He studied piano with Józef Śmidowicz and Aleksander Michałowski at Warsaw’s Higher School of Music, piano with Artur Schnabel and Leonid Kreutzer and composition with Franz Schreker at the Berlin State Academy. He played Chopin in Polish Radio’s last wartime broadcast in September 1939 (and opened the PR’s first postwar broadcast with the same programme). In Warsaw Ghetto from 1940, and then hid on the Aryan side from 1943 onwards. When the war ended, Szpilman returned to Polish Radio as deputy head of the music department, and (till 1963) also head of popular music section.