Full name: The Pianist: The Extraordinary True Story of One Man's Survival in Warsaw, 1939-1945

Author: Wladyslaw Szpilman Year: 1946 Rank: Rating: Original Rating: Pop Rating: Genres/categories: History, Non Fiction, Award winners, War/Military, Memoirs Purchase/reserch links: Amazon Goodreads LibraryThing ISBNs: 9780312263768 0312263767

Written immediately after the end of World War II, this morally complex Holocaust memoir is notable for its exact depiction of the grim details of life in Warsaw under the Nazi occupation. "Things you hardly noticed before took on enormous significance: a comfortable, solid armchair, the soothing look of a white-tiled stove," writes Wladyslaw Szpilman, a pianist for Polish radio when the Germans invaded. His mother's insistence on laying the table with clean linen for their midday meal, even as conditions for Jews worsened daily, makes palpable the Holocaust's abstract horror. Arbitrarily removed from the transport that took his family to certain death, Szpilman does not deny the "animal fear" that led him to seize this chance for escape, nor does he cheapen his emotions by belaboring them. Yet his cool prose contains plenty of biting rage, mostly buried in scathing asides (a Jewish doctor spared consignment to "the most wonderful of all gas chambers," for example). Szpilman found compassion in unlikely people, including a German officer who brought food and warm clothing to his hiding place during the war's last days. Extracts from the officer's wartime diary (added to this new edition), with their expressions of outrage at his fellow soldiers' behavior, remind us to be wary of general condemnation of any group. --Wendy Smith Similar books: Clara's War by Clara Kramer In My Hands by Irene Gut Opdyke The Nazi Officer's Wife by Edith Hahn Beer The Pages In Between by Erin Einhorn The Girl in the Green Sweater by Krystyna Chiger I Remember Nothing More by Adina Blady Szwajger Edith's Story by Edith Velmans The Boy on the Wooden Box by Leon Leyson The Zookeeper's Wife by Diane Ackerman The Diary of Mary Berg by Mary Berg Searching for Schindler by Thomas Keneally Elly: My True Story of the Holocaust by Elly Gross Eva's Story by Eva Schloss Crossing the Borders of Time by Leslie Maitland The Cage by Ruth Minsky Sender American Sniper by Chris Kyle No Easy Day by Mark Owen Auschwitz by Miklos Nyiszli The Forgotten Highlander by Alistair Urquhart A Woman in Berlin by Marta Hillers