The Pianist (2002)

"The Pianist" begins in Warsaw, Poland in 1939, at the outbreak of the Second World War, first introducing Wladyslaw Szpilman, who works as a pianist for the local radio. He is soon introduced to Dorota, who accompanies him around Warsaw to learn of the injustice Jewish people have to face under the new Nazi regime. We soon see Wladyslaw and his family, with one brother and two sisters and living parents, as a tightly-knit Jewish family with different opinions of the war. The father is concerned with it, as if he's an ex marine, the brother - a sarcastic man, has his own opinions. The family faces new anti-Jewish laws and regulations, and soon has to move to the Jewish ghetto emplaced by Nazi rule. The Holocaust is starting, and the family, though well-to-do before the war, is reduced to subsistence level, although they are still better off than many of their fellow Jews in the overcrowded, starving, pestilential ghetto.

Wladyslaw takes a job playing piano at a restaurant in the ghetto, turning down a offer to work for the Jewish Police, and the family survives, but living conditions in the ghetto continue to deteriorate and scores of Jews die every day from disease, starvation, and random acts of violence by German soldiers. By 1942, the aged father must apply for working papers through a friend of Wladyslaw, so that he can take a job in a German clothier, but the day comes when it is their turn be shipped to their deaths at the Treblinka concentration camp. As the family sits under the blazing sun in a holding pen with hundreds of other Jews waiting for the trains, the father uses the family's last 20 zlotys to buy a piece of candy from a boy (who apparently isn't aware of his own impending doom). Each family member eats a tiny morsel of candy, their last meal together.

As they are going to the trains, Wladyslaw is saved by Itzak Heller, a Jewish man working as a police guard. Wladyslaw watches the rest of his family board the train, never to be seen again. He hides for a few days, and blends in with the ten percent or so of the Jews that the Nazis kept alive in the ghetto to use as slaves. He is put to work, under grueling, abusive conditions, building a wall. He thinks he sees Dorota, but she passes quickly. He learns that some of the Jews are planning an uprising, and helps them by smuggling guns into the ghetto. A German officer almost catches him once. After this close call, he decides he must escape and take his chances in the larger city, so with the help of friend (who was the friend that got his father working papers) Majorek, he escapes and finds Dorota, who is now married and pregnant, and her brother dead.

They hide Wladyslaw for one night, and the next day take him to a vacant apartment, not far from the ghetto wall, where he can live indefinitely on smuggled food. There he watches the Jewish Ghetto Uprising in 1943, for which he helped smuggle the weapons, and watches weeks later as the uprising is finally crushed and its participants killed. Later, the man who had been taking care of him and smuggling food to him wants to move him, but he decides to stay put, feeling safer where he is. His friend gives him an address to go to in case of an emergency, and leaves. Wladyslaw remains in the apartment a few more months until he has an accident , breaking some dishes. The noise has blown his cover, and he has to scurry out of the building, being chased by an angry German woman.

Wladyslaw goes to the emergency address he was given, where he meets another man who is with the Jewish resistance hiding Jews. This man hides Wladyslaw in another vacant apartment, where there is a piano, but his new caretaker is very slack about smuggling in food, and Wladyslaw once more faces starvation, and at one point almost dies of jaundice. He recovers in time to bear witness to the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, in which the Poles tried to retake control of their city. Soon, Nazis start attacking the building and he has to flee. The Poles had expected the advancing Soviet Red Army to help them, but the Russians did not come, instead allowing the Germans to put down the revolt, and drive the entire remaining population of Warsaw out of the city. Wladyslaw hides in the abandoned hospital that had been across the street from his second hideout. The Germans had by then decided to burn Warsaw to ashes, so Wladyslaw flees the hospital and jumps back over the wall into the ghetto, now an abandoned, desolate wasteland of bricks and rubble.

He stays there, rummaging through burned-out buildings to find something to eat, and continues to hide, until one night a Nazi officer, Captain Wilm Hosenfeld, finds him. There was a piano in the building, and Wladyslaw played for Hosenfeld. Hosenfeld was moved by his music, and he helped Wladysaw survive, by bringing him food and giving him his coat. By this time, it is early 1945, and the sound of Russian artillery in the distance shows that the liberation of Warsaw is at last imminent. Hosenfeld leaves as the Germans abandon the city. Shortly afterward, Wladyslaw sees Polish partisans, and, overcome with joy, goes outside to meet his countrymen. Seeing his coat given to him by Hosenfeld, they think he is a German and try to kill him, before he can convince them he is Polish.

Newly freed Poles walk past an improvised Russian prisoner of war camp, and Hosenfeld is among the prisoners. The Poles hurl insults at the Germans through the fence, but when Hosenfeld hears that one of the Poles is a musician, he goes to the fence and tells him that he helped Wladislaw, and asks him to ask Wladislaw to return the favor, before a Russian soldier throws him back down on the ground. The Polish musician does indeed bring Wladislaw back to the site to petition the Russians, but they have departed without a trace by the time he gets there. Wladislaw is unable to help Hosenfeld, but he returns to playing piano for the radio station.

Hosenfeld died in a Soviet gulag in 1952. Wladislaw lived to be an old man, dying in Poland at the age of 88.

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