The Spiritual Triumph of Wladyslaw Szpilman: Resistance in the Face of Tragedy
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Wilm hosenfeld
"Hosenfeld (Center right) with family," 1938
In 1944, Szpilman was discovered hiding in the building of SS Captain Wilm Hosenfeld.
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"Innumerable Jews have been killed like that, for no reason, senselessly. It is beyond understanding. Now the last remaining Jewish residents of the ghetto were annihilated. An SS-Strumfuehrer boasted that he had shot the Jews who jumped out of the burning houses. The entire ghetto is a burned ruin. This is how we want to win the war. These animals. With this horrible mass murder of the Jews we have lost the war. We have brought an eternal curse on ourselves and will be forever covered with shame. We have no right for compassion or mercy; we all have a share in |
Hosenfeld hid Szpilman and provided him with provisions after listening to Szpilman’s piano performance. Szpilman survived the last year of the war under his care.
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I slumped on the chair by the larder door. With the certainty of a sleepwalker, I suddenly felt that my strength would fail me if I tried to escape this new trap. I sat there groaning and gazing dully at the officer. It was some time before I stammered, with difficulty, ‘Do what you like to me. I’m not moving from here.’ ‘I’ve no intention of doing anything to you!’ The officer shrugged his shoulders. ‘What do you do for a living?’
-Wladyslaw Szpilman, The Pianist: The Extraordinary True Story of One Man's Survival in Warsaw, 1939-1945
Wladyslaw Szpilman Interview by David Ensor Peter Jennings ABC, January 17, 1985
‘"It’s all right, you can play. If anyone comes, you hide in the larder and I’ll say it was me trying the instrument out.’ When I placed my fingers on the keyboard they shook. So this time, for a change, I had to buy my life by playing the piano! I hadn’t practised for two and a half years, my fingers were stiff and covered with a thick layer of dirt, and I had not cut my nails since the fire in the building where I was hiding. Moreover, the piano was in a room without any window panes, so its action was swollen by the damp and resisted the pressure of the keys."
-Wladyslaw Szpilman, The Pianist: The Extraordinary Story of One Man's Survival in Warsaw, 1939–45
Following the war, Szpilman sought for his benefactor, to no avail. He didn’t learn his identity as Captain Wilm Hosenfeld until 1951. In 1952, Hosenfeld died in a labor camp.
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In 2008, Hosenfeld was recognized as Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem.
"….Since then I had been living alone in the ruins of destroyed Warsaw, without food, without water and without warmth. Around November 15, a German officer found me in a house on Aleje Niepodleglosci 221. It was Captain Wilm Hosenfeld from Thalau. This officer actively supported me by helping me find a hiding place in the attic of the German general command of Warsaw, and by providing me with a blanket, a coat; supplying me with food over a lengthy period; as well as extending moral and personal support until his departure from Warsaw in mid December 1944. Any help to Jews at that time was punished with death. Without his help I wouldn’t have survived. Unfortunately my efforts to free this officer from Russian captivity after the war were unsuccessful, and he died in a camp in Stalingrad in 1952...Captain Hosenfeld proved to be a heroic person and opponent of Fascism, and deserves to be awarded."
-Letter of Wladyslaw Szpilman to Yad Vashem, 20 November 1998