In October 1939 the Germans occupied Warsaw.
Without their father, Polanski and his elder sister, Annette, clung to their mother. When she went out to scavenge, Roman clung to Annette. He was a small boy, even for his age, and she could nearly hold his whole body in her arms. “Let’s sleep,” she would say. “Time passes quicker that way.” Listening for his mother’s approaching footsteps, Roman waited where he had last seen her, sometimes for hours, for the door to open.
She was elegant. Even as a boy, he knew that. Deliberate in her presentation, Bula Polanski dressed in fox stoles and livened her face with the discreetly aristocratic touches of her Russian forebears, carefully drawing lines over tended eyebrows and, in accordance with the fashion of the day, painting her upper lip just so, like a cherub’s. She was as neat as the house she had kept before the war, and just as welcoming, ready to conduct conversation through all rivers of thought. Roman’s mother was half Jewish but decidedly agnostic, practical above all, and demonstrated, in her wartime resourcefulness, the resilience and audacity Roman would come to inherit. People told him, and he could almost see, that she was a survivor; and never more so than when—after hours of feeling what it was never to see her again—the door opened.
In time, Ryszard came from Kraków, haggard and unshaven. Roman took him to see an abandoned dog, shivering in the bombed-out skeleton of a nearby building, whimpering for help. Ryszard shrugged at the animal: “What can we do?”
Soon after the Polanskis relocated back to Kraków, to Podgórze Square, Annette drew Roman to their apartment window and pointed across the street. The Germans were building, red brick after brick, a wall. Then came more bricks, bricks against windows, against the main entrance to their apartment, bricks to build the wall higher and longer—bricks, Roman realized, not to keep something out, but to close them in. He knew then he was in danger. “But at the same time,” he said, “I didn’t know anything else, so I just accepted it.” And accepting the routines of ghetto life, he anticipated its only just outcome: It would be just a matter of time before the Germans realized they had made a giant error; neither he, nor his family, nor the other Jewish families, had done anything wrong. All this would end well, the way it should.
“Children don’t have any point of reference,” Polanski would explain. “They’re optimistic by nature.”
Inside the ghetto Roman met Pawel, an orphaned “smart kid,” as Polanski described him, “with an extraordinary capacity for absorbing and marshaling facts.” They shared an obsessive, surgical interest in the workings of things: how to build, from abandoned parts, simple motors; how to apply the principles of aerodynamics to toy planes. “I’d always had a craving for practical information of all kinds,” Polanski would say, “and Pawel could supply answers to everything.” What was electricity? What was gasoline and how did it make cars go? Coming to consciousness in an increasingly incoherent world, Polanski clung to Pawel, and together, attached at the brain, they set out—the streets echoing with gunfire and old women screaming in Yiddish—looking for scraps of metal and mechanical discards. As Roman’s parents began to fight, regularly now—“My own worst fear at this time,” Roman recalled, “was that my parents might split up”—he and Pawel engineered themselves to make order. They were building. The world was made of truths, Roman discovered, like a wall made of bricks. If one looked closely, if one asked why, one could discover, buried in the heap, explanations for everything. It came down to science. That was the highest truth. Truth was power. “Of course, science gives hope,” Polanski said. But the ghetto population reduced—“Germans would raid families,” Polanski said, “and they wouldn’t take all of them. They would just take one”—leaving the boys more rubble to sift through, more deserted bits to choose from. “[Pawel] was my first friendship in my life,” Polanski said.
Roman and his mother would practice. She, who worked as a cleaning woman outside the ghetto, would take him to the home of Mr. and Mrs. Wilks, where Roman was told he was to flee—through an opening they’d found in the wall—in case, for whatever reason, he could not find them, his parents. “That’s what [war] means to me: not bombs and tanks, that’s just the backdrop. War is separation.” He was told if this separation ever happened he was then to wait at the Wilkses’ until either his mother or father appeared to bring him home.
The raids continued. At the sound, Ryszard would turn off all the lights and they would stand still, trying not to hear. But once, Polanski said, “We heard noises coming from upstairs, screams and shouts and shots. And my father stepped out on the landing discreetly to see what was happening, and at that time they were dragging a woman by her hair down screaming. These were the first—some kind of memories from me—of violence.”
He saw a murder. It was a woman, shot only steps from his feet. The blood, he noted rather clinically, burst from her back, but it didn’t gush, it gurgled, like water from a garden fountain.
One day Pawel disappeared.
“I remember,” Polanski said, “as a child, I was never really scared of any ghosts, but I was very much scared of people—of a thief in the house, for example—or robber getting in—something of this kind.”
Pawel: Roman’s heart. It was the first loss that didn’t go away.
He befriended a younger boy, a neighbor named Stefan. Stefan told Roman that he wanted to be a race car driver and that his parents were gone. “He had a photo of him with his mother standing in a field of rye,” Polanski said. “And he was always showing me this photo. Of him with his mother.”
Then the day came. His parents woke him early one morning with suspicions of another raid. Just as they had practiced, Roman’s mother, known to the guards, rushed the boy clear of the ghetto wall to the Wilkses’, but it was his father who, later that same day, collected Roman from his hideout. On the street, Ryszard hugged and held his son with unsettling intensity, squeezing him, kissing him too much; on Podgórze Bridge, returning to the ghetto, he was weeping uncontrollably: “They took your mother.…”
There was nothing he could do.
He loved Sharon.
* * *
He loved Sharon’s Los Angeles once he came to be with her there, the bare feet and early nights; he loved the funny science-fictional house—like being on the moon, she said—she rented from a friend. “I have never made love more often,” he recalled, “or with greater emotional intensity, than I did with Sharon during those few days together.” He loved the city’s free embrace of sensuous ideals, the wide red carpet into the Beverly Hills Hotel, the world-within-a-world tranquility of its spacious estates and, at every turn, unbroken vistas. “Here in L.A.,” he reflected, “there were no skyscrapers; it was countrified living with all the desirable advantages of a city.” Having spent much of his childhood in the ghetto and, after his father was taken from him too, in hiding at the Wilkses’ cottage, he was predisposed to love the safety and seclusion of Los Angeles’s vast and variegated topography and big open skies. He loved to drive. He loved cars. He put the top down and drove. He loved to go fast. Polanski was speed. He cherished the freedom—in every respect anathema to his film-school days in gray, angular Communist Poland—of Disneyland, which he had visited for the first time, in 1963, with Federico Fellini and his wife, Giulietta Masina. “For all of us,” Polanski remembered of their afternoon, “it was like discovering the America of our childhood dreams.”