The Pianist: Realistic Interpretation of Events and Feelings Experienced by Many During the War
The film The Pianist (2002) Roman Polanski is an adaptation of the memoirs of Wladyslaw Szpilman a Jewish pianist who lived through the Nazi occupation of Poland during WWII. According to the sources, Roman Polanski supplemented the story with a few anecdotal events that had occurred in his life during WWII as a boy. (INMB, NP) The film is characteristic of other period films of WWII and especially those of the Jewish experience. Polanski frequently tried to stay within the confines of the real experience and the real words of Szpilmam who apparently frequently stated when witnessing particularly adamant German Nazi sympathizers in action, "The all want to be better Nazi's that Hitler." The story line of the film is the life of one Jewish family during WWII in Warsaw Poland. The family began the war rather well off with Wlad working as a rather famous pianist for a radio station and other unknown income. Yet, as the war moved on and restrictions on Jews became fiercer the situation dimmed considerably as did the situation for all Jews. Wlad hoped to help the cause of Jewish liberation but was often stymied by the fact that he was to well known, a scene late in the film when he goes to a resistant office in the ghetto tells of th
The decisions they make about what to take, that seemed so agonizing during these early scenes, became almost comical, likely later when the family was relegated to a few suitcases and a cart full of furniture, which is far more than many on the street had when they were being evacuated to the ghetto. Szpilman and his family are secularized, their lifestyle does not differ in any way from that of their non-Jewish friends and colleagues. The Warsaw ghetto was much as the film described it, a desperate starving place with limited options, high rates of conspirator crime and countless daily trials and humiliations for Jews who had to leave their homes simply to work for a few dollars to feed themselves. The scene is also telling of the likely many reenacted scenes where people wonder were to go and what to do, as they bustle around their home trying to decide what to take with them when they move to another location to help aide the war, only to end with them calmly and quietly celebrating the American and French entrance in the war. (Stimmel 83)Stimmel runs through a list of particularly believable bit characters who all had different motives and tactics for survival. When the Warsaw Ghetto is evacuated mostly to the concentration camps the Wlad tries to stay and lives off scavenged food from bombed out buildings until he was befriended by a German officer who heard him play the piano and gave him food to survive. It was a degrading mental process of absurd character meted out a little bit at a time as if to see how much the Polish character would tolerate before it rebelled. By omitting the stereotypical Jewishness--lack of religious ceremonies, prayers, or even distinctly Jewish names of the protagonists--Polanski's film forcefully points out how random the Nazi genocide was. Another poignant moment in the film is when the family is listening to news of the war, just after a bombing raid and is filled with hope when the Americans and French announce that they have entered against the Nazi's. The scene was not only believable it was heartbreaking. The conditions of the ghetto deteriorated significantly as the war years went on. The most telling scene in the film for me was the moment that Wlad pulled the very young boy out of the drain gutter. The speed at which the Jews were first financially starved, then mentally and then finally physically starved was really just a matter of a few months and was as many witnesses attest to so absolutely absurd that it was hard to believe it would not end soon.
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Acceptance Essays
