gold coins on a table; Szpilman's father, a violinist, bows to every German officer he can find, bemusing them with his smiling courtesy; pushed to one side as his family are hustled onto a death-truck, Szpilman hears the sound behind closed windows, "the twittering of caged birds in deadly peril". You'll cry - I did - but please read it. by MIRANDA SEYMOUR London, 28.11.1999 

THE GUARDIAN 

Books of the year

For someone who consumes history on TV, Jeffrey Shandler's While America Watches was illuminating and complemented Peter Novick's provocative essay The Holocaust in American Life. Wladyslaw Szpilman's memoir of life and death in the Warsaw Ghetto, The Pianist, is a miniature masterpiece to set alongside Victor Klemperer's nightmare epic To the Bitter End, his diary of existence in Dresden 1942-45. I appreciated Suzanne Glass's thoughtful first novel, The Interpreter, and I am enjoying Gotham , by Edwin Burrows and Mike Wallace, a wonderful romp through New York's history. December 3, 1999 by David Cesarani

The Economist

Our reviewers' favourites

Our correspondents choose what they consider the finest of those published this year 

THE PIANIST: SURVIVING THE HORROR OF WARSAW, 1939-45 By Wladyslaw Szpilman , Picador;

The last live broadcast on Polish radio in 1939, a piano piece played by Wladyslaw Szpilman, was interrupted by German shelling. The same pianist played the same piece when broadcasting resumed six years later. Mr Szpilman's account of the years in between is a tribute to the power of description and of music.

LIBRARY JOURNAL

Best Books of 1999

Since its inception in 1985, LJ's Best Books list has aimed to provide an end-of-the-year overview of the most interesting and important books the year had to offer. The list has averaged 30 to 35 titles, but this year -- as befits the end of the millennium -- it totals a grand 55. The Book Review editors found a wide range of books they were eager to share and noted some intriguing pairings: John Keegan's and Niall Ferguson's divergent studies of World War II, for instance, and novels by relative newcomers Diane Leslie and Frederick Reuss that look at the world from a child's cockeyed yet haunted perspective. With the rest of the list, these books represent a treat for every dedicated reader.

Szpilman, Wladyslaw. The Pianist: The Extraordinary True Story of One Man's Survival in Warsaw, 1939-1945. Picador: St. Martin's. ISBN 0-312-24415-0. $23.

Szpilman's memoir of life in the Warsaw ghetto is remarkable not only for the heroism of its protagonists but for the author's lack of bitterness, even optimism, in recounting the events. Written and published in a short run in Poland soon after the war, this first translation maintains a freshness of experience lacking in many later, more ruminative Holocaust memoirs. by Eric Bryant, Barbara Hoffert, Rebecca Miller, Nathan Ward, & Wilda Williams January 1, 2000

WLADYSLAW SZPILMAN WINS

London - 3rd May 2000 - The judges of the annual Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Literary Prizes tonight awarded this year's Non Fiction Prize to Wladyslaw Szpilman for The Pianist (Phoenix / Golancz).

The decision was announced by author and broadcaster Frank Delaney, chairman of the judges, who had selected it earlier this evening from a shortlists of four titles:

"When you read this book - and you must read it - you will never forget it. The subtext asks whether good people were on the side of the evil people and shows how the human spirit is enlarged by the knowledge of such people."

Le Pianiste a été élu Meilleur livre de l'année 2001 par la rédaction du magazine Lire

Le Pianiste - Grand Prix des Lectrices de ELLE en 2002

PRESS

Why has "The Pianist" been rediscovered now? Los Angeles Times 16.1.2000 (Click here to read the story)

" ...the book offers a sense of future after Auschwitz, a future grounded in the promise of dialogue, of real relationships..." JEWISH CHRONICLE, 4/4/1999