Adrien Brody as Wladyslaw Szpilman in The Pianist.

Władysław Szpilman was a Jewish pianist living in Poland and working for the Polish radio in Warsaw before World War II. After the German invasion of Poland, many Polish cities were transformed into ghettos, and Szpilman managed to stay in Warsaw and barely survived from one hiding place to another while eating scraps of food and old potatoes. Remaining locked inside small apartments for months at a time, he often had to pretend to be playing piano in order to keep his sanity.

While I do not want to give away the ending of the movie for those who have not yet watched it, Szpilman managed to survive and become one of Poland’s most famous pianists. The movie is a powerful statement of success and survival against all odds. Szpilman almost died from starvation, sickness and was even shot once or twice by both Germans and Russians. But what is even more powerful is Szpilman’s relentless reminder of who he was: a pianist able to create beauty and magic in the midst of the ghetto’s misery and suffering. The Germans could not get to and destroy what was inside him and indeed, Szpilman was more than his body, was his music and dedication to it. In fact, one of the most powerful scenes of the movie was the beautiful Nocturne in C sharp minor being played by Szpilman after not touching a piano for almost three years; all this in the dead of the Polish winter, with a German officer standing next to him and with death and desolation all around him.

In 1945, Władysław Szpilman wrote a memoir about his adventures in Warsaw, but the Communist government did not permit a wide distribution of the book. It was not until 1998 when his book was reprinted in German as Das wunderbare Überleben and in English as The Pianist. It was finally made into a movie in 2002 by Roman Polański.