WILM HOSENFELD
Biography
Wilm Hosenfeld was born in a village in Hessen, Germany, in 1895. His family was Catholic and he grew up in a pious and conservative German patriotic environment. After serving as a soldier in World War I, he became a teacher, and taught at a local school. By the time World War II broke out, Hosenfeld was married and had five children.
In the end of August 1939, a week before the German attack on Poland, 43-year-old Hosenfeld was drafted into the Wehrmacht (the German Army). He was stationed in Poland, first in Pabiance, and as of July 1940 in Warsaw, where he would stay until the end of the war. Hosenfeld spent most of the war years as a sports and culture officer, rising from the rank of sergeant to captain. In summer 1944, during the Polish uprising, when all military forces were engaged in suppressing the revolt, he was involved in the interrogation of prisoners.
Although joining the Nazi party in 1935, Hosenfeld soon grew disillusioned with the regime and disgusted by the crimes against Poles and Jews that he became witness to. All through his military service he kept a diary in which he expressed his feelings. The texts survived because he would regularly send the notebooks home. In his writing, Hosenfeld stressed his growing disgust with the regimes’ oppression of Poles, the persecution of Polish clergy, the abuse of Jews, and, with the beginning of the “Final Solution”, his horror at the extermination of the Jewish people. In 1943, after witnessing the suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto revolt, he wrote in his diary: "these animals. With horrible mass murder of the Jews we have lost this war. We have brought an eternal curse on ourselves and will be forever covered with shame. We have no right for compassion or mercy; we all have a share in the guilt. I am ashamed to walk in the city…."
Offering to help Szpilman leave Warsaw, Hosenfeld at first did not realize he was talking with a Jewish man. He asked the refugee what he did for a living. Learning he was a pianist, the “tall, elegant German officer” led the unkept, unwashed man to an out-of-tune piano in a room without window panes:
"When I placed my fingers on the keyboard they shook...my fingers were stiff and covered with a thick layer of dirt...I played Chopin’s Nocturne in C sharp minor...When I had finished, the silence seemed even gloomier and more eerie than before. (The Pianist, pages 177-178.)"
When Hosenfeld realized the pianist was a Jew who could not leave the city, he searched, and found, a safe hiding place in the loft above the building’s attic. Three days later the former teacher returned with food. Although the German fortress commando unit did move into the building, no other soldier ever found Szpilman’s refuge.
The officer came to see the pianist for the last time on December 12, 1944:
He brought me a larger supply of bread than before and a warm eiderdown. He told me he was leaving Warsaw with his detachment, and I must on no account lose heart, since the Soviet offensive was expected any day now. (The Pianist, page 181.)
Szpilman, Wladyslaw
