The film "The Pianist" chronicles the story of a musician named W³adys³aw Szpilman and how he, like many others, survived the Holocaust. The movie, directed by Roman Polanski, was based on the best selling book by Szpilman. Polanski himself survived the Holocaust as a young child and was helped and hidden by Polish families. Szpilman's story really touched Polanski and he felt that he was destined to make a film out of it. When watching "The Pianist", it is easy to recognize that the director must have lived through this experience as well and this makes the movie really become alive.
             The action of the film begins on September 1st, 1939. Szpilman was a popular pianist who often played live for the Polish Radio. On that day, his performance was interrupted by German aerial attacks on Warsaw. Szpilman was the last live performance of the Polish Radio before the station was destroyed by bombs. That day completely changed Szpilman's life. He was transformed from a young, successful and much admired artist into a person hunted by the German authorities only because he was Jewish. We follow his life and watch its deterioration. We could see his status lowered to almost nothing, watch him move into the Warsaw ghetto along with 400,000 other Jews, get beaten by German officers, face death nearly every day, and watch his family get deported to the concentration camp Treblinka. The increasing horrors of war are reflected in the way the characters and their surroundings are shown. Both the costumes and the setting seem very realistic. We see Orthodox Jews in their traditional attire, we see Germans in their uniforms, both SS and the Gestapo, we see Jewish police in the ghetto and we see people dying on the streets of the ghetto. We also see ordinary Poles whose lives almost look comfortable in comparison to life in the ghetto.
             As the fighting in this movie is limited to the streets of Warsaw, we only have a c
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