Roman Polanski survived the Krakow Ghetto as a boy, then fled American justice as an adult
As a child, Roman Polanski escaped the Krakow Ghetto and passed as a Catholic to stay alive. Decades later he won an Oscar for The Pianist, a film about that same catastrophe. He also remains a fugitive, having left the United States in 1978 before sentencing in a child sex abuse case.
Raymond Liebling was born in Paris on 18 August 1933. His father, a Polish Jew, painted and made sculptures; his mother, Russian-born, had been raised Catholic. In early 1937 the family returned to Krakow, and when Germany invaded Poland two years later they were forced into the ghetto. The boy was expelled from primary school within weeks and kept out of classrooms for six years.
Both parents were deported. His mother, four months pregnant, was sent to Auschwitz and killed on arrival; his father went to the Mauthausen camps in Austria and survived to take the name Ryszard Polanski. Roman watched his father marched away and heard him whisper at him to get lost, for fear the soldiers would notice. He escaped the ghetto in 1943 and was hidden by Polish Catholics, one of whom had promised his father to shelter him. He learned prayers and attended church without ever being baptised, even though sheltering a Jew carried a death sentence.
His debut feature, Knife in the Water (1962), earned an Oscar nomination for best foreign-language film. He moved to France, then Britain, where Repulsion opened his English-language career in 1965, and in 1968 settled in America, where Rosemary's Baby made his name. Chinatown followed in 1974. In 1969 his pregnant wife, the actress Sharon Tate, was murdered with four friends by followers of Charles Manson. Honours eventually included an Academy Award for directing The Pianist in 2002, a Palme d'Or, a Golden Bear and ten Cesars.
American police arrested him in 1977; the charge was that he had drugged and raped a girl of 13. He pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of unlawful sex with a minor, expecting probation, but on learning in 1978 that the judge was likely to reject the deal he left for Europe. He has kept working there, making 23 features in all, while further women have come forward with abuse allegations.
Source: Roman Polanski
