Just one step at a time

If you’ve seen the film The Pianist, you’ll know what it’s about. If not, here’s a quick summary I cribbed from imdb.com:

The true story of Wladyslaw Szpilman who, in the 1930s, was known as the most accomplished piano player in all of Poland, if not Europe. At the outbreak of the Second World War, however, Szpilman becomes subject to the anti-Jewish laws imposed by the conquering Germans. By the start of the 1940s, Szpilman has seen his world go from piano concert halls to the Jewish Ghetto of Warsaw and then must suffer the tragedy of his family deported to a German concentration camps, while Szpilman is conscripted into a forced German Labor Compound. At last deciding to escape, Szpilman goes into hiding as a Jewish refugee where he is witness to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (April 19, 1943 - May 16, 1943) and the Warsaw Uprising (1 August to 2 October 1944).

I saw the film a few weeks ago, then got the book out from the library. I sometimes think we see so much crap on screen that it becomes easy to just block it out, ignore it and not be moved, even when we know it’s a true story.

But when we read… It’s the Hitchcock effect: if you can’t see it, what you imagine is a whole lot scarier.

And I believe if you can’t see it, what you read, especially if it is personal, written by one who experienced the situation, rather than a detached observer or historian, can be a whole lot more horrific.

“Another month of peace and quiet passed, and then, one June evening, there was a bloodbath in the ghetto. … As the jackbooted Germans marched upstairs the lights went on, floor by floor. A businessman’s family lived in the flat directly opposite ours… When the light went on there too and SS men in helmets stormed into the room, machine pistols ready to fire, the people inside were seated sitting around their table just as we had been seated at ours a moment ago. They were frozen with horror. The NCO leading the detachment took this as a personal insult. Speechless with indignation, he stood there in silence, scanning the people at the table. Only after a moment or so did he shout, in a towering rage, ‘Stand up!’

“They rose to their feet as fast as they could, all except for the head of the family, an old man with lame legs. The NCO was seething with anger. He went up to the table, braced his arms on it, stared hard at the cripple, and growled for the second time, ‘Stand up!’

“The old man gripped the arms of his chair to support himself and made desperate efforts to stand, but in vain. Before we realized what was going on, the Germans had seized the sick man, picked him up, armchair and all, carried the chair to the balcony, and thrown it out into the street from the third floor. …

“We saw the old man still hanging in his armchair in the air for a second or two, and then he fell out of it. We heard the chair fall to the road separately, and the smack of a human body landing on the stones of the pavement.”

A young woman who worked at the local school, single mother to a boy with learning difficulties, died of a brain haemorrhage last weekend.

An 8-year-old boy whose mother volunteered at one of our church projects, died from anaphylactic shock yesterday, the result of a nut allergy. It’s not clear how he came into contact with nuts. I met him once. He was a lovely, nice, polite little lad.

Why?