One of the original “Schindler’s lists”, the documents used by the German industrialist Oskar Schindler to save more than 1,200 Jews during the Holocaust, has been put up for sale. The document, commemorated in Thomas Keneally’s Booker prize-winning novel, was among those drawn up to protect Jewish workers from deportation and death. It is expected to make more than $2.4m.

It is one of only seven, and was compiled with help from Schindler’s accountant Itzhak Stern, who was portrayed by Ben Kingsley in the 1993 Steven Spielberg film of the story. For sale through the Moments in Time dealer, which specialises in rare documents, the 14-page document is the penultimate list and is dated 18 April 1945. It lists 801 male Jews at Schindler’s factory in occupied Czechoslovakia, who had been transported from the Nazi concentration camp at Plaszòw in German-occupied Poland.

The dealer’s website describes the document as an “exceedingly rare original” and the only one to have come on to the market. Three others are known to survive, with two kept in Israel’s official Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem and one at the US Holocaust museum in Washington DC. “A more poignant and historic [second world war] relic cannot be imagined,” the site states of the list. “This is the opportunity of a lifetime to acquire an item of truly incredible magnitude.”

Gary Zimet, chief executive officer of Moments in Time, told the Guardian that the list, which is a carbon copy of the original given to the Nazis, “originally was the property of Itzhak Stern’s nephew”. Stern, who died in 1969, was Schindler’s accountant and the man who typed the lists.

“I was flabbergasted when I first handled it,” Zimet said, predicting that interest from potential buyers would be “extraordinary”.

Despite the document’s rarity and significance, the $2.4m (£2m) reserve is lower than its previous reserve price of of $3m from 2013, when it was last up for sale on eBay.

The original list of Schindler’s Jews was drawn up in the autumn of 1944 by Schindler, Stern and Mietek Pemper, an inmate of Plaszòw who was assigned as the personal secretary of Amon Göth, the concentration camp’s notorious commandant, and played by Ralph Fiennes in Spielberg’s film.

The list was used to protect workers rescued from the camp by Schindler as Nazi Germany retreated from the east and began closing down its easternmost concentration camps. Those in the camps were transported west to the gas chambers of Auschwitz. Schindler, who had already been using bribery to protect Jews working in his enamelware factory, persuaded Gõth to let him transport his workforce to the Sudetenland when he moved his factory. The move saved them from almost certain death.

Schindler spent his entire fortune on bribes to protect his workers from the gas chamber and in 1963 was honoured by the Israeli government when he was named Righteous Among the Nations. On his death in 1974, he became the only former member of the Nazi party to be buried on Mount Zion in Jerusalem. More than 8,000 people alive today are descended from the Jews saved through Schindler’s efforts.