A Singer Undone By Accusations
Amid horrific Nazi madness, Wiera Gran sang love songs in the Warsaw Ghetto. Within the walls of that grim urban cage, the 25-year-old petite Jewish beauty drew crowds to the ghetto’s Café Sztuka, crooning standards from happier times in a deep, velvety lilt. She died, many decades later, in 2007, in a Paris at peace, caged in her own filthy, darkened hovel, consumed with hatred, sick with fear. She had scrawled words on every surface in her oppressive 16th-arrondissement flat, crippled by paranoia yet determined to defend her name. A hallway wall screamed in thick red marker, “Help! Szpilman and Polanski’s clique want to kill me! HELP!”
The subject of a controversial new book published in Polish and French, Accused: Wiera Gran, Gran’s fame has long faded. But many people know of her accompanist at the Café Sztuka, Wladyslaw Szpilman, the eponymous hero of Roman Polanski’s 2002 Oscar-winning biopic, The Pianist. Gran and Szpilman played the Sztuka together under the most intense conditions for more than a year.
Both the singer and the pianist went on to escape the ghetto, the only surviving members of their respective families. But as early as 1946, Szpilman’s memoirs curiously omitted Gran. Szpilman would become legend; Gran would be hounded wherever she went to sing or to live—from Poland to Israel to France, even Venezuela—by hazy rumors that she had collaborated with the Gestapo. Disparate joys—she dueted with Charles Aznavour and sang at Carnegie Hall—were always eclipsed by allegations she had been some sort of Marlene Dietrich turned Mata Hari. In 1971, her Israeli concert tour was canceled when protesters threatened to attend dressed in concentration-camp stripes. In matters of the Holocaust, vigilante persecution of the unpunished might be understandable, especially where guilt is beyond question. But in this case it wasn’t. In fact, Gran was never proved guilty by the official tribunals that studied her case in Poland and Israel. Still the rumors would resurface. She kept hundreds of copies of court verdicts, piled high, until her death. The whispers drove her mad....
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The subject of a controversial new book published in Polish and French, Accused: Wiera Gran, Gran’s fame has long faded. But many people know of her accompanist at the Café Sztuka, Wladyslaw Szpilman, the eponymous hero of Roman Polanski’s 2002 Oscar-winning biopic, The Pianist. Gran and Szpilman played the Sztuka together under the most intense conditions for more than a year.
Both the singer and the pianist went on to escape the ghetto, the only surviving members of their respective families. But as early as 1946, Szpilman’s memoirs curiously omitted Gran. Szpilman would become legend; Gran would be hounded wherever she went to sing or to live—from Poland to Israel to France, even Venezuela—by hazy rumors that she had collaborated with the Gestapo. Disparate joys—she dueted with Charles Aznavour and sang at Carnegie Hall—were always eclipsed by allegations she had been some sort of Marlene Dietrich turned Mata Hari. In 1971, her Israeli concert tour was canceled when protesters threatened to attend dressed in concentration-camp stripes. In matters of the Holocaust, vigilante persecution of the unpunished might be understandable, especially where guilt is beyond question. But in this case it wasn’t. In fact, Gran was never proved guilty by the official tribunals that studied her case in Poland and Israel. Still the rumors would resurface. She kept hundreds of copies of court verdicts, piled high, until her death. The whispers drove her mad....