Monday, April 06, 2009

Schindler's list rediscovered in Oz


Oskar Schindler's famous list has surfaced in Sydney, the BBC says. It is a handful of 13 yellowing pages, typewriiten on 18 April 1945, and contains the names and nationalities of 801 Jewish victims who managed to evade the holocaust through Schindler's interventions. The iconic list, compiled by the German industrialist, a registered Nazi with a twinge of conscience, was discovered in a Sydney library among the papers of the author Thomas Keneally, who wrote the novel Schindler's Ark, on which Steven Spielberg's film was based. The Beeb goes on:

Schindler ran a factory in Krakow, Poland, during the war, where he used Jewish labour.

Appalled by the conduct of the Nazis, he sought to persuade officials that his workers were vital to the war effort and should be spared from the death camps.

"It saved 801 men from the gas chambers... It's an incredibly moving piece of history," library co-curator Olwen Pryke said.

This Schindler's list was found sandwiched between research notes and German newspaper clippings gathered by Australian author Thomas Keneally.

Ms Pryke said neither the library nor the book dealer, from whom it bought the six boxes of material in 1996, realised the list was hidden among the documents.

Mr Keneally was handed the list almost 30 years ago in a shop in Los Angeles, by one of the people whom Schindler helped - Leopold Pfefferberg, Jewish worker 173 on the list.

Mr Pfefferberg wanted the novelist to write Schindler's story.


The tomb of Oskar Schindler lies in Jerusalem, and Izzy Bee is reminded of the hero everytime she steps into an elevator in an Israeli highrise. Inevitably, it's labelled "Schindler's Lift".

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Actually it's only part of Schindler's list which was found in Sydney