As soon as he saw Szpilman coming, Bogucki turned away and began to walk towards the hiding place they had arranged for him.

Living in the attic of the block of flats, with very little protection from the cold and the snow, Szpilman began to get extremely cold.

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

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.

Surprisingly, the officer did not kill Szpilman, but instead after finding out that he was a pianist, asked Szpilman to play for him on a piano they had found.

Other CDs with the works of Szpilman include Works for Piano and Orchestra by Władysław Szpilman with Ewa Kupiec ( piano ), John Axelrod ( director ), and the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra ( 2004 ) ( Sony BMG ) and the Original recordings of The Pianist and Władysław Szpilman-Legendary recordings ( Sony classical ).

When not touring or building pianos, he has been editing piano editions of the works of Władysław Szpilman for Boosey and Hawkes and wrote a piece on aesthetics, which was published in Poland in March 2005.

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

Again, the experience of those in the bigger ghetto is best described by Szpilman: Dozens of beggars lay in wait for this brief moment of encounter with a prosperous citizen, mobbing him by pulling at his clothes, barring his way, begging, weeping, shouting, threatening.

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.

At around this time, the Germans in charge of Szpilman ’ s group decided to allow each man five kilograms of potatoes and a loaf of bread every day, to make them feel more secure under the Germans ; fears of deportation had been running at especially high levels since the last selection.

So, at great risk, Szpilman came down from the attic to find a working oven in one of the flats.

From then on, Szpilman decided to stay hidden on the roof every day, only coming down at dusk to search for food.

The officer went with Szpilman to take a look at his hiding place.

Lednicki told Szpilman of a German officer he had met at a Soviet Prisoner of War camp on his way back from his wanderings after the defeat of the Warsaw Uprising.

After the war Szpilman resumed his musical career at Radio Poland in Warsaw.

Szpilman died in Warsaw on 6 July 2000 at the age of 88.

House at 223 Niepodległości Avenue in Warsaw where in 1944 Szpilman met Wilm Hosenfeld

Photo of Szpilman, the most famous of Robinson Crusoes of Warsaw | Warsaw Robinsons, at the Warsaw Uprising Museum

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 ).

In November 1944, Szpilman was hiding out in an abandoned building at 223 Niepodległości Avenue when he was found by a German officer.

When Szpilman resumed his job at Polish Radio in 1945, he did so by carrying on where he left off six years before: poignantly, he opened the first transmission by once again playing Chopin's Nocturne in C sharp minor ( Lento con gran espressione ), the piece he was playing as the German bombs hit the studios of Polish Radio, interrupting its broadcast on 23 September 1939.

From 1945 to 1963 Szpilman was director of the Music Department at Polish Radio.

House at 223 Niepodległości Avenue in Warsaw where Wilm Hosenfeld was helping Władysław Szpilman

On December 4, 2011, a commemorative plaque in Polish and English was unveiled at 223 Niepodległości Avenue in Warsaw, the place where Hosenfeld discovered Szpilman, in the presence of Hosenfeld's daughter Jorinde.

Szpilman describes the scene :< p > I played Chopin ’ s Nocturne in C sharp minor.

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 ).

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

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.

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

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.

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

By October 14 Szpilman and the German army were all but the only humans still living in Warsaw, which had been completely destroyed by the Germans.

From then until his unit retreated from Warsaw, the German officer supplied Szpilman with food, water and encouraging news of the Soviet advance.

Szpilman is widely known as the protagonist of the 2002 Roman Polanski film The Pianist, which is based on his memoir of the same name recounting his survival of the German occupation of Warsaw and the Holocaust.

After Adolf Hitler seized power in 1933, Szpilman returned to Warsaw, where he quickly became a celebrated pianist and composer of both classical and popular music.

Władysław Szpilman and his family, along with all other Jews living in Warsaw, were forced to move into a " Jewish District "— the Warsaw Ghetto — on 31 October 1940.

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.

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.

In 1963, Szpilman and Gimpel founded the Warsaw Piano Quintet, with which Szpilman performed worldwide until 1986.

In November 1998 Szpilman was honored by the president of Poland with a Commander's Cross with Star of the Order of Polonia Restituta.

Szpilman composed many pieces and soundtracks while touring Poland with his accompanying violinist, Bronislav Gimpel.

He helped to hide or rescue several Poles, including Jews, in Nazi-occupied Poland, and is perhaps most remembered for helping Polish-Jewish pianist and composer Władysław Szpilman to survive, hidden, in the ruins of Warsaw during the last months of 1944.

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 ).