Władysław Szpilman

Szpilman was playing Chopin live on Polish radio in September 1939 when German shells knocked the station off the air, and he played the same piece when it came back in 1945. Between those two broadcasts his parents, his brother and his two sisters were sent to Treblinka and killed, and he survived alone in the ruins of Warsaw, hidden by Poles and finally by a German officer, Wilm Hosenfeld, who brought him food and a coat. He wrote the account at once and it appeared in 1946 before communist censors pulled it: a helpful German and unhelpful Poles did not fit the official story. Republished in 1998, it was filmed by Polanski. Szpilman went back to writing popular songs and died in 2000.