FROM BUCHENWALD TO CARNEGIE HALL

A combination of musical memoir and Holocaust history, in which pianist Filar traces his career from Warsaw to Philadelphia, revealing how his passion for music helped him persevere, and defending his decision to study in postwar Berlin under world-renowned pianist Walter Gieseking, an alleged Nazi.

Born in 1917, Filar began playing with the Warsaw Philharmonic when he was 12. After the Germans invaded Poland, he participated in the Warsaw ghetto’s resistance movement until 1943, when the Nazis murdered his parents and sent him to Buchenwald. In the camp’s munitions factory, Filar almost lost a hand working with knives. His dream of becoming a concert pianist—his prime motivation to survive—would have perished had a Pole not given him some disinfectant. After his injury healed, Filar boldly demanded safer working conditions from a sympathetic German. Reasoning that death was inevitable, he took other risks that ultimately saved his life. After liberation, Filar sought an apprenticeship with Gieseking. He refutes allegations that Gieseking was a Nazi, noting that Gieseking often played the music of the Jewish-born Felix Mendelssohn. His olympian perspective rises above ethnic divisions and simple labels of hero and villain. Filar cannot forget that a German also helped save his hands. He pities “brainwashed” Nazi youths who threw stones at him. Admitting his postwar acts of revenge, he reveals that he “played kickball” with a captured Gestapo chief and—after immigrating to New York City during the ’50s—attacked a former Polish official who had slapped his father with a “Jewish tax” years earlier in Warsaw. Toward the story’s end, Filar focuses on the rewarding aspects of his career, sharing the joy of playing in the concert halls of Israel, Brazil, and New York.

Like Wladyslaw Szpilman’s The Pianist, a well-written, perceptive tale that evokes the splendor of prewar Warsaw and its progressive music scene, and a poetic testimony of artistic beauty triumphing over evil.