Tregre: Week 4, The Pianist

This was a difficult novel to read, just like Night. It is emotionally draining to read about these personal experiences and first hand accounts of horrors that one cannot even image, let alone go through. Chapter 9: The Umschlagplatz will stick in my mind because of the details.

The Pianist is a novel about a man named Szpilman's journey through the Holocaust with the comfort of the piano.

The Pianist by Wladyslaw Szpilman and The Pianist directed by Roman Polanski were the same story shared in two different ways, but both extremely impacting on different levels. The novel allowed insight into Szpilman's thoughts and feelings during this horrific time. He was able to hide and play the piano, and when he was forced into silence, he mimicked it with his hands. The impact the long years, 1939-1944 had on Szpliman were disturbing and evident in both works.

In the autobiography, one was able to get close and actually feel what Szpilman was feeling. This is what made some parts hard to read. Not to be too graphic in this account, when he discussed his viewing of the Germans smashing children's heads into a brick wall as a favorite form of extinguishing people, I wanted to get sick. This novel was so intimate and personal being written in a first person narrative. One could feel what he was going through and his recollection of how his feelings were towards other Jews and Nazis, which were not really expressed in Polanski's film. Over 20,000 people died in Warsaw and many were Szpilman's friends, family and neighbors. The closest one can get to understanding how this felt, is by reading someone who went through it. One can see his internal struggles and his thought process when each thing happened. Szpilman wrote for himself and not for others in order to let his grief go and move on with his life. This makes his writing more powerful and the next best thing to the actual experience. One can feel how he was more worried about the splinter in his finger effecting his playing than his emaciation. I was there with Szpilman as he retold his story.

In the film, third person perspective was used. The movie was able to express emotion that words could not express through music. It showed how the function of music could be used to cope with massive trauma. One could really focus on Szpilman's relationship with the piano and his music, and how the time, memory, and fantasy world he lived in passed while coping with the Holocaust. He was a professional musician and had the discipline to deal with isolation through his music. Most people would go insane. This film gave a different view of Szpilman. It focused more on his music instead of his own personal thoughts and reactions. The audience is looking from the outside world into his life, instead of being told what he experienced and witnessed. Trauma that is experienced at this degree is usually expressed in a nontraditional way, such a music in this case. It is not easy to cope and put into words, so instead a different outlet is created. Trauma is more hard to survive psychologically than physically. One can see the affect this had on him in the movie. Polanski did a wonderful job. It was a different interpretation.

It is difficult to choose which one was better. One was Szpilman's account of things and first hand experience, while the other played with how music impacted his life. I think it depends which one hits your gut the hardest. The movie was a work of art along with the novel because the director, Polanski also experienced some of the same things that Szpilman did. Maybe this movie was as much of healing for Polanski as the book was for Szpilman. Both a man's form of expression and grief while coping with extreme trauma.