The link for me with "Schindler's List"--a very important one-- is the Warsow ghetto. The roundup of Jews in the ghetto in "Shindler" was very terrifying to me, the most terrifying single sequence. However, Polanski's film doesn't try to terrify; rather, it horrifies, and does so casually ("the Banality of Evil"). The thing that sets "The Pianist" apart is that the final long sequence is meandering and lonely and in an odd way (despite all the artillery and explosions) quiet, (the hero barely speaks) and it's not punctuated by much of anything that we remember other than the moving and unexpected scene where Szpilman plays Chopin for the German officer who's caught him hiding and forraging. This scene has many layers of meaning. Even the actor Brody himself was almost literallystarving and freezing at the moment when that scene was shot, which is to say perhaps his method acting really worked, because the moment is impressive, again, beyond words. The music in that harrowing situation is symbolic of the other side of humankind, the side worth living for. The whole final meandering sequence gives us a chance to meditate on what the whole film is about and to soak up the experience. "Au revoir les enfants" is very powerful too--I saw it in Paris and I started to cry only when I got outside in the street under a drizzly rain--it has a subtle powerful buildup of emotional impact. But it's quite a different story. The Garden of the Finzi-Contini ends--also very powerfully, with that amazing lament-- at a point that is only midway in the story the "The Pianist" tells. They're all different. But the power of "The Pianist" is tremendous, because of its rather comprehensive picture of the Holocaust (except for the main thing, the extermination camps!) and its focus on one Jewish adult survivor who was there through it all in a major city that is being destroyed brick by brick. The material is familiar to all of us, in a sense, and also, in a sense, unknown to all but a very, very few of us who cannot imagine what it was really like. But even if you have seen all the other films, on the contrary upon reflection this one actually does seem quite fresh and bold, I think.