The best Katarzyna Bargiełowska’s war movies

The true story of pianist Władysław Szpilman's experiences in Warsaw during the Nazi occupation. When the Jews of the city find themselves forced into a ghetto, Szpilman finds work playing in a café; and when his family is deported in 1942, he stays behind, works for a while as a laborer, and eventually goes into hiding in the ruins of the war-torn city.

Run Boy Run is the true story of Jurek, an eight-year-old boy, who escapes from the Warsaw ghetto, then manages to survive in the woods and working as a farmhand, disguising himself as a Polish orphan. He encounters people who will betray him for a reward, who will beat him up or try to kill him, and he meets those, who will do and risk almost everything to help him. Jurek’s resilience is put to the ultimate test, when an accident cripples him, making it harder to find work. But he struggles on against all odds. Eventually the Russians reach his area and Jurek even finds a family where he could stay. Yet he is betrayed again, and a young man from a Jewish orphanage forcefully tries to bring Jurek back to his people and his faith.

In the spring of 1945, the commanding officer of the National Armed Forces in Mazowsze and older brother of 20-year-old Mieczyslaw Dziemieszkiewicz, is assassinated by Soviet soldiers. Mieczyslaw then joins the National Military Union. He becomes the commander of a partisan unit fighting for the next six years to free Poland from Soviet tyranny by terrorizing the UB and its collaborators. Communist authorities will do whatever it takes to track down the "enemy of the people's power."