Revisiting the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in film

"The Pianist" by director Roman Polanski tells a poignant story of Polish-Jewish pianist and composer Wladyslaw Szpilman, who survived life in the Warsaw Ghetto thanks to the help of a German officer. He is portrayed by Adrien Brody in the movie. The Ghetto Uprising serves as a turning point in the narrative. Polanski's own mother died in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.

The filming of "The Pianist" took place in Berlin at the Babelsberg studios. Roman Polanski had the set created using a historical template that reconstructed the look of the Warsaw Ghetto, where the Nazis had rounded up and interned the Jewish inhabitants of the city. Polanski similarly experienced this as a child, but in the Krakow Ghetto.

In this documentary about the life of the French-Polish filmmaker, "Roman Polanski: A Film Memoir," directed by Laurent Bouzereau, Polanski divulges his life's story in highly personal interviews with his friend, producer Andrew Braunsberg. In it, he speaks of life as a young child in the Krakow Ghetto and his mother's deportation to Auschwitz.

Janusz Korczak was a doctor and the director of a Jewish orphanage in Warsaw, who was transferred to the ghetto in 1940. When the SS evacuated the ghetto in 1942, soldiers drove 200 orphans to the station for deportation; Korczak refused to leave them and boarded the train to the extermination camp Treblinka with his children. In "Korczak," Andrzej Wajda (above) re-staged the dramatic story.

Written by Jewish writer Jurek Becker, the book "Jacob the Liar" was made into a tragi-comic film by director Frank Beyer. In it, he gave a face to the victims of the persecution of the Jews in occupied Poland. Jacob was played by the Czechoslovakian playwright Vlastimil Brodsky (above). The film takes place in 1944, in a ghetto in Poland, shortly before its liberation by the Red Army.

German director Pepe Danquart turned the novel "Run, Boy, Run" into a historical political drama. The film follows Srulik, a small Jewish boy, who has managed to flee the Warsaw Ghetto just in time. To escape the Nazis and the guards, the nine-year-old flees into the nearby forest, where he has to learn to be on his own and survive in the wild.

The life story of literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki, a Jew in Poland who was deported at the age of 18, was filmed in 2009 by the director Dror Zahavi for television. Together with his wife Teofila, Reich-Ranicki barely survived the Warsaw Ghetto. The young Marcel is played by actor Matthias Schweighöfer and Katharina Schüttler (right) portrays his wife, Teofila.