Rajmund Roman Thierry Polaski is his full name. He was born on August 18, 1933. In Paris, Roman Polanski was born.¹⁾

His mother has a daughter, Annette, from a previous marriage. Annette survived Auschwitz, where her mother perished, and fled Poland for good to France.²⁾

Polaski's father was Jewish and originated from Poland; Polaski's mother was born in Russia, raised Roman Catholic, and had half-Jewish heritage.³⁾

In an interview about his film, Rosemary's Baby, Roman Polaski stated, “I'm an atheist,” influenced by his schooling in the People's Republic of Poland.⁴⁾

In 1936, the Polaski family returned to the Polish city of Kraków, where they were residing when World War II began with the invasion of Poland. Kraków was quickly taken by German forces, and Nazi racial purity regulations targeted the Poles, sending them into the Kraków Ghetto with thousands of the city's Jews.⁵⁾

He went to elementary school for a few weeks when he was five, when “all the Jewish children were unceremoniously evacuated,” according to biographer Christopher Sandford. This was quickly followed by a requirement that all Jewish youngsters over the age of twelve wear white armbands with a blue Star of David inscribed on them for visual identification.⁶⁾

Roman Polanski was witness of the ghettoization of Kraków's Jews into a small portion of the city, as well as the following deportation of all the ghetto's Jews to concentration camps, including the removal of his father. He recalls one of his earliest encounters with the terrors that would come later, when he was six years old.⁷⁾

His father was sent to Mauthausen, a network of 49 German concentration camps in Austria, along with thousands of other Jews. His mother was sent to Auschwitz and murdered shortly after arriving.⁸⁾

Roman Polanski, who was then hiding from the Germans, recalls watching his father being marched out with a long line of people. Polanski attempted to move closer to his father to ask him what was going on, and he got within a few yards. His father noticed him but, fearful that his son would be discovered by the German soldiers, he said (in Polish), “Get lost!”⁹⁾

He left the Kraków Ghetto in 1943, taking the name Romek Wilk and surviving with the aid of certain Polish Roman Catholic families, especially Mrs Sermak, who promised his father sanctuary.¹⁰⁾