He survives in the ruined city with the help of friends and strangers, including Wilm Hosenfeld, a German army captain who admires his piano playing.

[4] A German translation by Karin Wolff in 1998, Das wunderbare Überleben: Warschauer Erinnerungen ("The Miraculous Survival: Warsaw Memories"), named Władysław Szpilman as the sole author, and in 1999 an English translation by Anthea Bell was published as The Pianist: The Extraordinary Story of One Man's Survival in Warsaw, 1939–45.

Władysław Szpilman (1911–2000) was born in Sosnowiec, Poland, and studied piano in the early 1930s at the Fryderyk Chopin University of Music in Warsaw and at the Berlin Academy of Arts.

In 1933, after Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party rose to power in Germany, Szpilman returned to Warsaw, where he worked as a pianist for Polish Radio.

The Germans were too cultured and magnanimous a race, said the newspaper, to confine even parasites like the Jews to ghettos, a medieval remnant unworthy of the new order in Europe.

Instead, there was to be a separate Jewish quarter of the city where only Jews lived, where they would enjoy total freedom, and where they could continue to practise their racial customs and culture.

)[15] By the time the Germans closed the gates of the ghetto on 15 November 1940, Szpilman's family had sold all their belongings, including their "most precious household possession", the piano.

Food, drink and luxury goods arrived heaped on wagons; Kon and Heller, who ran the business (both in the service of the Gestapo), paid the guards to turn a blind eye.

[17] Szpilman describes watching such an operation in progress; the goods had been thrown over, and the child was about to follow: His skinny little figure was already partly in view when he suddenly began screaming, and at the same time I heard the hoarse bellowing of a German on the other side of the wall.

Whenever he went into the large ghetto, he would visit a friend, Jehuda Zyskind, who worked as a smuggler, trader, driver or carrier as the need arose.

Szpilman went to the labour bureau building, hoping that his popularity as a pianist would be enough to secure Henryk's release and stop himself from being arrested as well, for none of his papers were in order.

The inhabitants were called out and the buildings searched, then everyone was loaded into wagons and taken to the Umschlagplatz (assembly area) in Stawki Street next to the Warszawa Gdańska station.

At this time, Henryk, Władysław and their father were given work sorting the stolen possessions of Jewish families at the collection centre near the Umschlagplatz.

The family sat together in the large open space: At one point a boy made his way through the crowd in our direction with a box of sweets on a string round his neck.

By eating some of the food and selling or trading the rest in the ghetto (where the value skyrocketed), the workers could feed themselves and raise enough money to repeat the exercise the next day.

Hidden inside his bags of food every day, Majorek would bring weapons and ammunition into the ghetto to be passed to the resistance by Szpilman and the other workers.

These months were long and boring for Szpilman; he passed his time by learning to cook elaborate meals silently and out of virtually nothing, by reading, and by teaching himself English.

That month, just weeks after the first Soviet shells had fallen on the city, the Warsaw uprising began, the Polish Home Army's effort to fight the German occupiers.

To avoid the patrols that occasionally swept the building, Szpilman hid in a lumber room, tucked in a remote corner of the hospital.

The stinking water was covered in an iridescent film, but Szpilman drank deeply, although he stopped after inadvertently swallowing a considerable amount of dead insects.

[20] By October 14 Szpilman and the German army were all but the only humans still living in Warsaw, which had been completely destroyed by the Germans: [The city] now consisted of the chimneys of burnt-out buildings pointing to the sky, and whatever walls the bombing had spared: a city of rubble and ashes under which the centuries-old culture of my people and the bodies of hundreds of thousands of murdered victims lay buried, rotting in the warmth of these late autumn days and filling the air with a dreadful stench.

They left empty-handed, cursing and calling me a number of names.From then on, Szpilman decided to stay hidden on the roof, coming down only at dusk to search for food.

The glassy, tinkling sound of the untuned strings rang through the empty flat and the stairway, floated through the ruins of the villa on the other side of the street and returned as a muted, melancholy echo.

After much soul searching, Szpilman sought the intercession of a man whom he privately considered "a bastard", Jakub Berman, the head of the Polish secret police.

[24] Szpilman went on to become the head of Polish Radio's music department until 1963, when he retired to devote more time to composing and touring as a concert pianist.

[3] The decision to present Szpilman as the author was made by the publishing house, according to Krzysztof Lichtblau of Szczecin University, citing Waldorff's biographer, Mariusz Urbanek.

[27] According to Wolf Biermann in his afterword in the German and English editions, Śmierć Miasta was withdrawn from circulation after a few months by the Polish censors.

[28] In 1998 a German translation by Karin Wolff was published by Econ Verlag as Das wunderbare Überleben: Warschauer Erinnerungen ("The Miraculous Survival: Warsaw Memories").

[g] In 1999 Victor Gollancz published an English translation by Anthea Bell as The Pianist: The Extraordinary Story of One Man's Survival in Warsaw, 1939–45.

[38] As part of the 2007 Manchester International Festival, passages from Szpilman's book were recited by Peter Guinness, accompanied by the pianist Mikhail Rudy.