On January 12, 1945, the stalled Red Army offensive lumbered into motion toward Berlin.1 Soviet soldiers and their allies, who had spent months across the Vistula from Warsaw, advanced into the Polish capital. The Nazi General Government was gone. The Polish intelligentsia had been captured or evacuated; stragglers lived amid the ruins. A member of the Warsaw elite greeted the arrivals: Polish-Jewish pianist Władysław Szpilman, who had survived the anti-intelligentsia campaigns, ghetto liquidation, the ghetto uprisings, the Warsaw Uprising, and the evacuation and demolition of the city. Much the worse for wear, he remembered that unlikely moment:
Around one o’clock I heard the remaining Germans leaving the building. Silence fell, a silence such as even Warsaw, a dead city for the last three months, had not known before […] Not until the early hours of the next day was the silence broken by a loud and resonant noise … Radio loudspeakers set up somewhere nearby were broadcasting announcements in Polish of the defeat of Germany and the liberation of Warsaw. […] I began slowly coming down the stairs, shouting as loud as I could, “Don’t shoot! I’m Polish!” … The figure of a young officer in a Polish uniform, with the eagle on his cap, came into view beyond the banisters. He pointed a pistol at me and shouted, “Hands up!” I repeated my cry of, “Don’t shoot! I’m Polish!” The lieutenant went red with fury. ‘Then why in God’s name don’t you come down?’ he roared. “And what are you doing in a German coat?”2
Szpilman heard radio in his “dead city” in Polish for the first time since Starzyński’s voice had faded from the airwaves. A UNESCO commission sent British and French experts to assess the destruction shortly thereafter. The shocked observers reported that,