It’s the only holocaust drama I can think of that was directed by a holocaust survivor. It’s both fortunate and unfortunate that the survivor is a Polish auteur named Roman Polanski. Fortunate because Polanski is an undeniable talent, one of the most gifted of all European filmmakers. Unfortunate because Roman Polanski is still a fugitive from American justice, wanted for drugging and raping a thirteen-year-old girl in 1977. As a French citizen, Polanski has been protected from extradition to the United States ever since. He has continued to make films in exile, and The Pianist is often considered the greatest of them.
Based on a memoir by Władysław Szpilman, The Pianist studies the guilt and pain of survival. Read any commentary on the film and you’ll encounter the phrase ‘unheroic’ again and again, always used to describe the film’s lead character. This is accurate. Szpilman (Adrien Brody) is not a hero, he’s a human. We are introduced to him at work: playing the piano on Polish national radio. A technician attracts Szpilman’s attention through the studio glass, asking him to stop. Szpilman refuses, continuing to play until the German invasion of Warsaw forces him to stop. It takes a bomb blasting glass into his studio to get him to leave the building.
We quickly understands that Szpilman is a compromiser. He keeps his head down, follows the rules and waits for things to change, preferring to focus on music rather than politics. He tries not to let the war bother him, but the fact of his identity prevents him from remaining unseen. He is Jewish, and has no choice but to be involved in the war. He will be a holocaust survivor or a holocaust victim. We understand that Władysław is the quiet member of his family, tasked with calming and comforting the others. His brother is a passionate radical who shouts about his contempt for the Nazis. His sister is a lawyer, quickly targeted for her high status. Władysław is not going to take arms. He isn’t going to collaborate with the occupiers and he isn’t going to riot in the streets. He’ll just live on.
We see the holocaust progress step by step. Jews are banned from walking on the pavement and visiting public parks. They’re made to wear star of David armbands. Then they’re forcibly relocated to a ghetto. The ghetto is walled off. They begin to starve. They’re forced into enslavement. They’re rounded up into groups and forced to wait in an open courtyard. Then they’re forced onto a train. With each step, the Szpilman family does their best to become accustomed to their new hardships. They find new jobs, secure work permits, find food and stay silent while witnessing atrocities. This part of the film isn’t about resistance, saviours and noble sacrifices. It’s about the fact of the holocaust, the lived reality for families like the Szpilmans as the Nazis advanced their final solution step by step.
Władysław manages to avoid the train to Treblinka by pure chance. A Jewish member of the occupying police force recognises him at the station and takes him out of the crowd. As his entire family is loaded onto the train, Władysław escapes into a ghetto drained of its population by the second-to-last step in a campaign of genocide. The rest of the film is about the guilt and debt of survival. Władysław didn’t earn a right to continue existing. It’s not by virtue of his courage or his talent that he was singled out to avoid the fate of his friends and family. He simply finds himself still alive, hungry and in need of shelter. The only way that he can continue to live is through the non-Jewish friends who he knew before his life in the ghetto.
Each time that he’s given food and shelter, Szpilman can’t find the words to express his gratitude. He’s given new life, and it comes at the cost of his friends’ safety. Every time that someone takes him in, they risk execution. Szpilman’s guilt can only increase. He’s separated from the war, living every day in isolation, under constant fear of capture. Everyone he meets must risk their lives to protect him, or else turn him over for a certain death. He lives in empty apartments, remaining silent to prevent his collaborationist neighbours from knowing of his existence. He can’t participate in the ghetto uprising because he’s escaped from the ghetto. His guilt increases. All he can do is watch the war from his window.
The Pianist makes us reconsider the reality of war, genocide and survival. Do we instinctively judge Szpilman for his careful avoidance of combat? He smuggles guns for the Polish Underground (itself an act of unimaginable courage), but doesn’t use them. He feels guilt for his inaction, but isn’t survival enough? As a Jewish person condemned to death by a state that insists on your extermination, isn’t survival its own form of resistance? All who we see actively engage the Nazis in street-fighting appear to die. Szpilman watches, and lives. Think to whom he owes his survival. He is taken away from the train to Treblinka by a collaborationist. He is eventually fed and clothed by a German officer. These men have facilitated the final solution, but saved him.
One sequence in particular stays in my memory. Left alone in an apartment, Szpilman grows sick. He develops jaundice and is left bed-ridden and incoherent. The Polish resistance members who feed him realise that they have to call a doctor. We know what this means. Either the doctor will betray them, or endanger his own life. Szpilman’s survival risks the lives of more and more people the longer it continues. His survival is a crime, and all who aid in it are accomplices. This is a side to the holocaust that we’re not used to seeing in films. The Pianist is not about victory over the Nazis, it’s about the unseen side of their genocide. Beyond the mass slaughter were the impossible decisions, the hidden suffering, the starvation and the endless fear.
As the sole studio movie about the holocaust made by a survivor, The Pianist avoids the sentimentalism and saviours present in other films on the same subject. There is no attempt to glorify Władysław Szpilman‘s life or embellish his efforts. We’re shown every detail of his ordeal, and through it we understand that avoiding the death camps and the execution squads was a result of chance and risk, not valour and intelligence. It’s as objective a depiction of the holocaust as a non-documentary feature is ever likely to give us. The full English-language title of Szpilman’s autobiography is ‘The Pianist: The Extraordinary Story of One Man's Survival in Warsaw’. It is an extraordinary story, but not one designed to comfort us.
Should The Pianist be allowed a legacy? Should we continue to watch it and be moved by it, knowing the terrible crime that its director committed? I think that it’s an invaluable film. If Polanski hadn’t directed it, it would be more palatable to a wider audience. However, it would also mean that we’d be left without a holocaust movie directed by a survivor. Polanski was left to fend for himself in the Krakow ghetto after his mother was murdered in Auschwitz’s gas chamber and his father was sent to another concentration camp. Therefore, Roman Polanski’s wartime experience is notably similar to Szpilman’s, making the director’s viewpoint absolutely inseparable from the film’s unflinching objectivity and accuracy. That alone makes The Pianist a historically significant work of art. Whether you choose to watch it is up to you.
Thanks Frank. If I can muster the emotional strength I will watch it again. I couldn’t get beyond the harrowing- ness the first time. I do remember the ending though. Strong writing.