Polish wartime hero accused of being Nazi collaborator

He became a national hero after his story of survival in the Warsaw ghetto was immortalised in the Oscar-winning film The Pianist – but the wartime exploits of the late Polish pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman are at the centre of a row following accusations, from beyond the grave, that he collaborated with the Gestapo.

Szpilman's son Andrzej is taking legal action to force the recall of a book containing allegations by Wiera Gran, a Polish singer famed for her pre and postwar cabaret acts, who claimed that Szpilman "formed a gang" that tried to kill her.

Gran, who died in 2007, also accused him of collaborating with the Gestapo when they were both held – along with hundreds of thousands of other Jews – in the Warsaw ghetto during Nazi occupation of the Polish capital.

Szpilman's autobiography The Pianist, describing his survival, thanks in part to a music-loving German officer, was turned into an award-winning film by director Roman Polanski in 2002.

"Straight after the war my father published his diaries under the title Death of a City, and no one who survived the ghetto as he himself had, criticised his version of events," Andrzej Szpilman told Der Spiegel. "My father was a victim of the Nazis, not a collaborator."

The book, Accused: Wiera Gran, by the journalist Agata Tuszynska, has been described by Polish media as an attempt to rehabilitate the singer. Its publishers have publicised it under the slogan: "The other side of the Wladyslaw Szpilman story."

Tuszynska quotes from private notes made by Gran, in which she refers to Szpilman as a "Gestapo man", and also accuses him of involvement as a Jewish policeman in the resettlement of Warsaw's Jews. In one handwritten note she says Szpilman was one of several ghetto residents who "formed a gang to kill me".

Szpilman's son, himself a producer and composer, has accused Tuszynska of trying to stir publicity for a book about a singer who, unlike Szpilman, is now little known in Poland. He said she had been underhand by repeating the accusations of a woman who was no longer alive to be questioned about her claims.

"I don't want the name of my father, who is a symbolic figure, to be dragged through the dirt," he said, adding that the claims were being repeated on anti-Semitic websites.

Warsaw ghetto historians say that animosity already existed between Gran and Szpilman and other artists when they lived in the ghetto from which the singer escaped.

As punishment for their collaboration, several of the artists with whom she performed in cabaret acts were sentenced to death during the war by members of the Polish and Jewish underground movement.

In 1947, Szpilman was in court when Gran was put on trial for wartime collaboration with the Nazis. But insufficient evidence led to the case being dropped. Gran later faced similar accusations after her emigration to Israel and was forced to leave her new homeland and move to France where she worked alongside Maurice Chevalier and Charles Aznavour .

Szpilman thinly disguised Gran as "Mrs K" in The Pianist, painting an unflattering picture of a physically attractive but morally questionable character.

Several famous ghetto survivors who personally knew Szpilman, such as Poland's former foreign minister Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, have condemned the allegations, calling them "baseless and shameful".