One of my
all-time favorite movies that I could watch over and over again is Roman
Polanski’s, “The Pianist”. This movie caught my attention because I was very
good at playing the piano myself and one of my favorite actors, Adrien Brody
plays the main character in this movie. This movie happened during the late
1930’s and is about a Polish, Jewish musician who experiences the destruction
of his community in Warsaw, Poland during World War II. This is also based on a
true story. The main character in the movie was Wladyslaw Szpilman also known
as Wladek, who was a well-known pianist who played for the Polish radio
stations. In the meantime, Germany was preparing for war with Poland and started
September of 1939. “The Pianist” is a great example of how the Polish
experienced genocide/ethnic cleansing and relates to one of the readings book
that we read in class. The book that was discussed in class and focused on
World War II including the ethnic cleansing of the Polish in Germany was,
Norman M. Naimark’s,” Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in the Twentieth
Century”. Naimark discussed in chapter
two from his book, how Adolf Hitler wanted to declare war with other Nazi
leaders and Wehrmacht generals on destroying the Polish nation. They wanted the
war to be similar, but better than the Armenian genocide of 1915.
To the Nazi’s, the
Germans were viewed as the good, natural, and humane, compared to the Jews who
were considered as fake, useless, and culture less group of people in Europe. In
the movie, there was a Polish army that was involved and was defeated by the German
Army. To Wladyslaw Szpilman, he knew this was trouble because the radio station
he played at was bombed as well. From this, he knew that it was time to leave
Poland. There were other wars declared in the movie, how other countries wanted
to go against Germany. From this news, Szpilman believed that the
Polish community would be safe but in reality, the war involving them and
Germany has just begun. In both the book and the movie, Jews were noticing that
they were being discriminated against with the Germans. They were being
restricted from facilities and other health services. There were also Jewish
communities that were beginning to worsen and without the help of health
services and being restricted from getting the food and clothing they need in
order to survive, many Jews were dying every day because they were starved to
death, diagnosed with diseases or randomly killed by German soldiers. In the
movie, eventually the Jews were being selected at random to be shipped to the Treblinka
concentration camps to their deaths, but being tricked as if they are escaping
Poland to be freed.
Many of the
Polish were all forcibly gathered together to wait for trains to be emigrated
to another location. At this point of World War II, many of the Jews were
either killed, worked to death, or died of starvation, and only a few were
living. In the movie, Wladyslaw tries to find ways to survive even though his entire
family died from being transported from Poland to a concentration camp to be
killed. This same situation also occurred in the book of how the Polish people
were killed. People, especially women were deported, raped, killed, and many
were forced conversion to Islam and absorption into Muslim families. In the
book, the main purpose of causing this mass murder was to have Europe ethnically
cleansed of the Jews and Hitler did not want a trace of a Jew to be found. Unfortunately,
Hitler was not able to get rid of all Jews, but was able to eliminate a good proportion
of them during that time of World War II. As for the movie, Wladyslaw got
caught by one of the German soldiers, but instead he helped him because
Wladyslaw proved that he was a Jewish pianist that played for a well-known
radio station. Later on he was saved by Polish partisans because the war was
finally over and in result the Russians have taken over controlling the
Germans. Finally, Wladyslaw was saved and was able to continue as a pianist for
the Polish radio station. With the movie “The Pianist” and the book, “Fires of
Hatred”, they both were related to each other and discussed what it was like relating
to discrimination of different races and ethnicities dealing with ethnic
cleansing and genocide involving the Germans and the Polish during World War
II.
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