Pre-war Polish Culture

This song was written by Wladyslaw Szpilman, a polish Jew living in Warsaw when it became occupied by German armed forces. Renowned for being the inspiration for the film 'The Pianist', he was one of many Jews forced to move into the infamous Warsaw ghetto, which housed approximately 400,000 Jews, 250,000 of whom were later sent to Treblinka death camp where they met their gruesome deaths. Songs like this one, which was written before the German occupation, would have been commonplace in the enormous European classical music scene, though pieces of such somber beauty and relevance were afterward and are now still much more difficult to come by. To an extent, listening to a piece music that comes from somewhere thought of almost entirely in terms of the damage done to it during the holocaust can lead us to see Poland as a country of culture and life, rather than the loss thereof.