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You might say all of us owe our very existence to the lottery of chance that allowed our ancestors to survive the second world war. Maybe this is one reason I find it such a compelling subject. The margins of genetic survival were narrowed to a much greater extent than at any time in recent history. And of course if you're Jewish this was exacerbated a thousand-fold and more. If you were interned in the Warsaw Ghetto your chances of survival were about the same as any of us being struck by lightning in our lifetime. So one huge point of interest here, behind all the horror, is how did this man manage to survive? I can't answer this question. It doesn't appear to have anything to do with any quality he possessed that others didn't. He wasn't particularly intrepid or brave or robust physically, he wasn't inordinately wealthy, he didn't breach his ethics to survive. In fact, at times he seems almost comically inept as any kind of resistor, never highlighted better than when at the end of the war he goes to meet the Russian liberators dressed in a German military overcoat. (The woman soldier who shoots at him misses.) In some ways he reminds me of Primo Levi, another highly sensitive artistic man who you'd think wouldn't have the qualities to survive. I always remember his account of how he was captured as a partisan. His band didn't have a single weapon and were caught hiding in the kind of hideout children make. Surely the odds of someone so ill-suited to the deprivations and depravities of a death camp wouldn't last three months?

There were several key moments when individuals who might easily have murdered Szpilman let him off the hook. Was it charm? He doesn't though come across as particularly charming. He doesn't get on with his brother and takes little interest in his sisters. He seems a bit of an introspective loner, unrealistic (he's often worrying about the health of his hands and the implications frostbite will have on his career as a pianist). It's as if he carried with him some untouchable quality that his persecutors recognised. That he was marked out to survive. There's always a kind of mysticism at work in these survival stories. To realise this is also to begin to understand the tragic phenomenon of survivor guilt. How hard it must be to be singled out as special when you know you're no more special than countless others who perished.

Perhaps even harder to comprehend than the gas chambers are the personal and intimate acts of barbarity, especially the cold-blooded killing of children. In this regard the Ukrainian and Lithuanian SS are particularly monstrous. It's probably important to remember it wasn't only Germans who were sadistic killers. One horror they performed was to smash the heads of children against a wall by swinging them by the legs. I remember watching an interview with a Lithuanian guard who had participated in countless atrocities. His answer to every question was to tell the interviewer he couldn't possibly understand. He refused to apologise. As far as he was concerned he had paid his penance by spending ten years in a Russian gulag as if he considered what he did little more than an illegal act. He struck me as a completely worthless human being. And I couldn't for the life of me understand why fate had chosen to usher him safely into old age. The pathetic self-love this man must have possessed to believe his life was more important than the barbarous acts he performed beggars belief.