Disclaimer: I am aware Roman Polanski is problematic. This is in no way an endorsement of him as a person.

My grandfather Marc Moise Szeftel died when I was five. I didn’t know that he was a Holocaust survivor until my late teens and my knowledge of his story comes almost entirely from a book published in the early 90s called Pniniad which chronicled his journey from a child in Ukraine, through his escape from occupied Poland and France, to his tenure at Cornell University where he befriended Vladimir Nabokov. The basis for the book (meticulously researched by author Galya Diment) is the assumption that Nabokov’s character Timofey Pnin is based on my grandfather.

Released in 2002, “The Pianist” tells the story Wladyslaw Szpilman who was forced into hiding during the Nazi occupation of Warsaw. At the time I had recently quit my job and was waiting for school to start. Having a lot of time on my hands, I decided to finally read Pniniad. It was full of amazing revelations about what his family went through before and during the war. I remember being surprised that these stories were not part of the family narrative, not thinking that maybe he was so traumatized by the experiences that he probably just wanted to forget them.

For some reason I ended up seeing “The Pianist” alone. I knew going in that it would be an emotional experience, but I was not prepared for how much Szpilman’s story would mirror the one I had just read about my Papa. By the end i was a sobbing mess and couldn’t even articulate what was happening to me.

To read about these experiences is one thing. To see them acted out on screen is another. In my mind I was watching my grandfather, and it was absolutely heartbreaking. The fact that he carried this trauma with him for the rest of his life is hard to reconcile.

I don’t know if he ever received therapy or was able to work through his experiences. Given the times I expect not.

This kind of trauma affects generations, but as we get farther away and people who survived these experiences pass on, we start to forget. We forget that this trauma exists in our bones, our subconscious. We hold this in ourselves and it affects the way we deal with the world.

There are plenty of movies and documentaries about WWII and the Holocaust. To me The Pianist is the best example of pulling the focus in and showing the internal psychological effect this kind of horror can have on an individual.