SOURCE: Badt, Karin. “Art after Auschwitz?” Tikkun 18, no. 3 (May-June 2003): 93-4.

In the following review, Badt argues that The Pianist embodies one of Polanski's recurring themes in his films—the triumph of art over adversity.

Roman Polanski's forte is evil; he has treated this theme for the last fifty years. His latest film, The Pianist (winner of the Palme d'Or and three Academy Awards) gives the context to his vision: the Holocaust. Using the memoir of Wladyslaw Szpilman, a Jewish pianist who survived the Warsaw ghetto, Polanski tells his own story. His parents deported, his mother murdered, Polanski emerged from the war a twelve-year-old boy on his own, determined to make it in cinema. Like Szpilman, he became a world-renowned artist.

Szpilman's and Polanski's stories coincide, it seems, to give the same message of the triumph of art. The film begins with Szpilman playing Chopin in 1939 and ends in...