Movie Review: The Pianist

Written 6/9/22

Two days ago I decided to watch The Pianist. I was going to rent it, but then I saw it on YouTube for free, so I watched it there. I probably should have rented it though because there was some dialogue in German and the YouTube version didn’t have subtitles so I didn’t know what the characters were saying in German. As much as I want to re-watch it though, it is one of those films where I need to take at least a couple of weeks to process it. My parents told me it was going to be an intense film. Then again, any film about war and genocide, particularly about World War II and the Holocaust, is going to be hard to sit through. The atrocities that the Nazis committed against Jewish people during that time were very real, and the lasting trauma that this genocide left for many survivors is still very real today, and as someone who isn’t Jewish I needed to continue to educate myself on the Holocaust. Also, in middle school we weren’t allowed to see R-rated films, so there was no way that any of my teachers would be able to show The Pianist for our curriculum.

I think especially it was important for me to watch this film because to understand how bad the Holocaust really was, I had to listen to and watch first-hand accounts by people who lived through it. The film also showed me events during World War II that I had studied in world history class but had forgotten after a while. I am sure I studied about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, which was depicted in the film, but I hadn’t studied about it in depth. Wladyslaw Szpilman (1911-2000), the pianist and Holocaust survivor whose memoir the film is based on, witnesses the uprising at the same time that he is in hiding. It really is a story of one man’s survival and trauma as he witnesses the Nazis commit some of the worst human rights abuses in history. It kind of reminded me of the film 1917; even though of course the former takes place during World War I and the latter takes place during World War II, both movies depict the horrors of war. In 1917, we see how horrific the war and its aftermath were from the perspective of two British soldiers fighting in the war. The camera follows their perspective; we don’t see the perspective of other soldiers. These young men make their way through all kinds of destruction; they wade through trenches where human and non-human corpses lie ravaged with flies, they make their way through bombed-out buildings, and one of the soldiers is stabbed and killed by a German pilot, so the other soldier has to survive on his own. Even as he meets people on the way who try to help him in some way, he knows that the security given to him won’t last long and that he is still very much in a war zone where his life and the lives of other civilians are in jeopardy. The film shows him becoming more and more hopeless each time he has to navigate and survive the moment-to-moment traumas of war. There is no time for him to stop and process the psychological toll that witnessing the war has on him; he is always moving through this constant trauma and like his fellow soldiers, he loses hope for humanity.

In The Pianist it is similar. Szpilman, like so many Jewish people, is fighting for his life and even though the couple he meets takes him in and provides him shelter, he knows it won’t last long because soon after, he accidentally shatters a bunch of plates in their cupboard while they’re away, and a non-Jewish woman who lives in the apartment bangs on the door and tells him to come out, and when he comes out she accuses him of trespassing because he is Jewish, even when he tells her that the couple let him stay in the apartment. Another scene that stuck with me is when the SS guards force Szpilman’s family and other Jewish families onto cattle cars to be taken to the Treblinka killing center, but Szpilman is forced to stay behind. Soon after, he is seen walking through the city of Warsaw and breaking down in tears. Like the soldiers in 1917, Szpilman is forced to witness trauma and loss moment after moment. He witnesses corpses in the streets, a dying child caught in a wall dies in his arms and he has to leave his dead body there, and towards the end when he is in hiding, he sees some SS officers burn several dead bodies in the street while two other SS officers casually watch the bodies burning and eat their food. The film’s depiction of the trauma that many Jews faced will be engraved in my memory for a while. There is a scene in particular that stuck with me, which was when the Jewish civilians were held in a blocked off area to be taken to the Treblinka killing center, and a woman is sitting there and just repeats over and over again “Why did I do it?” Wladyslaw’s sister says aloud how it’s annoying that the woman keeps saying that over and over again, but then someone who knows the woman says that when the Nazis invaded her home, she smothered her baby and killed it. The woman has to relive this trauma and grief in her mind over and over again. This is just one of many moments in the film that sat with me.

The film reminded me of a quote that Buddhist philosopher and writer Daisaku Ikeda says at the beginning of the novel The Human Revolution: “Nothing is more barbarous than war. Nothing is more cruel.” In Buddhism, there is a concept called The Ten Worlds, which are different life states that humans experience at any given moment. The lower life states are Hell, Hunger, Animality, Anger, Heaven and Humanity and the higher life states are voice-hearers, cause-awakened ones, bodhisattvas and buddhas. This film clearly shows that the Nazis were in the life condition of Hell. Hell is a life condition in which everything around you is suffering, and it feels like there is no way out of it. War is a manifestation of the world of Hell because people who commit atrocities during war are in a state of life where they feel hopeless and feel that the only way to address their internal suffering is to hurt others and cause destruction. Another life condition in Buddhism that everyone has is animality, which is where people put others down who they think are inferior to them and act servile when they are confronted by people in higher positions of authority. I’m pretty sure all of the SS officers were terrified for their own lives and terrified of Hitler so they felt they had no choice but to make the Jews feel inferior to them and murder them. There is a scene in the film where Szpilman is in the ghetto and is a laborer, and the SS guards force him and the other men to line up, and for no reason other than they just felt like it, the SS guard has six or seven men from the line lie down and he just shoots and kills each of them. It was hard to look at that and think “Oh, it’s just acting.” As much as I tried to tell myself it was acting, it still felt way too real and it was a reminder that yes, the people playing these men were actors but the crimes the Nazis committed were very real.

I know I am stating the obvious, like “of course the Holocaust was a real-lived genocide where many people were murdered and treated as scapegoats. Most people know that already.” But after this film I reflected on the anti-Semitism that is very much still alive today and how there are still people who say the Holocaust never happened. This film also forced me to overcome the apathy in my own heart and understand that human rights and social justice requires persistent efforts to educate oneself, especially if you’re not a member of the community that is being marginalized, so that I can overcome the indifference within my own life that causes me to dismiss injustice and human rights abuses. I remember when I was ambivalent about watching 12 Years a Slave for an African-American history course in college, especially because everyone had said it was a very sad and painful film to watch, but then my professor told me that it was just acting and that while the atrocities that white slaveowners committed were true, the people reenacting these atrocities were actors. Like, Michael Fassbender isn’t actually whipping Lupita Nyong’o. And so I watched the film at least four times, thinking, “It’s just acting.” I somehow thought I needed to watch it more than once, but each time I watched it I found myself pushing down a lot of those uncomfortable human emotions that I normally would have expressed. I would have felt fear, disgust, anguish, and I would have cried loads of tears. But I just watched and casually thought, “It’s just a movie.” I honestly couldn’t do that with The Pianist this time; I had learned that I don’t necessarily need to watch the movie twice to understand the depth of the pain and trauma that Szpilman went through during his life. It will pretty much stick with me for a long time. I don’t like horror movies, but this film was pretty much a horror movie for me because everything in the film really happened and a human being, along with other human beings, was forced to see the most ugly darkest sides of humanity.

In our June 2022 issue of the magazine I read called Living Buddhism, there is a section with excerpts from Daisaku Ikeda’s peace proposals, and one of the excerpts is called “Removing the ‘Arrow of Fundamental Delusion'” (2013). It talks about how Siddhartha Gautama, or Shakyamuni Buddha, found that the fundamental cause of conflict between communities of people was fundamental darkness, or the inability to see the inherent preciousness of each person’s life including that of our own life. This fundamental darkness manifests as an egocentric worldview where one is only focused on self-interest and cannot put themselves in the other party’s shoes. I have this fundamental darkness and we all have this fundamental darkness, too, just by virtue of being human beings. The solution to overcoming this fundamental darkness is realizing the interconnectedness of life and that each person’s life has inherent dignity and thus each person is worthy of respect no matter what their ethnicity, race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, etc. When I look at the history of World War II and the Holocaust from a Buddhist perspective, I realized that the root at these atrocities committed against Jewish people and other minorities was this fundamental delusion about life and the value that we place on life.

The Pianist. 2002. 150 minutes. Rated R for violence and mature, upsetting themes.