Wilm Hosenfield on the left. Szpilman's picture at the Warsaw Uprising Museum on the right. By Adrian Grycuk
In the year 1944, Władysław Szpilman was living on the edge of survival amongst the rubble of Warsaw. His life had been shattered by the war, and he had lost everything: his family, his home, his future. Szpilman was starving, freezing, and devoid of any hope. He was hiding in the debris, the bitter truth was that he knew death was now only a matter of time.
But one day, a German officer named Wilhelm Hosenfeld found him.
Hosenfeld could have simply followed orders and shot Szpilman or at least, turned him over to the Gestapo. Instead, Hosenfeld took a different action: asked what he'd done before the war, Szpilman replied he was a pianist and then he asked, “Can you play something?”. Weak and shaking from hunger and cold, Szpilman sat down at a broken piano and began to play Chopin’s Nocturne in C-sharp minor, certain he was dead anyway. His fingers could barely move, but he began to play anyway. Hosenfeld stood still in a destroyed city and listened with his eyes shut, turning this moment into a makeshift concert hall in his mind, in the midst of war-torn recesses.
When the music stopped, Hosenfeld chose not to arrest him and simply enquired where Szpilman was hiding. Over the following weeks, Hosenfeld came back with more food until the Soviet army liberated Warsaw, risking his life to help a man that his government had sentenced to death. He even brought Szpilman a coat to survive the harsh winter knowing that he was taking considerable risks.
After the war, Szpilman wrote of him and looked for him to thank him but unfortunately, Hosenfeld's life did not have a happy ending. He was captured by the Soviets after the war, and died in a Soviet POW camp in 1952, never knowing that Szpilman had lived. It was only decades later that Hosenfeld's diaries were found, revealing the truth of his quiet resistance. He had helped many survive not only Szpilman, risking his life, while trapped in a brutal system he knew was evil.
In 2009, Hosenfeld was recognized posthumously by Yad Vashem as a "Righteous Among the Nations". Szpilman lived until 2000, had a lengthy career as a pianist, all because Hosenfeld made a choice in that moment to show humanity instead of simply following orders.
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