Tear Jerker / The Pianist

• The gradual deterioration of the quality of life for the Szpilman family as the Nazis begin persecuting the Jews.
  • After enjoying a celebratory meal,confident in help from Britain and France, the Szpilman family watches with despair as the German army enters Warsaw.
  • The Szpilman family suffering under the discriminatory laws and decrees. Szpilman's father is abused by German soldiers and pushed into the street, and the family struggles to find places to hide their money.
  • The Szpilman family is brought to tears when a helpless old man is tossed to his death is a staggering act of cruelty by the Germans.
  • The conditions in the ghetto are abysmal. Wladyslaw is confronted by a half-insane woman, who desparingly asks him if he's seen her husband. One man is so starved when food spills from the pot, he falls to the ground and eats it off the ground like a hungry dog.
  • The family is so desperate, poor, and hungry that they have to pool all their money together just to buy one tiny caramel. The boy selling it, poor and starved, looks aged by several decades.
• As the Szpilman family awaits to board the train that will take them to the Treblinka death camp, they hear a woman crying and saying: "Why? Why? Why did I do it? Why?" Over and over again. Wladyslaw's sister eventually says that she's tired of listening to that woman, and thinks of going over and telling her to "shut up." Her father tells her and the rest of the family that the previous night the woman and her family were hiding in their home's secret hiding spot when the Nazis burst inside. As they were hiding, the woman's baby started to cry, so the woman put her hand on it's face to keep it quiet. When the Nazis were leaving, the woman noticed the baby wasn't moving, so she removed her hand from the baby's face and the Nazis heard the gurgling sound the baby made after it had suffocated. Wladyslaw's sister becomes forlorn and decides to ignore the woman's cries.
• Szpilman is separated from his family, especially his father. It's the last time he sees them, as they are all put on a train that's heading for a death camp. "I wish I knew you better," are the last words to his sister before she and the rest of his family are deported to their deaths.
• The boy gathering food on the outside is beaten to death while halfway through the hole.
• Szpilman nearly being arrested after he accidentally knocks over the dishes, leading him to be exposed by a particularly loudmouthed woman who nearly gets him killed.
• The way Szpilman clutches to the jar of pickles that he finds after Warsaw is leveled by the Germans.
• The fate of Captain Wilm Hosenfeld, who actively hid and helped Szpilman in the final days of the war. When he hears Szpilman is in a Polish camp nearby, he pleads to a Polish soldier to tell Szpilman that he's there, and that he'll vouch for the captain. By the time Szpilman gets there, the German prisoners are gone. The movie's epilogue says that the last thing known about him is that he died in a Soviet prisoner-of-war camp in 1953. His fate is already sad enough within the constraint's of the script, but if you know the real life story you'll weep even more as Hosenfield didn't simply save Szpilman but have hid other Jews during the war and and in addition helped Polish civilians around.