Intense biography about a Polish pianist named Szpilman during the Warsaw ghetto

Rating: 8/10 (18 November 2008)

This is an emotionally tale and very decent drama about a pianist named Szpilman from luxurious life until terrible ending in the Warsaw ghetto. Polanski correctly directs a spellbinding portrait about the holocaust with his personal knowledge and proper experience on his childhood . Adrien Brody is excellent in a complicate and suffering role. Besides splendid actors, Frank Finlay,Jessica Meyer, Emilia Fox and Thomas Kretschman as a good Nazi officer who helps him. Evocative cinematography by cameraman Pawel Edlman, Polanski's usual. Musical score by Wojciech Kilar with brilliant piano sounds. Academy Award for best director Roman Polanski, Actor, Adrien Brody and adapted script by Ronald Harwood based on Wladyslaw Szpilman memories.
Adding more details over largely described on the movie referred 'the Warsaw ghetto uprising', the events happened on the following manner : In 1939, after the invasion of Poland, Reinhard Heydrich chief of Gestapo began to place all Polish Jews in ghettos, where they could slowly die of hunger and disease. The campaign was to be administered by the Waffen-SS the party's military formations that fought as integral units in the armed forces. The Warsaw ghetto was the largest of these segregated areas established by the Nazis in Poland. In 1940 Heydrich, using the excuse that the spread of typhus had to be contained, set up a special section 11 miles in circumference enclosed by a brick wall 10 feet high. The cost was paid by the Judenrat, the Jewish Council of twenty-four-members, which was in charge of Jewish affairs inside the ghetto. In 1940 more than 80.000 gentile Poles living in the infected area were ordered to leave, and the next month about 140,000 living elsewhere in the city were moved in which the 240,000 still live in the ghetto. Some 360.000 Jews, a third of Warsaw's population, were herded into a 3,5-square-mile area. Meanwhile, Gestapo agents removed all Jews from the economic and cultural life of the city, from factories,shops, theaters, and libraries. On November 15,1940, the ghetto was sealed and its twenty-two entrances closed. No one was allowed to leave or enter, there was to be contact with the outside world.The situation soon became critical,Jews fought for jobs in the ghetto, including work with the labor battalions organized by the Nazis. Those unable to find work tried to exist by selling jewels,clothing, or anything else to obtain food. From 300 to 400 died daily in the Warsaw trap. More than 43.000 starved to death during the first year. Children crazed by hunger crawled through the sewers to the non-Jewish sectors of the city to smuggle in a bit of food. People were no longer moved by the sight of men and women falling dead on the streets. The Nazi authorities began intensified measure on July 22, 1942. As a memorial to Heydrich, Heirich Himmler ordered all Jews except those already in concentration camps to be deported .The ghetto and all labor camps would then be destroyed. Mass deportations to the gas chambers of Treblinka began. In two months 300.000 Jews were eliminated. The Judenrat was ordered to deliver 6.000 Jews daily for deportation. Each day thousands were driven by guards through the gates.Young Zionists, pioneers training to go to Palestine, mobilized first to be followed by members of the Polish workers party . On July 28, 1942, the Jewish Combat organization consisting about 1.000 men and boys was formed. All resolved to kill as many of their tormentors as they could before they died.The Jews fighting from rooftops, cellars, and attics,Poles outside the ghetto now began to send in more revolvers, grenades, and dynamite. In 1943 the guerrillas divided into twenty-two groups built an intricate network underground cellars and tunnels ,linked with command posts . In April 19,1943 German troops moved in on the ghetto to send all who were left to Treblinka in a final action. First came the armed trucks, tanks, and armored cars. The ghetto fighters poured a hail of bullets, grenades and bombs, the fighting went on for twenty-eight days. The guerrillas fought to the last. Many committed suicide at the moment before capture. The Germans dragged survivors from the cellars and rubble. Fewer than 100 escaped, the last 60000 Jews had been exterminated or killed in the explosions and fires.Polish sources reported that the fighters had killed 300 Germans and wounded 1000. From Warsaw Jewish resistance moved to swamps and forests.