On September 23,1939, Wladyslaw Szpilman played Chopin’s Nocturnal in C sharp Minor live on the radio as shells exploded all around him. It was the last live music broadcast from Warsaw. That day, Germany invaded Poland and a German bomb hit the station and it went off the air. Shortly after Poland surrendered, the 27 year old Szpilman, his two sisters, brothers, and parents made thed ecision to stay in Warsaw because they believed that things would shortly return to normal. However, Szpilman and his family got caught in the net of the Nazi terror and were forced into the Warsaw Ghetto where he alone survived. His family was killed in the death camp, Treblinka.

The Pianist is the memoir of composer and concert pianist, Wladyslaw Szpilman, who lost his entire family in the Holocaust. Szpilman survived in hiding and, in the end, was saved by a German officer who heard him play the same Chopin piece on a piano found among the rubble of the Warsaw Ghetto.