“The Pianist” begins in Warsaw, Poland in 1939, at the outbreak of the Second World War, first introducing Wladyslaw Szpilman, who works as a pianist for the local radio. He is soon introduced to Dorota, who accompanies him around Warsaw to learn of the injustice Jewish people have to face under the new Nazi regime. We soon see Wladyslaw and his family, with one brother and two sisters and living parents, as a tightly-knit Jewish family with different opinions of the war. The father is concerned with it, as if he’s an ex marine, the brother – a sarcastic man, has his own opinions. The family faces new anti-Jewish laws and regulations, and soon has to move to the Jewish ghetto emplaced by Nazi rule. The Holocaust is starting, and the family, though well-to-do before the war, is reduced to subsistence level, although they are still better off than many of their fellow Jews in the overcrowded, starving, pestilential ghetto.