SOURCE: Kerr, Philip. “A Life Less Ordinary.” New Statesman 132, no. 4622 (27 January 2003): 46.

In the following review, Kerr praises Polanski's brutally realistic depiction of the Holocaust in The Pianist.

All stories about the Holocaust told from the Jewish perspective share a common fault: they are all remarkable. This is a fault because, for the vast majority of Jews, the experience of the Holocaust was very different. Millions of Jews found only a squalid, anonymous death on Germany's automated mass-destruction line. Movies dealing with the Jewish experience of the Holocaust never deal with these typical stories, only with the anomalies—the survivors. What kind of story is it when the hero dies?

These movies encourage audiences in a rather unfortunate delusion, for we like to imagine—do we not?—just what we would have done in order to survive such an ordeal, when the truth is that survival was almost always...