The Pianist and the Nazis

In a 2003 TNR review of Roman Polanski’s Oscar-winning film, The Pianist , Michael Oren gives information about Wilm Hosenfeld, the German officer who assists Szpilman:

“while scrounging in an abandoned house for food, Szpilman comes face-to-face with a German officer. Instead of drawing his revolver, the officer asks Szpilman what he does for a living, and then leads him to a piano. Stiff and unpracticed, Szpilman manages to perform Chopin’s Nocturne in C-Sharp Minor, whereupon the officer steeves him in an attic directly above the German headquarters and feeds him . . . .

“The officer’s name, Wilm Hosenfeld, is revealed only in the book’s postscript. A recreational reserve officer in his late forties, Hosenfeld was a committed teacher and family man, an ardent Catholic who abhorred Nazism. He hazarded to keep a diary in which, on September 1, 1942, he asked: ‘Why did this war have to happen at all?’ This was his answer:

“‘Because humanity had to be shown where its godlessness was taking it . . . . This denial of God’s commandments leads us to all the other immoral manifestations of greed—unjust selfenrichment, hatred, deceit, sexual license resulting in infertility and the downfall of the German people. God allows all this to happen . . . to show mankind that without him we are only animals in conflict, who believe we have to destroy each other. We will not listen to the divine commandment: ‘Love one another’ . . . and must die, guilty and innocent alike.’

“And Hosenfeld did more than write. He repeatedly risked his life to rescue others, Poles and Jews, from extermination. These survivors, Szpilman among them, later tried unsuccessfully to obtain Hosenfeld’s release from a Soviet labor camp, where he died in 1952.”

This is not the Hosenfeld of Polanzki’s film. As Oren notes, “All that we know about Wilm Hosenfeld from Szpilman’s book—his long-standing opposition to Hitler, his courage, his values—is withheld in the film. Instead we are given a figure half Hosenfeld’s age, a senior staff commander and Third Reich poster boy, a Nazi. Thus duped, we can easily believe that had Szpilman identified himself as a spot welder, say, instead of a pianist, Hosenfeld would have shot him instantly. Ignorant of the real Hosenfeld’s character, we see him as a monster transformed by music—a particularly Germanic redemption—and music played flawlessly, implausibly, by a physically devastated Jew. Reborn, Hosenfeld can harbor the Jude, as he calls Szpilman in the film (but not in the book), and give him his coat, as Christ commands. ‘You must survive, God wills it,’ Hosenfeld tells Szpilman with a faith that is fully documented in the book but in the film seems unaccountably newfound.”