The existence of a five-hour video of Holocaust testimony by film director Roman Polanski has been revealed in an interview with the film-maker in the Hollywood Reporter.

The footage, recorded in 2003 for the visual history archive of the USC Shoah Foundation at the University of Southern California, is one of over 50,000 such testimonies about the Holocaust and other genocides deposited at the archive.

The Hollywood Reporter’s Peter Flax was given permission to watch the video, which has never been publicly shown. Flax reports that Polanski recounted his experiences during the Nazis’ wartime occupation of Poland in an interview recorded inside a “historic pharmacy”, followed by a tour around key areas of the city of Kraków, including the flat inside the former Jewish ghetto where his family lived. Polanski also recalled the moment his father told him their mother had been deported from the city to Auschwitz concentration camp, where she later died. “He started crying on the bridge. He burst into uncontrollable sobs. I didn’t cry right away and begged him to stop.”

Polanski’s experiences during the war are well documented: he was born in Paris in 1933 to Polish-Russian parents, and the family moved back to Poland three years later. Kraków became the capital of German-occupied Poland in 1939, and the ghetto was created in 1941, where the Polanski family were confined along with the city’s remaining Jews. In the interview with the Reporter, Polanski recalled seeing Jews executed in the street by the SS, and his escape from the ghetto in 1943 after his parents had been deported to concentration camps. Living in the country with a family his parents knew, Polanski said: “I survived because I did not look very much like a Jew … I definitely looked like a lot of kids in Poland.”

The film-maker also recalled the moment in January 1945 when he realised liberation was near. “I looked up, and these were the American bombers coming, hundreds of them. It was one of the most joyful moments of my young life. I laid down on the ground, and I was watching those planes.”

Polanski said he was unlikely to make a directly autobiographical film about the Holocaust, despite the success of The Pianist, his 2002 chronicle of musician Władysław Szpilman’s struggle to survive in the Warsaw ghetto. “I can tell you I always wanted to make [The Pianist], a picture about those things in that period in particular. But I didn’t want to do it about Kraków – it was just too close to home.”

“When you make a movie, you always superimpose the movie set over the real streets and the movie characters over the people that you remembered … I would never do it.”

Polanski did not speak about recent legal proceedings in which Polish courts refused a US extradition request over his 1977 conviction for statutory rape.