The Jewish pianist Władysław Szpilman lived in Warsaw with his parents and siblings. He played piano concertos for Polish radio until the city was occupied by the German Wehrmacht in 1939.
In the summer of 1942, over 250,000 Jews were deported from the Warsaw ghetto to Treblinka extermination camp. Władysław Szpilman and his family were also due to be deported. He himself was able to escape the assembly point, however. He was deployed as a forced laborer outside the ghetto. Together with others, he smuggled weapons and ammunition into the ghetto on several occasions. They passed them on to Jewish resistance groups, who later used them in the ghetto uprising.
Szpilman managed to escape from the ghetto in February of 1943, and hid with support from non-Jewish friends. In November 1944 the Wehrmacht officer Wilm Hosenfeld discovered him in a hiding place. The officer helped him to find a new place to hide in the building’s attic, and provided him with food. Władysław Szpilman remained in Warsaw after the war and returned to working for Polish radio.