Must-watchWorld War II · Film · 2002
The Pianist
Władysław Szpilman, a Jewish pianist on Polish Radio, watches Warsaw close in around him: the armbands, the ghetto, the deportations, and then years alone in hiding as the city is destroyed.
Where it happened
Follow the story across 5 places.
Stop 1: Polish Radio, Warsaw
Szpilman is playing Chopin live on the air when German bombs hit the radio building.
Stop 2: Warsaw Ghetto
Key location
The family is forced behind the ghetto wall, where Szpilman plays in a café for the privileged while people starve on the pavement outside.
Stop 3: Umschlagplatz
At the loading square a Jewish policeman pulls Szpilman out of the crowd while his family is pushed into the cattle cars.
Stop 4: Hideout on Aleja Niepodległości
Hidden in a flat facing a German hospital, he watches the Home Army attack in the street below and has to flee when a tank shells the building.
Stop 5: Ruins of Warsaw
Starving in an attic of the razed city, Szpilman is found by a German officer who asks him to play the piano.
What really happened
Roman Polanski adapted Szpilman's 1946 memoir almost scene by scene. In November 1940 the Germans sealed about 400,000 Jews into the Warsaw Ghetto, where hunger and typhus killed tens of thousands; between July and September 1942 some 265,000 were deported from the Umschlagplatz to be murdered at Treblinka, Szpilman's parents and siblings among them.
Szpilman escaped the deportation, worked as a labourer and then hid on the 'Aryan' side with help from the Polish underground, witnessing both the Ghetto Uprising of April 1943 and the Warsaw Uprising of August 1944. In November 1944 Wehrmacht captain Wilm Hosenfeld found him in a ruined building on Aleja Niepodległości and brought him food; Hosenfeld died in Soviet captivity in 1952.
Where to watch
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Full details
- Original title
- The Pianist
- Directed by
- Roman Polanski
- Countries
- France, Poland, Germany, United Kingdom
- Languages
- English, German
- Released
- 2002
- Period
- –
- Theaters of war
- Eastern Front
- Themes
- Holocaust
- Biography
- True story
