Page "Władysław Szpilman" Paragraph 8

Everyone in his family was deported in 1942 to Treblinka, an extermination camp also in German-occupied Poland, roughly 50 miles northeast of Warsaw.

A member of the Jewish Police ( Itzchak Heller ) pulled Szpilman from a line of people — including his parents, brother, and two sisters — being loaded onto a train at the transport site ( which, as in other ghettos, was called the Umschlagplatz ).

None of Szpilman's family members survived the war.

Szpilman was left in the ghetto as a laborer and helped smuggle in weapons for the coming Jewish resistance uprising.

He avoided capture and death by the Germans and their collaborators several times.

Szpilman remained in the Warsaw Ghetto until it was abolished after the deportation of most of its inhabitants in April-May 1943 and went into hiding.