it every month. Everyone is concerned about typhus: the poor wonder when they will die of it and the rich wonder if they can obtain a vaccine against it. Szpilman explains that although he could obtain a vaccine, he refuses on the grounds that he cannot have afforded to vaccinate his entire family. Szpilman’s mother protects her family by stopping her children when they come in and remove the lice from their clothing with pincers. She drowns the vermin in a bowl of spirits. People die so quickly that corpses pile up in the streets.

Szpilman regularly walks along the streets on his way to work, and he witnesses many atrocities. Some days, Szpilman walks along the wall of the ghetto to get to work, where smugglers are busy. Szpilman explains that the afternoon is best for smuggling because the police,

exhausted by a morning spent lining their own pockets, were less alert then, busy counting up their profits.

Nevertheless, smuggling remains a dangerous business. One morning, Szpilman witnesses a child trying to smuggle goods under the wall into the ghetto, only to have his legs held by the German authorities, who proceed to beat him until his spine is “shattered.” Szpilman contrasts this child with the smugglers he sees while playing at the Café Nowoczesna, which is at the heart of the Warsaw ghetto. “Magnates such as Kon and Heller” run the “real, regular” smuggling. One time he is asked to stop playing so one patron can listen to the ring of a coin. These smuggling magnates do not need to rely on children sneaking beneath the walls of the ghetto because they can just bribe the guards.

The patrons of the Café Nowoczesna are wealthy compared to other Jews in the ghetto, but they do not believe in charity because, Szpilman explains:

if you worked as hard as they did then you would earn as much too: it was open to everyone to do so, and if you didn’t know how to get on in life that was your own fault.

Szpilman feels satisfied to get another job playing for the Jewish intelligentsia at a café in Sienna Street. Szpilman explains how other Jews join the police. His brother Henryk characterizes these police as bandits. Although the brothers often disagree, in this Szpilman admits that Henryk is right. He considers:

you could have said, perhaps, that they had caught the Gestapo spirit. As soon as they put on their uniforms and police caps and picked up their rubber truncheons, their natures changed. Now their ultimate ambition was to be in close touch with the Gestapo...that did not prevent them from forming a police jazz band which, incidentally, was excellent.

These police also participated in the “human-hunt.” At one point, they even take in Henryk, and Szpilman only just manages to plead for his brother’s release.

Although the family manages to stay together longer than many others, they are eventually separated. Szpilman explains that the Umschlagplatz is an assembly area to which Jews are taken. The police and the Gestapo randomly surround buildings and take the inhabitants away to these areas, where the people are kept until they can be loaded into train cars. Szpilman recalls one conversation his father has with a dentist, who is angry because

we’re letting them take us to our death like sheep to the slaughter! If we attacked the Germans, half a million of us, we could break out of the ghetto, or at least die honourably, not as a stain on the face of history!

However, Szpilman’s father asks whether they can be sure they will be taken away to their deaths and goes on to point out:

We’re not heroes! We’re perfectly ordinary people, which is why we prefer to risk hoping for that ten per cent chance of living.

Others join in at this point, arguing that the Germans cannot afford to squander the labor the Jewish population can provide. The family is soon taken to the cars. Szpilman explains:

A hand grabbed me by the collar and I was flung back and out of the police cordon. Who dared do such a thing? I didn’t want to be parted from my family. I wanted to stay with them!

When Szpilman attempts to rejoin his family, a police officer tells Szpilman, “Save yourself.” At this point, Szpilman realizes “what awaited the people in the cattle trucks.” He returns to the city and begins his solitary life of hiding.

Szpilman now spends his time working in labor groups; he feels fortunate to survive them because he has few skills as a laborer. The Jews that remain in the ghetto begin to organize a resistance, and slowly they build up defenses and accumulate supplies. Szpilman hides during the rebellion, which at first seems to do quite well but ultimately is defeated. Szpilman juxtaposes the dignity of the starved rebels with the cowardice of the well-fed Germans.

Now, Szpilman lives alone with only a watch and a fountain pen to his name. He is only visited when his protectors bring him food, which they do quite rarely. He explains how he carefully divides his food and how in winter he obtains water by heating snow in a pot balanced on his stomach. He spends his days revisiting his English language lessons, recalling the books he has read, and pretending to play each song he ever memorized on an imaginary piano. He regularly prepares to commit suicide rather than allow himself to be caught by the Germans. In spite of all his care, Szpilman is nearly caught several times. At one point, he manages to buy his freedom with a bottle of liquor. At another point, he flees guards who shoot at him while he hides on a roof. German patrols regularly inspect buildings.

Near the end of the war, Szpilman is forced to forage for food and finds a store in a building the Germans are preparing to convert into a fortress against the Russian advance. Szpilman thinks he is finally caught when a German officer finds him, but the officer asks him his occupation. Upon learning that Szpilman is a pianist, he invites him to play. Szpilman plays Chopin’s Nocturne in C Sharp Minor. The German captain shows Szpilman a place to hide and brings him food; he often encourages him with reassurances that the Germans will lose the war soon. When they meet for the last time, Szpilman shares his name and says he will almost certainly work for the Polish Radio again at the end of the war. If the officer ever needs help, he can contact Szpilman in this way. He does not ask for the officer’s name because he might be made to give it up if captured.

After Warsaw is taken by the Soviets, Szpilman does eventually return to work at the Polish Radio. In the memoir’s postscript, Szpilman explains that the captain does try to contact him. An acquaintance of Szpilman’s named Lednicki, who is a violinist, one day approaches a Soviet prisoner-of-war camp and berates the Germans for claiming to be cultured when the first thing they took from him was his instrument. A German approaches and asks whether he knows Szpilman. He then asks Lednicki to carry a message asking for help. Lednicki is unable to hear his name before guards haul him away. Szpilman explains that he is unable to ever find the captain again. However, he eventually learns the identity of this captain, Wilm Hosenfeld. When Szpilman investigates his whereabouts, he learns that Hosenfeld’s unit was suspected of spying and taken to a camp somewhere in Russia.

Extracts from Hosenfeld’s diary are included in The Pianist. Many of his notes are critical of the National Socialists for breaking with Christianity. He at first cannot believe initial reports about concentration and death camps, thinking that “there can be only one explanation: they’re sick, abnormal or mad.” He writes, “In spite of all the secrecy, people say they know what happens.” He goes on to explain that

people are driven into these heated rooms and burnt alive, and thousands can be killed like that in a day, saving all the trouble of shooting them, digging mass graves and then filling them in.

Hosenfeld concludes that

we shall be punished for it too. And so will our innocent children, for we are colluding when we allow these crimes to be committed.

Many of these excerpts recall what the German officer says to Szpilman when they first meet. When the pianist asks whether the captain is German, the officer responds, “Yes, I am! And ashamed of it after everything that’s been happening.” He also reassures Szpilman that they can survive because

if you and I have survived this inferno for over five years... it’s obviously God’s will for us to live.