Australian library workers uncover original Schindler's list



Oskar Schindler saved 801 Jewish people from the Nazi death camps

A list of Jewish people saved by Oskar Schindler that inspired the novel and Oscar-winning film has been found in a Sydney library.

The list, which contains the names of 801 Jews saved in the Holocaust by the businessman, was found in a box belonging to author Thomas Keneally.



The list was among the author's manuscript materials which he used to create the book Schindler's Ark.

Keneally's book went on to become a major motion picture, Schindler's List, starring Liam Neeson as Schindler and Ralph Fiennes as the head of an SS-run camp

The 13-page list, a carbon typescript copy of the original, was found between research notes and German newspaper clippings.

Library co-curator Olwen Pryke said the document was 'one of the most powerful documents of the 20th Century and a moving peice of history.'

'This list was hurriedly typed on April 18, 1945, in the closing days of WWII, and it saved 801 men from the gas chambers,' she said.

Schindler ran a factory in Krakow, Poland, during World War Two and relied on Jewish labour.

He became appalled at the German treatment of Jews after witnessing a 1942 raid on a Jewish getto and used his position in the Nazi party to persuade officials that his workers were vital to the war effort, saving them from the gas chambers.

Author Thomas Keneally used the list to write Schindler's Ark, which formed the basis of the Oscar-winning film Schindler's List starring Ralph Fiennes

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 among the documents.

Mr Keneally wrote Schindler's Ark after Jewish worker Leopold Pfefferberg handed him the list of names thirty years ago.

Schindler who was born in Movaria, then part of Austria-Hungry but now in the Czech Republic and died in 1974.

In 1963, he was honoured as one of the Righteous Among Nations at Israel's Yad Vashem memorial, for his efforts in saving the lives of Jews during the holocaust.

It was during the 1942 raid on a Jewish ghetto, captured during this movie scene, that prompted Schindler to create his list















