The Pianist: The Extraordinary Story of One Man's Survival in Warsaw, 1939-45

by Władysław Szpilman

I can’t believe Hitler wants such a thing and there are Germans who will give such orders. If it is so, there can be only one explanation: they’re sick, abnormal or mad.

You can’t help wondering again and again how there can possibly be such riff-raff among our own people. Have the criminals and lunatics been let out of the prisons and asylums and sent here to act as bloodhounds? No, it’s people of some prominence in the State who have taught their otherwise harmless countrymen to act like this. Evil and brutality lurk in the human heart. If they are allowed to develop freely they flourish, putting out dreadful offshoots, the kind of ideas necessary if the Jews and the Poles are to be murdered like this.

You would hardly believe it, and yet it’s true.

Why did this war have to happen at all? Because humanity had to be shown where its godlessness was taking it.

the people who could do it, who gave the orders and allowed it to happen, have lost all sense of decency and responsibility.

It’s beyond understanding.

one of the hated master race played the part of guardian angel in this dreadful story.