As a young boy in the ghetto, Roman Polanski gave away his stamps

In 2002, Roman Polanski won the Cannes Film Festival with "The Pianist", based on the autobiography of the Jewish pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman. It recounted the Nazi invasion of Poland, the occupation of Warsaw, the ghetto, the escape and the struggle for survival, right up to the arrival of the Red Army. It seemed like an autobiography told through a third party, so closely did the biographical details match. The director had never spoken of those tragic years, which he had lived through as a child all alone in the world. Both his parents had been deported – his mother died in Auschwitz. The son, now an adult, had always been reticent about those difficult years (those, and the ones that followed, including his disgraceful and belated spell in prison in Switzerland).

The future film director was born in 1933 in Paris. In 1936, fearing the growing anti-Semitism in France, the Polanski family returned to their homeland: it seemed a safer and relatively peaceful place, and they had relatives they could rely on. That was until the walls of the ghetto were erected, first in Warsaw and then in Kraków, and the deportations began. His father shouted at the young Roman – aged 9 – to run away, as the SS seized him and carried him off. They would be reunited in 1945, after the Mauthausen camp had been liberated by the Americans.

That, and little else, was all we knew. Until "The Pianist" and far beyond. Before reading "Don’t Run!" Take it easy!, which has just been published by Adelphi. It is co-authored by Roman Polanski and his father, Ryszard. The first section, which gives the book its title, is the director’s testimony given in 2006 for the ‘Mémoires de la Shoah’ project (transcribed in 2024). On the cover, a photograph of Roman as a child, with a toy rifle slung over his shoulder. On page 17, another photograph taken in Paris – the very first one. It shows a child with curls, in his knitted woollen outfit and white booties, with a little teddy bear by his side. Perhaps the very one that – later on – little Roman recounts losing.

He began a life split between Warsaw and Kraków, suffering from hunger. His grandmother took her own life; his mother was deported. Before he was taken away, his father had entrusted his young son to a family, so that they might take him to safety in the countryside – places, Roman recalls, that were stuck in the Middle Ages. After a couple of attempts, the plan succeeded – during the first few attempts, money and family jewellery went missing.

Father Ryszard recounts having met – after the war – some of these individuals, without ever speaking of their shared past. Nor will father and son speak of it. Until 1973. When the father, angered by a couple of remarks made by his son, wrote in one go the first twenty pages that appear in this book. The remaining ninety pages were added at his son’s request after Roman discovered his father’s file at the Yad Vashem Institute in Israel in 2002, revealing that Ryszard had shaved six years off his age. “I told him I’d pay him for it,” Roman Polanski remarks. His father played along – “things are starting to get interesting”; the family shared the same sense of humour. The remaining pages of the book recount, almost dispassionately and therefore all the more chilling, life before and during the camp. They include a few brief sketches of the Nazis whom Ryszard Polanski had the misfortune to encounter along the way. It was a small town; everyone knew one another.

Meanwhile, Roman discovers his calling. A boy in the ghetto had a hand-cranked projector. And a few snippets of film, by the Lumière brothers. Roman gave him his stamp collection in exchange for a screening in the bathroom, projected onto a towel.