The Pianist

As war rages in eastern Europe, I thought of the movie adaptation of The Pianist I had seen a while ago and wanted to read the manuscript behind the chilling film. The story centers around a Jewish pianist during the WWII Nazi occupation of Poland, a time when Jews were confined to the ghetto and subjected to arbitrary rules and punishments. As the occupation went on, the Germans escalated their efforts that led to the killing of the pianist’s family, and the desperate struggle to stay alive in the latter years of the war. Near the end of the war, he’s caught by a German officer who, after hearing his piano playing, provides him the food and supplies to survive. The book is graphic and violent, something the movie preserved well, and Szpilman’s words carry a mix of cold objectivity and poignant description; and many parts of it were unfathomable to me at first, in both the atrocities depicted as well as the miracles that saved the author’s life.

The deluge of evil in war could only be explained by the wartime environment being a catalyst for the latent evil in people, something Dr. Zimbardo had proved years later. The book describes how the German officers would wave around arbitrary rules and hand out unpredictable punishments during the early days of their Polish occupation for their own sadistic, sporty fun and to keep an atmosphere of unpredictable fear and anxiety. It made me think, although everyone has some latent evil, who are these people most susceptible to latently activated evil who behave the worst if they get the chance? I think these latently sadistic officers likely had some kind of sadism effected onto them from others at many points of their life, especially abuse they couldn’t prevent or displace, and suddenly when these weak and pathetic wretches became powerful and could toss others around, they overcompensate and let all of their repressed demons come out to torture others. The repressed middle manager who is stressed and has taken a lifetime of small bullying from above is so much more fearsome and despicable if they suddenly come into power than someone who’s lived a more placid life. In a way, post-WWI Germany itself was that repressed, overcompensatory nation whose victimhood at Versailles inflamed it to seek revenge onto the whole world, just as its petty, bullied loser soldiers wreaked havoc on the people they conquered.