Holocaust in “The Pianist”

"... in spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again." - Anne Frank

Throughout history, several abominable events have happened. These historical episodes have shown us that humans are able to do the best and the worst. Just to mention one example, the bombs thrown by U.S planes in the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of the Second World War (1939-1945). In the same war, another cruel episode happened: the Holocaust. In the Holocaust almost 6 million Jews were killed in Concentration camps and ghettos. The most affected populations were in Germany, the Netherlands and Poland. How the holocaust in Poland occurred as depicted in the movie The Pianist will be presented in this essay.
During the years 1939 to 1945 a Great War happened between The Allies: Great Britain (including the Commonwealth), Free France, URRS, the United States and China and Germany, Italy, Japan, Hungary, Finland, Croatia, Romania and Bulgaria (Fernandez, et all, 1996). There were several reasons why this war was developed. Some of them will be following stated. One of the reasons was the extreme nationalism present in Germany, Italy and Spain which would later become the Rome-Berlin Axis. Another was the breakage of the Treaty of Versailles by Germany because Adolf Hitler, ruler of Germany and member of the NSDAP (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterparte) decided to rearm the army and buy new armament. Then, Nazis occupied Czechoslovakia in March 1939. Finally, the Nazis invaded Poland on September 1st, 1939 which is another reason of the outbreak of the war because Great Britain protected Poland (Richard Fuller, 2006).

Because of the war, Hitler decided to replace all the workers who were being called to the war with many citizens from different of his occupied countries. This was at the beginning the reason of creating different concentration camps such as: Drancy (France); Auschwitz, Treblinka and Belzec (Poland) and Bergen- Belsen and Buchenwald (Germany) (Fernandez, 2004). It was not until he decided to kill the major enemy, Jews who were impure of race according to him, that these concentration camps were known as extermination camps.

This entire extermination is known as the Holocaust. According to historians from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum,

The Holocaust was the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of approximately six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators. "Holocaust" is a word of Greek origin meaning "sacrifice by fire." The Nazis, who came to power in Germany in January 1933, believed that Germans were "racially superior" and that the Jews, deemed "inferior," were an alien threat to the so-called German racial community (2009).

This definition is close to the definition shown in the movie The Pianist, directed by Roman Polanski in which he shows how the Jews were being selected to work for the Nazi Germany. In the movie, Jews were being discriminated against at the beginning by not allowing them enter some public buildings and parks. Then, by restricting their amount of money at only 2000 zlotich and later making them wear a star in their right arms. Another type of discrimination was having Jews walk in the street and not the sidewalk.

In this film, we see that Jews in Warsaw were removed to ghettos in which they lived in very poor conditions. After that, they were selected to work for Germany and Nazi soldiers would kill people from the ghetto everyday. That is how the extermination of the Jews began. Later in the movie, they were transported to other places, concentration camps, in which you had to do much work and receive poor portions of meals which made the sanitary conditions worsen. Once they could not continue working, they were mercilessly killed.

From an historical point of view, the movie portraits flawlessly what happened during the Second War World with the Jews in Poland because it follows the historical succession of the tragic episode. Almost all of the events previously described in this essay are also described in the book Polonia en Defensa de la Libertad 1939-1945. As it reads, “Los guetos supusieron una etapa de transición para la aniquilación completa de los judíos que vivían en el territorio del Tercer Reich y de los países ocupados por él.” (Krzysztof and Skalski, 2006).

In conclusion, every event is formed by its circumstances. In this essay we have seen how the Holocaust in Poland happened as depicted in the movie The Pianist, and what the context to that episode in history was like. However, this is a brief description since there are so many issues to discuss that are involved in the extermination of the Jews and the war itself that touching upon them would take far more than an essay. I would really like to see that what happened in that period is learnt by all of us humans so that it will never happen again.

Holocaust
by Barbara Sonek

We played, we laughed
we were loved.
We were ripped from the arms of our
parents and thrown into the fire.
We were nothing more than children.
We had a future. We were going to be
lawyers, rabbis, wives, teachers, mothers.
We had dreams, then we had no hope.
We were taken away in the dead of night
like cattle in cars, no air to breathe
smothering, crying, starving, dying.
Separated from the world to be no more.
From the ashes, hear our plea.
This atrocity to mankind cannot happen again.
Remember us, for we were the children
Whose dreams and lives were stolen away.
(Holocaust Poetry, 2008)