Music transcends darkest hours in ‘Willesden Lane’

By Tom Tugend
Published on April 11, 2012

Malka and Abraham Jura faced a Solomonic decision in late 1938, as the Nazis were tightening the vise on the Jews of Vienna. The couple hoped to send their three daughters to safety but were able to wrangle only one place on the Kindertransport ferrying a limited number of Jewish children to London. After much agonizing, the Juras decided to give the spot to 14-year-old Lisa, a remarkable piano prodigy.

Roman Polanski wants sex charges dropped

By Danielle Berrin
Published on December 4, 2008

Was Roman Polanski treated unfairly?  BBC documentary says yes

By The Web Guy
Published on October 10, 2008

Memory Through Music

By Naomi Pfefferman
Published on January 16, 2003

When Andrzej Szpilman was 12, he furtively rummaged through a chest high on a shelf of a closed wardrobe in his Warsaw home. Inside the closet, he found 10 copies of a book and, recognizing his father as the author, hid one in his third-story bedroom. "I read it and received a shock," said Andrzej Szpilman, 46, a dentist and record producer who immigrated to Germany in 1983.

The book was "Death of a City," his father, Wladyslaw's, grittily brutal, dispassionate 1946 memoir of hiding in and around the Warsaw Ghetto. Since Roman Polanski turned the book into a searing film, "The Pianist" -- which won four National Society of Film Critics Awards and is up for two Golden Globes on Sunday -- Szpilman has become one of the best-known Holocaust survivors in history.