Wladyslaw Szpilman studied the piano in the early 1930s in Warsaw and Berlin. In Berlin, he was instructed by Leonid Kreutzer and, at the Berlin Academy of Arts, by Artur Schnabel. During his time at the academy he also studied composition with Franz Schreker. In 1933 he returned to Warsaw after Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party rose to power in Germany.


Upon his return to Warsaw, Szpilman worked as a pianist for Polish Radio until the German invasion of Poland in 1939. He was forced to stop work at the station when the power station that kept Polish Radio running was destroyed by German bombs. He played Polish Radio’s last ever pre-war live recording (a Chopin recital) the day that the station went off the air.

Only days after Warsaw’s surrender, German leaflets appeared, hung up on the wall of buildings. These leaflets, issued by the German commandant, promised Poles the protection and care of the German State. There was even a special section devoted to Jews, guaranteeing them that their rights, their property and their lives would be absolutely secure. At first, these proclamations seemed trustworthy, and opinion was rife that Germany’s invasion may have even have been a good thing for Poland; it would restore order to Poland’s present state of chaos. But, soon after the taking of the city, popular feeling began to change. The first clumsily organised race raids, in which Jews were taken from the streets into private cars and tormented and abused, began almost immediately after peace had returned to the city. But the occurrence that first outraged the majority of Poles was the murder of a hundred innocent Polish citizens in December 1939. After this, Polish opinion turned strongly against the occupying army, especially the organisation responsible for the majority of civilian murders, the SS.

Soon, decrees applying only to Jews began to be posted around the city. Jews had to hand real estate and valuables over to German officials and Jewish families were only permitted to own two thousand zloty each. The rest had to be deposited in a bank in a blocked account. Unsurprisingly, very few people handed their property over to the Germans willingly as a result of this decree. Szpilman’s family (he was living with his parents, his brother Henryk and his sisters Regina and Halina) were amongst those who did not. They hid their money in the window frame, an expensive gold watch under their cupboard and the watch’s chain beneath the fingerboard of Szpilman’s father’s violin.

By 1940, many of the roads leading into the area set aside for the ghetto were being blocked off with walls. No reason was given for the construction work. Also in January and February 1940, the first decrees appeared ordering Jewish men and women each to do two years of labour in concentration camps. These years would serve to cure Jews of being “parasites on the healthy organism of the Aryan peoples.” But the threats of labour camps didn’t come into effect until May, when Germany took Paris. Now, having expanded the bounds of the Reich by a significant distance, Nazis had time to spare to persecute the Jews. Deportation, robberies, murders and forced labour were stepped up significantly. To avoid the concentration camps, rich, intellectual Jews like Szpilman’s family and many of his acquaintances could pay to have poorer Jews deported in their place. These payments would be made to the Judenrat, the Jewish organisation that the Germans had put in charge of arranging the deportation. Most of the money went to supporting the high-cost livelihoods of those at the head of the council.

But, for the Jews, the worst was yet to come. In The Pianist, Szpilman describes a newspaper article that appeared in October 1940:

A little while later the only Warsaw newspaper published in Polish by the Germans provided an official comment on this subject: not only were the Jews social parasites, they also spread infection. They were not, said the report, to be shut up in a ghetto; even the word “ghetto” was not to be used. The Germans were too cultured and magnanimous a race, said the newspaper, to confine even parasites like the Jews to ghettos, a medieval remnant unworthy of the new order in Europe. Instead, there was to be a separate Jewish quarter of the city where only Jews lived, where they would enjoy total freedom, and where they could continue to practise their racial customs and culture. Purely for hygienic reasons, this quarter was to be surrounded by a wall so that typhus and other Jewish diseases could not spread to other parts of the city.

And so the Warsaw Ghetto was formed.