Profile of Wladyslaw Szpilman on Famous Like Me

Władysław Szpilman (December 5, 1911 – July 6, 2000) was a Polish pianist. He was born in Sosnowiec, Poland, to a family of Jewish origin. He died in Warsaw.

Władysław Szpilman worked as a pianist for the Polish radio in Warsaw until the German invasion of Poland 1939 reached Warsaw. With Nazi Germany establishing ghettos in the city, he was forced to move to the Warsaw Ghetto with his family, and continued to work as a pianist in a restaurant. Szpilman remained in the ghetto until it was abolished after the deportation of most of its inhabitants—Szpilman was left as a labourer and helped smuggle weapons. He evaded being caught and killed by the Germans several times by luck or coincidence.

When the rest of his family was deported to Treblinka, an extermination camp in the east, Szpilman managed to flee from the transport loading platform with the help of a friend who grabbed him from the crowd and shewed him away from the waiting train. He found places to hide in Warsaw, helped by members of the Polish underground. Several times he had to change hiding places, one of which was a bombed apartment building where he had to climb over a scorched corpse for months to reach his room. He maintained sanity by going over all the pieces he had ever played or composed in his head, paying meticulous attention to detail. Towards the end of the war, he found refuge in a ruined house in which the Germans suddenly made their headquarters.

His survival is credited in part to Wilm Hosenfeld, a German captain who had grown ashamed of his country's Nazi policies. Hosenfeld discovered Szpilman when the latter was searching for something to eat. He asked him who he was and demanded proof that he was a pianist, leading him to an old piano. At this point, Szpilman had not touched a piano for four or five years, yet he played several classical pieces perfectly, fearing for his life. Hosenfeld provided Szpilman with food and army clothes to keep him from dying of cold when the Germans left Warsaw. When the Soviets captured Warsaw and Szpilman went out to greet his Polish rescuers, he was shot at and almost killed. He called out "I'm Polish!" to the soldiers. They asked "Why the hell are you wearing a German military coat then?" He answered "I was cold." Hosenfeld later died in a Soviet POW camp.

After the war Szpilman resumed his musical career in Poland. He sat down at the piano in the newly reconstructed recording room of Radio Warsaw and resumed playing the same piece he had been playing when German bombing of the station interrupted him at the beginning of the war in 1939. He later became one of the most prolific post-war composers of Polish popular songs.

In 1945, shortly after the war's end, Szpilman wrote a memoir about his survival in Warsaw. He published the book, Śmierć Miasta ("Death of a city") in Poland, but it was suppressed by the Communist authorities, who did not like its perspective on the war, and the number of copies printed was small.

Szpilman's memoir was not reprinted for fifty years, until 1998 when it was published in German first as Das wunderbare Überleben ("The fantastic survival") and then in English as The Pianist. It was also later published in several other languages, and in 2002 it was made into a movie of the same name by Roman Polański. Szpilman died before the film was completed, but his son Andreas compiled a CD with the most popular songs Szpilman had composed under the title Wendy Lands sings the songs of the Pianist. The movie won three Academy Awards.

This article on a musician is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.

This content from Wikipedia is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article Wladyslaw Szpilman