Roman Polanski - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Roman Polanski - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "Polanski was born Rajmund Roman Liebling in Paris, France, the son of Bula[14] (née Katz-Przedborska) and Ryszard[14] Liebling (aka Ryszard Polański), who was a painter and plastics manufacturer.[15] Polanski's parents were agnostics.[16] His mother had a daughter, Annette, by her previous husband.[17] His father was a Polish Jew and his mother, born in Imperial Russia due to Partitions of Poland, was brought up as a Catholic as she had a Jewish father and a Polish Roman Catholic mother.[18][19][20]

The Polański family moved back to the Polish city of Krakow in 1936,[14] and were living there in 1939, when World War II began. Poland was invaded and occupied by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Nazi racial and religious purity laws made the Polańskis targets of German Nazi persecution and forced them into the Kraków Ghetto, along with thousands of other Polish Jews.

His father survived the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp in Austria, but his mother perished in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. Polanski himself escaped the Kraków Ghetto in 1943, and survived the war with the help of Polish Roman Catholic families.[14] In hiding, Polanski became a religious Catholic at the age of 10, and strongly identified as a Catholic until age 15.[19] After the war he was reunited with his father[14] and moved back to Krakow. Polanski's father married Wanda Zajączkowska. He died of cancer in 1984.[21]"