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In the Pianist, Roman Polanski Illuminates the Traumas and Triumphs inherent in Holocaust survival through his cinematic portrayal of the survival of one man—Wladyslaw Szpilman, a renowned concert pianist, composer, and star performer of Polish radio, and one of 20 out of 360,000 Jews who survived the Nazi occupation of Warsaw. Szpilman's relentless quest to survive encompassed an unyielding struggle not only to endure physically, but also to preserve his dignity and unique identity as a musician and to sustain his belief in the authentic responsiveness of others, particularly the community of Polish (non-Jewish) musicians and resistance fighters, and even the Nazi who ultimately saved him.
Szpilman documented his struggle for survival in a memoir written immediately after the war, but it took Polanski's film—with its juxtaposition of music and words, sound and silence, image and dialogue—to capture the soul of Szpilman's saga of survival. Polanski, as a child, escaped from the Krakow ghetto at the age of 8 and spent the war years in flight. In an interview about why he chose Szpilman's memoir to express aspects of his own parallel and heretofore unnarrated tale of survival Polanski stated,
I had searched for decades for a model parallel to my life, which I couldn't film myself…Szpilman's book was the text I was waiting for—a testimony of human endurance in the face of death, a tribute to
Page 425the power of music and the will to live, and a story told without the desire for revenge. (Polanski, n.d.).
This latter comment is somewhat ironic coming from a director whose earlier films center around themes of revenge and vengeful versus dialogic encounters between victims and victimizers (e.g., Rosemary's Baby, Knife in the Water, Death and the Maiden). Indeed, in The Pianist, the director Polanski, whose life and work epitomizes the mad underbelly of survival, encounters a subject that epitomizes the grace, the exaltation of survival. We might hypothesize that Polanski found i