best-known

When Andrzej Szpilman was 12, he furtively rummaged through a chest high on a shelf of a closed wardrobe in his Warsaw home. Inside the closet, he found 10 copies of a book and, recognizing his father as the author, hid one in his third-story bedroom. \”I read it and received a shock,\” said Andrzej Szpilman, 46, a dentist and record producer who immigrated to Germany in 1983.\n\nThe book was \”Death of a City,\” his father, Wladyslaw\’s, grittily brutal, dispassionate 1946 memoir of hiding in and around the Warsaw Ghetto. Since Roman Polanski turned the book into a searing film, \”The Pianist\” — which won four National Society of Film Critics Awards and is up for two Golden Globes on Sunday — Szpilman has become one of the best-known Holocaust survivors in history.