
AFP - A list of Jews saved by Oskar Schindler that inspired the novel and Oscar-winning film “Schindler’s List” has been found in a Sydney library, its co-curator said Monday.
Staff at the New South Wales State Library found the list, containing the names of 801 Jews saved from the Holocaust by the businessman, as they sifted through boxes of Australian Irish author Thomas Keneally’s manuscript material.
The 13-page document, a yellowed and fragile carbon typescript copy of the original, was found between research notes and German newspaper clippings in one of the boxes, library co-curator Olwen Pryke said.
While it appears unremarkable at first glance — a neatly-typed roll-call detailing names, birth-dates and occupations in German — Pryke said she immediately realised what she had stumbled across.
She described the list as “one of the most powerful documents of the 20th Century” and was stunned to find it in the library’s collection.
“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.