A Tale of Two Survivors.

Roman Polanski always knew that he was going to make a Holocaust movie. As a child he escaped the Jewish ghetto of Krakow and lived through the bombing of Warsaw. His parents were taken to the concentration camps. His father survived. His mother did not.

But Polanski didn't want to use his own story--it was far too close, far too personal. For years he searched for someone else's to adapt. He advised Steven Spielberg on the script of "Schindler's List" but turned down the offer to direct it because it was set in Krakow. Then, at the premiere of Polanski's "The Ninth Gate" in Paris three years ago, an old friend handed him a book called "The Pianist," a memoir by Wladyslaw Szpilman, a Polish Jew and classical pianist who slipped out of the Warsaw ghetto and spent the war in hiding. "He said, 'Read this'," the 69-year-old director told news-week. " 'I think there's a movie in it for you'."

There was. By the end of the first chapter, Polanski knew he had finally found the story he had been looking for. He turned it into "The Pianist," a richly hued war epic that depicts the devastation of Warsaw and its Jewish community through the eyes of one of its few survivors, Szpilman. The film won Cannes' top prize, the Palme d'Or, in May, and is just beginning its worldwide release. "The exciting thing about finding this material was that it was not my personal story," Polanski said at Cannes. "It helped me re-create the events without talking about myself or people around me."

It also helped Polanski break out of a creative rut. His movies of the past two decades--a mere five--have been moderate successes at best. The buzz in the film business was that Polanski was washed up, his career run aground after he fled the United States in 1977 following his conviction on statutory-rape charges. Certainly he doesn't get the kind of choice projects he did when he was Hollywood's golden boy, directing now-classic films like "Rosemary's Baby" and "Chinatown." Even Polanski understands his exile has hurt his work. "Of course, I'd like to be able to return," he told The New Yorker a few years ago. "Not to live... but to just be able to work in a normal fashion. I miss the logic and the efficiencies of the Hollywood system."

But being outside that system gave Polanski the freedom to make "The Pianist" exactly as he wanted: an auteur's view of the Holocaust, untainted by executives obsessed with political correctness, test audiences and Monday-morning box-office reports. As a result, "The Pianist" may be one of the most honest Holocaust movies ever made (review). It is surely Polanski's most candid film, allowing him for the first time to consciously incorporate his most difficult life experiences into his work.

Though 20 years ...