The
Pianist: Man going through a holocaust.
Hanna
Kim
Racism is a topic we do not often talk
about. It’s a topic that is hard to approach and it is definitely not something
we usually experience nowadays. So what is this racism exactly? It is
discrimination among races. You call this an irony, human
being discriminating against other human being, since we are all same humans.
But it used to happen a lot in the past. When you look at the world history,
you will be able to find many serious events or genocides including racism.
Above all, I would like to talk about the holocaust.
You might not be so familiar with a word
holocaust, but you would have easily heard of Nazis and Hitler. Holocaust is
genocide of Jews, led by Adolf Hitler, who is known as most brutal dictator
through all history. It is surely one of the most tragic events that occurred
in history. Therefore many films, documents, and novels were made based on
holocaust. I would like to talk about one of the films, “The Pianist”. “The
Pianist”, as you might have noticed already at the title, is a movie containing
a story about Jewish pianist suffering through a holocaust and it is based on a
true story. This movie starts with a main character, Wladyslaw Szpilman,
playing piano beautifully until a bomb suddenly hits them. With this explosion,
runaway of Szpilman starts as well. Like all Jews at that time, he and his family
were living in a ghetto, areas they were allowed to live, and had to put this patch
proving that he is a Jew. As Nazism gets more worse, he and his family were
forced to get on this train that take them to this camp called Auschwitz, which
Jews were kept and killed by Nazi soldiers. When they were almost closed to getting
on that train, he miraculously gets saved by someone who adored him for his
play and he gets separated from his family, All alone, he starts a runaway for
his life asking people for help. He faces many moment that almost led him to
death during a runaway, but eventually he manage to survive and hides into his
remains of what used to be buildings and houses. Suffering from starvation,
loneliness, and fears, Szpilman hides in there, hopeless and devastated. He
finds this can of food in the wreckage, tries to open it, but it slips and
falls and stop in front of someone’s foot. That someone was a German general.
They stare each other for a while then general asks him about what he was
doing, and his job. Szpilman answers him that he was a pianist and general asks
him to play piano. After the play, general, for some reason, doesn’t kill him
and even brings him food constantly. Then eventually, Nazists get defeated, and
all German soldiers get caught including that general who helped Szpilman.
General asks for help, telling he had helped Jew named Szpilman but it gets
ignored. Movie ends like the beginning, Szpilman playing piano. I think this
movie is very well made, and it is one of the movies that I got strong
impression. The music was very suitable, and the act of Adrien Brody was just
perfect, showing every detail of emotions and feeling of Szpilman and image or
atmosphere of the movie just showed exactly what it would be like at that time.
I also liked how it showed little details how Jews got through that times by
putting scenes like when they share one caramel into pieces, or how Szpilman
hides through a runaway.
The first time that I watched this movie
was when I was attending school in U.S. We were learning about holocaust in
history class and this holocaust was most horrifying and shocking thing in my
whole life. The pictures of piles bodies dumped in holes, films that were shows
about Auschwitz, and stories I read from books like Anne’s Diary; all of them
described that time Jews were discriminated so clearly that I just could not
believe it really happened. I also couldn’t believe how human being can be so
cruel to other human being. That was the only thought I had at that time. How
cruel! But when I watched it for the second time after few years, I had a
chance to think more deeply about racism. Why on earth did Adolf Hitler hate
Jews so much? Was it because of, like some people suggest, the financial
problems that Germany had to take care of after the war? I just couldn’t
understand and neither will anybody. But one thing we can see from the movie,
is that not all Nazis were driven to kill all Jews like Hitler; like that
German general who took care of Szpilman. This holocaust might have started
from this pure racism Adolf Hitler had but I think he had used this power of
massive crowd. No one exactly know the reason why they were so better than Jews
or why Germans had to hate Jews so much but they hated and discriminated
against them anyway because others all do and they were told to. Thus, I
suppose some of them might were just following other people out of mob psychology.
Nowadays, there aren’t many racisms going on the surface, but it still exists
in some places. Because I don’t have a right to force others to think the way I
want them to, I can’t change their minds, but if there are people with racism
in their minds, I just want to tell them that race can’t be a standard or a
criteria to judge people. It is something no one can decide so no one should
feel superior or inferior by races.
Posted with permission from the author.
