The latest edition was slightly expanded by Andrzej Szpilman himself and printed under a different title, The Pianist.

In 2002, Roman Polanski directed a screen version, also called The Pianist, but Szpilman died before the film was completed.

Szpilman ’ s family ( he was living with his parents, his brother Henryk and his sisters Regina and Halina ) were amongst those who did not.

Szpilman ’ s family was lucky to already be living in the ghetto area when the plans were announced.

In his memoir, Szpilman describes one of these forays: One day when I was walking along beside the wall I saw a childish smuggling operation that seemed to have reached a successful conclusion.

Szpilman and his family were fortunate to live in the small ghetto, which was less crowded and dangerous than the other.

After much effort, Szpilman managed to extract from him a promise that Henryk would be home by that night, which he was.

Soon after they arrived, Szpilman ’ s family was reunited.

Szpilman was horrified and angered by his siblings ’ headstrong decision, and only accepted their presence after his appeal to the guards had failed to secure their release.

Here, Szpilman !’ A hand grabbed me by the collar, and I was flung back and out of the police cordon .</ p >

Whilst doing this new work, Szpilman was permitted to go out into the Gentile side of Warsaw.

After his work on the wall Szpilman survived another selection in the ghetto and was sent to work on many different tasks, such as cleaning out the yard of the Jewish council building.

Eventually, Szpilman was posted to a steady job as “ storeroom manager .” In this position, Szpilman organised the stores at the SS accommodation, which his group was preparing.

But also, Majorek was a link to Szpilman ’ s Polish friends and acquaintances on the outside.

Szpilman followed, careful not to reveal himself as Jewish ( Szpilman had prominent Jewish features ) by straying into the light of a street lamp while a German was passing.

While he was hiding in the city, Szpilman had to move many times from flat to flat.

From the window of the flat in which he was hiding, Szpilman had a good vantage point from which to watch the beginnings of the rebellion.

Hiding in a predominantly German area, however, Szpilman was not in a good position to go out and join the fighting: first he would need to get past several units of German soldiers who were holding the area against the main power of the rebellion, which was based in the city centre.

Now, Szpilman was resigned to dying.

His work focusing on this period includes the films Operation Daybreak ( covering the assassination by the Czechoslovakian Resistance of Nazi leader Reinhard Heydrich ), The Statement ( a fictionalized account of the post-War life-on-the-run of French collaborator Paul Touvier ), The Pianist ( an adaptation of the autobiography of the Jewish-Polish musician Władysław Szpilman covering his survival during the Nazi occupation of Poland ), the play later adapted to film Taking Sides ( focused on the post-War " de-Nazification " investigation of the German conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler ), the play Collaboration ( about the composer Richard Strauss and his partnership with the Jewish writer Stefan Zweig ), and the play An English Tragedy ( dealing with the British fascist John Amery ).

In 1998, Szpilman ’ s son Andrzej Szpilman republished the memoir of his father ’ s, first in German as Das wunderbare Überleben (" The Miraculous Survival ") and then in English as The Pianist.

The idea for the performance was originally conceived by the pianist, Mikhail Rudy, who gained the backing of Andrzej Szpilman ( Władysław Szpilman's son ).

Szpilman's son Andrzej compiled and released a CD with the most popular songs Szpilman had composed under the title Wendy Lands Sings the Songs of the Pianist ( Universal Music ).

Szpilman's son, Andrzej Szpilman, had long called for Yad Vashem to recognize Wilm Hosenfeld as a Righteous Among the Nations, non-Jews who risked their lives to rescue Jews.

On February 13, 1943, Szpilman slipped through the ghetto gate and met up with his friend Andrzej Bogucki on the other side.

As vividly described in his memoir, in February 1944 Szpilman found places to hide in Warsaw and survived with the help of his friends from Polish Radio and fellow musicians such as Andrzej Bogucki and his wife Janina.

This book includes a foreword by Andrzej Szpilman, excerpts from Hosenfeld's diary, and an epilogue in the form of an essay by Wolf Biermann.

* 1911 – Władysław Szpilman, Polish pianist ( d. 2000 )

* December 5 – Władysław Szpilman, Polish pianist and memoirist ( d. 2000 )

' speech to his brother Władysław Szpilman in a Jewish Ghetto in Warsaw, Poland, during the Nazi occupation in World War II.

The Pianist is a memoir of the Polish composer of Jewish origin Władysław Szpilman, written and elaborated by the Polish author Jerzy Waldorff, who met Szpilman in 1938 in Krynica and became a friend of his.

The book is written in the first person as the memoir of Szpilman.

It tells how Szpilman survived the German deportations of Jews to extermination camps, the 1943 destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto, and the 1944 Warsaw Uprising during World War II.

In the introduction to its first edition Jerzy Waldorff informed that he wrote " as closely as he could " the story told to him by Szpilman, and that he used his brief notes in the process.

Because of Stalinist cultural policy, and the ostensibly " grey areas " in which Szpilman ( Waldorff ) asserted that not all Germans were bad and not all of the oppressed were good, the actual book remained sidelined for more than 50 years.

Władysław Szpilman studied the piano in the early 1930s in Warsaw and Berlin.

Upon his return to Warsaw, Szpilman worked as a pianist for Polish Radio until the German invasion of Poland in 1939.

They hid their money in the window frame, an expensive gold watch under their cupboard and the watch ’ s chain beneath the fingerboard of Szpilman ’ s father ’ s violin.

To avoid the concentration camps, rich, intellectual Jews like Szpilman ’ s family and many of his acquaintances could pay to have poorer Jews deported in their place.

In The Pianist, Szpilman describes a newspaper article that appeared in October 1940: A little while later the only Warsaw newspaper published in Polish by the Germans provided an official comment on this subject: not only were the Jews social parasites, they also spread infection.

Szpilman played piano at an expensive café which pandered to the ghetto ’ s upper class, made up largely of smugglers and other war profiteers, and their wives or mistresses.

On his way to or from work, Szpilman would sometimes pass by the wall during smuggling hours.

In addition to the methods of smuggling mentioned previously, Szpilman observed many child smugglers at work.