Chapter 1 Synopsis

Wladyslaw Szpilman had a hard life during the war, his family sold everything they had even their piano. Szpilman managed to get a job at the Cafe Nowoczena which was very close to the warsaw ghetto. In the evenings people would smuggle things over the wall of the ghetto, such as bread and other things needed for survival. Children often were the ones to go out and smuggle food for their family, and szpilman talks about how he tried to save a boy that was stuck underneath the wall trying to crawl through, he pulled the boy but he could hear the german on the other side beating the boy; the boy went limp as the german broke his spine. Szpilman was often very lucky because where he worked often had many rich people in it, which means he often got to eat good food and make good money. Four months later he moved on to another cafe, he played the piano once again but this time with another man. Winter soon came after and winter in the ghetto was terrible, there was disease and lice everywhere and an epidemic broke out within the ghetto. Five thousand people died every month and the germans arrested the doctor because they didnt care. Szpilman didnt have himself vaccinated because he didnt have the money for him or his family, and he had to see all the people laying in the streets on his way home from work who had died of thyphus and starvation. The children in the ghetto had terrible lives the emerged from basements, alleys, and doorways where they slept where they never knew what the next day would bring them. Szpilmans life begins to change and he has to live with many things that we would never imagine, life in the ghetto gets harder and as they say at the end of chapter one "It turned his heart to stone".