'Pianist' Has Key Lesson on Evil
/The Boston Herald
It stalked him his whole life and he ran from it but he couldn't hide. He knew about good and he knew about evil and the legacy of both, long before he knew that a camera could be a weapon and that memory is the best revenge. Roman Polanski was only a boy when his mother, who was four months pregnant, was killed in the gas chambers at Auschwitz. And he was only a young man when his wife, who was eight months pregnant, was killed in their California home by madman Charles Manson.
Evil is outside and inside and everywhere and like it or not, life is a crapshoot.
Polanski, director of the new film "The Pianist," knows this. The film, which is playing in just a few theaters even though it won top prize at the Cannes Film Festival last spring and is a contender for a Golden Globe Best Picture Award Sunday night, is the true story of Wladyslaw Szpilman, a Polish Jew who had a good life playing the piano for Polish Radio before Hitler decided to exterminate a race.
Szpilman, who lived to be 88, wrote "The Pianist" in 1945, immediately after the war and the deaths of his mother, father, sisters and brother in a concentration camp. The book, like the film, is intense, lean and direct. "Scraping together the last of our small change, we bought a single cream caramel. Father divided it into six parts with his penknife. That was our last meal together.”
Polanski's footage of these words is as simple.
The book was published in Poland in 1946 but then withdrawn from circulation because though the Nazis had been defeated, Stalin had not. In 1999, it was finally republished in Great Britain and when Polanski read it, he found his life's purpose.
A thin slice of history, "The Pianist" speaks to these times.
There is nothing new in it, nothing that we don't already know. Except that evil always feels new. It's always a surprise to see again what man is capable of, still a shock to again watch those planes crash into the World Trade Center. Why do militant Muslims hate Americans and Jews? How could they issue a jihad to kill us? Where does the hate come from and how do they maintain it? What made a civilized nation rise up and kill its own citizens?
"A boy of about 10 came running along the pavement," Szpilman wrote. "He was very pale, and so scared that he forgot to take his cap off to a German policeman coming toward him. The German stopped, drew his revolver without a word, put it to the boy's temple and shot.”
On another day, "quite unexpectedly, a selection was made in our group. A young policeman stationed himself outside the main guard station with his sleeves rolled up and began dividing us according to the lottery system, just as he thought best: Those on the left to die, those on the right to live. He ordered me over to the right. Those on the left had to lie facedown on the ground. Then he shot them with his revolver.”
Evil lives. In "The Pianist," Polanski shows it not as an imagined bogeyman in a closet, not as some fiction but as the real thing.
In the end a German soldier helps save Szpilman's life. Evil lives but good lives, too. Nothing is either-or. There are no simple truths. That's the lesson we need to continually relearn.
Szpilman survived because of luck and the love of some good people. Polanski survived because of the same things. Ten years before he read his book, Polanski heard Szpilman play. Their lives touched one another's long before they even knew.
A camera is a weapon of defense against denial. To see is to believe. And memory is given so that we will never forget. Polanski calls "The Pianist" "the most important film of my life."
