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

"On September 23, 1939, Wladyslaw Szpilman, a young Warsaw pianist, played Chopin's Nocturne in C Sharp Minor live on the radio, while German shells exploded outside - so loudly that he couldn't hear his piano. It was the last live music broadcast from Warsaw: Later that day, a German bomb destroyed the power station, and Polish Radio went off the air."--BOOK JACKET. "The war cast Warsaw into the horror of occupation, the ghetto, the rounding up of the Jews, the uprising and the evacuation of the city - events that killed most of Szpilman's friends and all of his family. But incredibly he survived among the ruins of his beloved city. The Pianist is both an extraordinary story of one man's tenacity in the face of death, and a testament to the resilience of humanity itself - Szpilman's life was saved by a German officer who heard him play the same Chopin nocturne on a piano found among the rubble. That officer died in a Russian POW camp, but he left behind a diary expressing his fierce despair at the barbarity of National Socialism. Extracts from the diary are published here for the first time, alongside Szpilman's memoir."--BOOK JACKET.

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