The Decision

Books are known for their capability to leave lasting impacts on our psyche, mind and soul.
And when they are done right,  well done movies do the same. They leave an indelible imprint on the viewer who feels changed by the experience. I am not sure why, but I had not seen the 2002 movie  by Roman Polanski, " The Pianist " until this weekend. The movie, based on the book by the pianist Wladsilav Szpilman, is sublime, in its cinematography, in the setting of the miserable conditions in the forced resettling of the Warsaw Jewish families in the walled in ghetto,
in the brilliant acting by Adrien Brody. The haunting depiction of Nazi inhumanity during the Holocaust is a subject that will forever remain raw and sickening in the history of human kind. It continues to stun me that the worst acts of genocide were perpetuated by inhabitants of the center of European civilization. I remember how in the aftermath of World War II my father struggled with the idea of establishing friendships with Germans necessitated by his business connections. My younger sisters both dated young German students while in college in the US, and I know how my parents both had a hard time accepting the possibility that heir daughters might marry these young men. When that did not happen, they were visibly relieved. The wounds the Nazi monster machine left in the people of Western Europe who were traumatized by the war are very slow to heal. One of my maternal grandmother's cousins perished in Buchenwald, and the stories of the horrors of the Nazi death camps were everywhere when I was growing up.
" The Pianist " is brilliant at showing very deeply and intimately the shattering effects of persecution and brutality the Polish Jews endured during the Nazi occupation of their homeland. Adrien Brody's portrayal of Wladyslav Szpilman pulls us into his mind, his heart and soul and we feel his suffering and losses to the bone. There is a surreal quality of both horror and beauty in the depiction of the devastation. The almost unbearable tension between human frailty and tenacity is done in apocalyptic magnitude. Before I watched the movie I was aware of its importance and quality, but not of the details of the story it portrayed. By the time the movie introduces Wladyslaw Szpilman to Wehrmacht officer Wilm Hosenfeld, played so soberly by Thomas Kretschmann, I was resigned to the idea that the pianist would be shot or arrested and taken to an extermination camp like the rest of his family. But the German officer is war weary and decides to help Szpilman. He regularly brings him food, and even gives him his heavy winter coat and thus helps him to live out the rest of the war. The movie does an exquisite job letting us know that Hosenfeld was tired of the atrocities committed by the Nazi empire. In a bizarre twist of fate, Hosenfeld perished in a Soviet concentration camp in 1952, on false accusations of spying, despite efforts by Szpilman to have the German officer released. Apparently, Hosenfeld learned the name of the pianist in the course of their last meeting, while the pianist did not learn of Hosenfeld's name until after he was taken as a prisoner of war by the Russians. It was a bitter end for a man who had tried his best to help as many Jewish people as he could. And it must have been heartbreaking for Wladyslaw Szpilman to have been unable to save the life of the man who saved his. It is an unnerving story of the enigma of destiny and redemption. It is an astonishing story that is haunting and spellbinding. The presence of Chopin's piano music becomes the voice of the mystery of the presence of evil in the presence of beauty and human dignity, warmth and love. Chopin's exquisite Ballade No.1 in G minor added a personal touch for me, because my maternal grandmother was fond of playing the Polish composer's music on her piano, and she had lost a close relative in a Nazi death camp. The beauty of Chopin's music is in agonizing contrast to the brutality that the movie gives witness to. The silence of  Wilm Hosenfeld who seems absorbed in a dream like state while listening to Szpilman play Chopin in the bombed out building where the emaciated  pianist took refuge is more powerful than any words the two could have exchanged. The silence seems an affirmation of the decision the Wehrmacht officer made a while back to stop participating in the genocide perpetuated by the emblems of the uniform he was wearing.
The decision to say no to endless brutality and fathomless inhumanity. The decision to stop the madness, at least for the people he could, while he could.
Adrien Brody is superb, considering he was only 29 at the time of the movie. I thought he was in his late thirties. I was interested to learn that the real Wilm Hosenfeld was posthumously recognized in Yad Vashem as one of the Righteous among the Nations. He died in a Soviet concentration camp on August 13 1952, from a rupture of the thoracic aorta, possibly sustained during torture. Szpilman lived and worked on as a successful pianist and composer in Warsaw until 2000, where he died at the age of 88 on July 6th. The movie is an affirmation that people can rise above the definitions they are told to uphold, even in the most brutal circumstances, and it does not get any more harrowingly brutal than the Holocaust.