Mietek Pemper, 91, Camp Inmate Who Compiled Schindler’s List: RIP
Mietek Pemper was doing his job as a secretary taking dictation. One day his boss, Amon Goeth, glanced out the window and saw that a worker did not have a full load of stones in his wheelbarrow. Mr. Goeth walked outside and shot the man to death, then returned to his desk and said, “Where were we in the text?”
Mr. Goeth was commandant of the Plaszow concentration camp just south of Krakow, Poland, and Mr. Pemper was a Jewish prisoner from Krakow whom he had forced to be his secretary. Mr. Goeth personally murdered hundreds during the course of World War II, and Mr. Pemper regarded his assignment as a death sentence.
So Mr. Pemper, with nothing to lose, plotted against Mr. Goeth. His acts of defiance included typing the names on what became known as Schindler’s List, a roster of labor camp workers who were supposedly essential to the German war effort and who were thus spared almost certain extermination.Oskar Schindler was the flamboyant and controversial German industrialist who overcame his membership in the Nazi Party and willingness to profit from the slave labor of concentration camp prisoners to engineer the rescue of nearly 1,000 of his workers and 200 other inmates.
More on his Death in Germany at the age of 91 at AFP