A Very Polish Jewish Holocaust Story

Rating: Null/10 (2 February 2003)

My husband demurred going to see "The Pianist "as he "didn't want to see another Holocaust movie." Besides that every survivor's story is unique, besides the beautiful cinematography where color looks like browning black-and-white photos, and the tremendous performance and physical transformations by New Yorker Adrien Brody (and it's nice to finally see a real Jewish nose on a Holocaust movie star), Roman Polanski does have a different perspective to give.
This is the first time I can recall a specifically Polish Jewish viewpoint, even though other films have also dealt with the Warsaw Ghetto's creation, uprising, and destruction. While Wladyslaw Szpilman's personal story is no way identical to Polanski's similarly accidental personal survival of the Holocaust, the film is suffused with what are clearly Polanski's vivid memories, particularly of pre-war Warsaw, the round-ups, and then the post-war city-wide devastation.
The Szpilman family's urbane integration into secular Polish society is made clear at the outset; Wladyslaw is flirting with a non-Jewish colleague and the Nazi restrictions mostly interfere with his dating routine at first. Strong family ties, even among adult children, are beautifully portrayed.

But what is most startling throughout is the sympathetic view of Poles, unlike any similar movie. We hear frequently from Poles who are saddened by the restrictions, only see one glimpse of a Polish anti-Semite, and we frequently see Polish resistance fighters and their sympathizers, though they come out of the woodwork mostly due to Szpilman's fame. The infamous, compromised Jewish policemen in the Ghetto are given harsher treatment by the filmmaker.
My ignorance of classical music made me miss a key point in one scene as I didn't know what piece he was playing and wanted to know if he was playing a Polish or German composer, though I inferred from the closing credits that it was probably German.
But that was evidently a fictive scene. As I saw the film in Kew Gardens, Queens, settlement of many survivors, an elderly man on the line said, in a strong accent, when he was 15 in Warsaw after the war he'd met Szpilman, who recounted his story to him, and that the German who saved him did so for him as a human being, not a pianist. Would that have been more moving?