The Pianist - I am glad I made an exception for this book.

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Posted by Aryeh ben Avraham on February 12, 19100 at 03:44:51:

A life set to music - The Pianist / W. Szpilman

As a Jew I can rarely bring myself to read books on the Holocaust, as they are usually so full of despair. But I am glad I made an exception for this book. It is among the handful of truly special books I have read. One to treasure and remember, and pass on. It will hold it's place on your bookshelf like the score of great music, or a classic photograph. It is less a book than a life rendered vividly and sensitively on your imagination. It is a read which arrested me with it's first few pages, and which enthralled me with it's hollow beauty. It describes a bitter life, yet one where there are still kernels of surprising sweetness. It sets a powerful record of the ability of 'ordinary' human survival. The author was no hero, no role model, and had little except for his decency, talent for music, and strange unexplained desire to survive. Perhaps it's noblest moments are where it sets our slanted popular histories straight. There were good Germans and self-sacrifcing Poles. There were unnumbered hundreds of thousands who put themselves at risk, and ignored the anti-semitism all around them - to help Jews. The history of these ordinary people - pople who were neither , rich like Schindler, nor well placed like Foley - rests largely unrecorded. The deafening silence of our historians about this ordinary heroism is a disgrace to all of us. This short book begins to undo this great injustice.

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