WEDNESDAY REFLECTION
Twenty-First Week in Ordinary Time
At Mass in the school on 19th March, the feast of St Joseph, I said I did not know when we would meet again for the Holy Sacrifice. It was not until 13th August that I returned to the Oratory to celebrate Holy Mass. The gap reminded me of Wladyslaw Szpilman, a gifted pianist who started playing for Polish Radio in 1935 as their house pianist. On 23rd September 1939, broadcasting Chopin’s Nocturne in C-sharp Minor Because of a German attack on the building he was forced to stop playing in the middle of the piece and, in fact, that was the last broadcast for Six years. Polish Radio resumed in 1945 with Szpilman carrying on at the exact spot in the score where he had left all those years before!
The bombing of the studio features in the film, “The Pianist,” which recounts very graphically, perhaps too graphically for sensitive souls, the story of Wladyslaw Szpilman going into hiding during the time of the holocaust but, towards the end of the war, being treated kindly, but secretly by the German officer, Captain Wilm Hosenfeld who feeds the starving pianist and gives him his great-coat to keep him warm. The film doesn’t recount that it took until 1951 for Wladyslaw to discover the name of the German officer and that he was a devout Catholic. The pianist made many attempts to have his benefactor released from the Soviet war camp. He was, however, unsuccessful and it was there that the German officer died. Szpilman, however, got to know his son and daughter and his son, Andrzej Szpilman was instrumental in having Wilm posthumously honoured by the Polish Government with a “Commander’s Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta” and declared as “Righteous Among the Nations” by the State of Israel.
Let us Pray:
Lord, at the beginning this academic year, may we aware of our dependence upon You. When we begin to lean on our own understanding, remind us that Your ways far surpass ours. Show us the right paths and lead us in the way we should go as we trust in Your ability to care for us. In Jesus’ name,
Amen.
Monsignor Monaghan
