Rajmund Roman Thierry Polaski is his full name. He was born on August 18, 1933. In Paris, Roman Polanski was born.1)
His mother has a daughter, Annette, from a previous marriage. Annette survived Auschwitz, where her mother perished, and fled Poland for good to France.2)
Polaski's father was Jewish and originated from Poland; Polaski's mother was born in Russia, raised Roman Catholic, and had half-Jewish heritage.3)
In an interview about his film, Rosemary's Baby, Roman Polaski stated, “I'm an atheist,” influenced by his schooling in the People's Republic of Poland.4)
In 1936, the Polaski family returned to the Polish city of Kraków, where they were residing when World War II began with the invasion of Poland. Kraków was quickly taken by German forces, and Nazi racial purity regulations targeted the Poles, sending them into the Kraków Ghetto with thousands of the city's Jews.5)
He went to elementary school for a few weeks when he was five, when “all the Jewish children were unceremoniously evacuated,” according to biographer Christopher Sandford. This was quickly followed by a requirement that all Jewish youngsters over the age of twelve wear white armbands with a blue Star of David inscribed on them for visual identification.6)
Roman Polanski was witness of the ghettoization of Kraków's Jews into a small portion of the city, as well as the following deportation of all the ghetto's Jews to concentration camps, including the removal of his father. He recalls one of his earliest encounters with the terrors that would come later, when he was six years old.7)
His father was sent to Mauthausen, a network of 49 German concentration camps in Austria, along with thousands of other Jews. His mother was sent to Auschwitz and murdered shortly after arriving.8)
Roman Polanski, who was then hiding from the Germans, recalls watching his father being marched out with a long line of people. Polanski attempted to move closer to his father to ask him what was going on, and he got within a few yards. His father noticed him but, fearful that his son would be discovered by the German soldiers, he said (in Polish), “Get lost!”9)
He left the Kraków Ghetto in 1943, taking the name Romek Wilk and surviving with the aid of certain Polish Roman Catholic families, especially Mrs Sermak, who promised his father sanctuary.10)
Polanski, according to Sandford, would utilize his mother's memories, as well as her wardrobe and cosmetics style, as a physical basis for Faye Dunaway's role in his film Chinatown (1974).11)
Polanski began acting in the 1950s, appearing in Andrzej Wajda's Pokolenie (A Generation, 1954) and Silik Sternfeld's Zaczarowany rower the same year (Enchanted Bicycle or Magical Bicycle). Polanski made his directing debut in 1955 with the short film Rower (Bicycle).12)
Rower is a semi-autobiographical feature film starring Polanski that is thought to be lost. It relates to his real-life violent confrontation with Janusz Dziuba, a known Kraków criminal who planned to sell Polanski a bicycle but instead beat him and stole his money. In reality, the culprit was apprehended while escaping after breaking Polanski's skull, and he was killed for three murders, out of eight earlier similar assaults.13)
Knife in the Water is Polanski's debut feature-length film. Knife in the Water is a film written by Jerzy Skolimowski, Jakub Goldberg, and Roman Polanski about an affluent, unhappy married couple who decide to take a mystery hitchhiker with them on a weekend boating trip.14)
In 1963, this movie received its director his first Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Language Film. The only professional actor in the film was Leon Niemczyk, who portrayed Andrzej. Polanski spotted Jolanta Umecka, who portrayed Krystyna, at a swimming pool.15)