The Pianist is a powerful, moving indictment of tyranny that everyone should read, says Hugh MacDougall.

SCUTTLING rats scratched his face as he slept. It was the middle of winter, he was living in the attic of a burnt-out building and snow covered the rags he had found for bedding.

Living in constant fear for his life, he hadn't eaten warm food for four months. Indeed, the only food he could find, and which starvation caused him to digest, was mouldy crusts of bread covered in mouse droppings.

There was no running water. The only water he discovered was stinking, slime-covered liquid in a fire bucket, but he was so thirsty he drank some, swallowing dead insects in the process.

All around him the rest of the city was bombed and shelled rubble. The streets were full of corpses, bloated bodies of people shot or burnt alive.

This was Warsaw in 1945 and Wladyslaw Szpilman was a Polish Jew in hiding. Nazi thugs and even more sadistic, subhuman Ukrainian and Lithuanian soldiers, savages who would swing children by their ankles and smash their skulls against a wall, were in control.

Szpilman was lucky, if you can call it that. Luck at the last minute enabled him to escape as his parents, brother and sisters, along with thousands of other Jews, were herded on to a train which was going to take them to a concentration camp and death.

Countless times he was almost discovered, which would have meant being shot. A suicide attempt failed. He had nothing to live for, but somehow the human instinct for survival overcame all the odds.

And finally, amazingly, an 'angel' appeared. In all the carnage, when Szpilman could run and hide no more, his saviour was a German officer disgusted and horrified by the hell of Nazism. Excerpts from his diary follow Szpilman's text.

A concert pianist with Polish radio, Szpilman wrote this intensely vivid journal about his experiences in 1946. Recently his story became an Oscar-winning film.

Read this book, I urge you all. It is a grim tale told in simple language and remarkably without bitterness, but its effect is immensely powerful. It will make you weep. It will make you angry. Its knowledge will strengthen your resolve in wanting to free the world of tyrannical depravity.

Updated: 09:40 Wednesday, November 05, 2003