GBO Book Pick for August
THE ROAD TO RESCUE by Mietek Pemper
The Road to Rescue: The Untold Story of Schindler’s List by Mietek Pemper was translated by David Dollenmayer and will be released by Other Press on October 21, 2008. Dollenmayer received the 2008 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize for his translation of Moses Rosenkrantz’s Childhood: An Autobiographical Fragment. This press release from the German Book Office is in addition to the information provided by the publisher.
Mieczyslaw (Mietek) Pemper was born in 1920 to Jewish parents in Krakow, Poland. Pemper grew up speaking German and Polish. He studied law and business prior to the Nazi invasion of Poland. In 1939, he and his family were forced into the Krakow ghetto and later deported to the Plaszow concentration camp. Pemper was appointed as the secretary to the camp commandant, Amon Göth. Based on the information about Göth and the SS that Pemper gathered while at his post, he helped Oskar Schindler save Jewish factory workers from concentration camps. Pemper also testified at the war crimes trials of Amon Göth and other Nazi officials. After the war, he studied sociology and settled in southern Germany, where he now works as a corporate consultant.
About the book:
This is a story about two men who saved many lives: Oskar Schindler, the wealthy industrialist whose famous lists rescued his Jewish workers from Nazi extermination; and Mietek Pemper, the Jewish prisoner who made Schindler’s efforts possible. Pemper was deported to the Plaszow concentration camp in 1943. From March of that year through September 1944, he was forced to serve in the “epicenter of evil” as the secretary to camp commandant Amon Göth. Privy to the secret activities of Göth and the SS, Pemper formulated a strategy for saving thousands of his fellow prisoners, a plan he shared with Oskar Schindler. Pemper passed on critical information to Schindler and helped write the lists that would save so many lives. This memoir, co-written by Holocaust studies expert Viktoria Hertling and literary editor Marie Elisabeth Müller, burrows deep into Pemper’s firsthand experience with the human capacity for good and evil.
Media reviews prior to US publication:
“Everything that the Brothers Grimm collected about cruelty seems harmless when Pemper begins to write.” Der Spiegel
“Pemper’s report goes far beyond the ‘actual history’ of [Schindler’s] lists…” Tages-Anzeiger
Print
Send the page
Top
Back
