Wladyslaw Szpilman was one of Poland's most celebrated pianists. He was playing Chopin's Nocturne in C-sharp minor on Polish Radio when a German bomb hit the building on September 23, 1939 — the last live broadcast from Warsaw before the station went off the air for six years.

Szpilman was forced into the Warsaw Ghetto with his family. He watched his parents, two sisters, and brother being loaded onto trains to Treblinka — the last time he saw them. A Jewish policeman pulled him out of the line at the last moment. "What are you doing?" someone in the crowd yelled. "I'm saving a great artist," the policeman replied. Szpilman later wrote that he would have given anything to be on that train with his family.

Hiding in the Ruins

Szpilman escaped the ghetto and hid in a series of apartments on the "Aryan side" of Warsaw, sheltered by Polish friends. During the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, the buildings around him were systematically destroyed. He was alone in the ruins of the city for months, starving, drinking dirty water from puddles, and moving through shattered buildings like a ghost.

The German Officer

In November 1944, a German officer named Captain Wilm Hosenfeld discovered Szpilman hiding in an attic. Instead of turning him in, Hosenfeld asked him what he did for a living. When Szpilman said he was a pianist, the officer pointed to a piano in the ruins and asked him to play.

Szpilman played the same Chopin Nocturne he had played on the last radio broadcast. Hosenfeld listened in silence. Then he brought Szpilman food and a blanket. He returned periodically over the following weeks to bring more food, keeping Szpilman alive until the liberation.

Hosenfeld was captured by the Soviets and died in a POW camp in 1952. Szpilman spent years trying to help him, without success. Szpilman's memoir, "The Pianist," was published in 1946 but suppressed by the Communist authorities because it portrayed a German officer sympathetically. It was rediscovered and republished in 1998, and Roman Polanski adapted it into the 2002 film of the same name.