Mr. Szpilman was a Jewish concert pianist when the holocaust hit, and he lived in the Warsaw Ghetto for a good long time.
None of his family, which included his parents and siblings Henryk, Halina, and Regina, survived through the war.
Wladyslaw was at one time saved by a kind German soldier who let him go because he played Chopin's Nocturne in C minor (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzXqjcOASG0&feature=kp)
While he lived in Warsaw, some of the remaining Jews formed a rebellion, where one of the acts was to fill bathtubs full of water. Every rebel was taken to a camp or killed, except Wladyslaw, who then survived off the scummy water that was left in these bathtubs for over a year.
At one point during the war, he survived off of dusty, moldy, covered-in-mouse-poop bread crusts that he found in a carpenter's shop.
Throughout the entire war, he managed to keep his two prized possessions: A fountain pen and a pocket watch.
To keep himself from going insane when he had to spend his days unmoving to avoid spending unecessary energy, he reviewed every composition he had ever written, allowing him to return to his job very quickly after he was liberated from his hiding place. It was almost as if he had practiced through the entire war.
He attempted suicide at least once during the war, by taking very strong sleeping pills and an attempt at swallowing liquid opium; the pills knocked him unconcious before he even had a chance to do so.
To cross a street swarming with nazis, Wladyslaw had to crawl on his stomach, centimeters at a time, and pretend to be just another corpse if one soldier looked at him.
Near the end, seeing as he was wearing a German coat, liberators mistook him for a nazi and began shooting. By saying, "Don't shoot! I'm Polish!" over and over again, they eventually stopped fire long enough to see that his features were terribly not aryan.
For more information, go to http://www.ushmm.org/information/exhibitions/online-features/special-focus/szpilman-warsaw-pianist Or http://www.focusfeatures.com/the_pianist
The Szpilman family orchestra, with Wladyslaw in the back row. Most of his family was a rich bloodline of Jewish Musicians.