A movie about a pianist who overcomes extremely difficult odds in the middle of his career

Rating: 10/10 (17 August 2013)

Basically, this movie features a pianist who survives the Nazi holocaust in Poland and somehow survives that long ordeal to become a great pianist again.
It starts off at a radio station in Warsaw, where the vintage concert pianist, Wladislaw Szpilman, was playing the Nocturne in C-sharp minor (opus posthumous) by Chopin, in a professional radio recording session. Suddenly, the first bomb in the Nazi blitzkrieg against Warsaw makes a near miss at the studio in the middle of the piece. Wladislaw decides to hang tough and continue playing until a second bomb shortly afterwards makes a direct hit at the recording studio, knocking out their session for good.
Wladislaw survives and runs back to his family and realizes that extremely drastic changes are coming for them. The first part is that Poland lets the Nazis take over Warsaw unchallenged after the first bombs fell. Then, immediate restrictions on Warsaw's Jewish families by the Nazis in Warsaw affect Wladislaw's family as well, forcing them to do things like wear the star of David on their wrists.
Then, the ultimate restriction takes place as the Nazis' close off Warsaw, build a new wall and make what is called The Warsaw Ghetto, forcing Wladislaw and his family to move inside the ghetto.
Their family tries to survive that but after a Nazi raid on an apartment across the street from their flat that led to every family member being executed, they know that the continued Nazi crackdowns are not over.
Then, most of Wladislaw's family is forced into a new flat, and eventually, hoarded off to the Treblinka death camp, but Wladislaw is spared from going to Treblinka with a help of a Jewish ghetto police officer who was his friend.
The surviving Wladislaw families then become slave laborers, including Wladislaw himself, but then, a few of Wladislaw's friends make plans to fight back against the Nazis. Wladislaw then finally makes a ruse to get out of the ghetto undetected, which he does. His helpers then let him move to a new flat by one of his friends...outside the ghetto.
Suddenly, Wladislaw witnesses the first uprising and he realizes now that the Polish can fight against tyranny. The first uprising fails, but this leads to other stronger anti-Nazi uprisings later on. When Wladislaw had to flee his temporary flat to a flat just near the temporary German police headquarters, everything went well until new Polish uprising skirmishes cause the Nazis to fight back and eventually destroy part of the flat by a Panzer tank, forcing Wladislaw out again and end up in hiding.
He does find a abandoned house that he squatters, but then confronts a German officer who would have killed Wladislaw but he said to him that he was a pianist. That officer then allows Wladislaw to stay in the attic as the house turns into a temporary SS logistics post as the Russian Red Army advances towards Poland with distant artillery fire that Wladislaw hears.
The firing eventually stops, and the Germans in that post then have to pull out, as well the officer, and he gives to Wladislaw his raincoat and leaves. As Warsaw is liberated on V-E day, Wladislaw makes the mistake of wearing that Nazi coat as he goes out, and almost gets shot dead by a Polish army platoon but he counters that he is Polish, getting his life spared.
We then see the Treblinka death camp being liberated, and the German officer who helped him now is detained with hundreds of Wehrmacht soldiers at a temporary area just near the camp. One of the Wladislaw family members who survived the camp then rails at that officer.
Finally, the movie ends with him performing the "Grande Polonaise" over an orchestra, an example of his resilience.