I saw this movie on DVD recently and was duly impressed and moved by it. It’s won literally dozens of awards and it certainly deserves all of them. The story follows a Jewish pianist’s fight for bodily and mental survival during the Second World War from the early days of the Nazi pogrom through to the eventual end of the war. It is centred in Warsaw, where the lead character and his family become imprisoned in the Warsaw ghetto. It is based very closely on the memoires of an actual person, written immediately after the war ended which made the source material quite vivid. As well the director Roman Polansky added scenes based on events he himself witnessed as a child of five or six living in the Krakow ghetto.
Although bleak and sad throughout, the story echoes with hope in the same way that La Vita è Bella (Life is Beatiful), American Beauty, and the little-known Grand Canyon do. In the tradition of those movies, this one forces you to evaluate your life and realize the things in it that truly are important and conversely those things that are not. It is this evocative quality that make it more than simply a recounting of someone’s memoires of the most horrible period of the 20th century.
So, even though, like Schindler’s List, this is not what I would strictly call a “war” movie, as it doesn’t deal with the subject of combat, but rather views war from a civilian perspective, I have to add it as one more stellar movie in my favourite war movies list. Do yourself (and humanity!) a favour and watch it if you haven’t seen it already.