The Pianist premiers to emotional Polish audience

WARSAW, Poland — An emotional Roman Polanski returned to Poland for the premiere of "The Pianist," based on the memoirs of a Polish Jew who survived the Nazi occupation. \nThe film, shot on location in Warsaw and at the Babelsberg studio near Berlin, was awarded the Palme d\'Or at this year\'s Cannes Film Festival. It\'s the first movie Polanski has shot in Poland in more than 30 years. \nStarring Adrien Brody, "The Pianist" tells the story of Wladyslaw Szpilman, who survived the Warsaw ghetto in World War II with the help of a German officer. \nPolanski was joined at the premiere Thursday at Warsaw's National Philharmonic Hall by Halina Szpilman, widowed after Szpilman\'s death in 2000, along with the couple\'s two sons, Krzysztof and Andrzej, and Helmut Hosenfeld, a son of the German officer who saved Szpilman and later died in a Soviet camp. \n"It's an exceptionally moving moment for me," Polanski told reporters before the showing. "The premiere in Poland was my special wish." \n"I'm happy that Polanski did the film because he himself lived through the war," Mrs. Szpilman said. "It's a good time now to make this movie, because it will reach a new generation that didn\'t see the war." \nSzpilman was one of 400,000 Polish Jews confined by the Nazis in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1940. He remained there, in hiding, after the 1943 uprising by poorly armed Jewish resistance fighters who held Nazi troops at bay for weeks. \nShortly before the end of the war, he was discovered by German officer Wilm Hosenfeld, who helped shelter him and gave him food. \nPolanski said that when he read Szpilman\'s memoirs, "after several pages, I knew that it was going to be the next movie and I knew that I would be doing it in Warsaw." \nHe added, "It was a book that required honesty and modesty; there was no room for the actors to show off. So we told the story in the way that I remember things were at the time. No more, no less." \nPolanski, 69, director of 1968's "Rosemary's Baby" and 1974's "Chinatown," was born in 1933 in Paris to a Polish-Jewish family that returned to the southern Polish city of Krakow two years before World War II. \nHe escaped the horrors of Krakow's Jewish ghetto, sheltered by Polish families in the countryside. His mother died at Auschwitz. \nBrody also attended the premiere. \n"I made tremendous preparations," he recalled. "I learned to play the piano, I was practicing for whole days, for a month. I was on a very extreme diet — I lost 30 pounds." \nPolanski left Poland for France and later the United States after communist censors reacted coldly to his 1962 film, "Knife in the Water." \n"The Pianist" opens later this month in France, where Polanski lives. It will open in the United States in December.