Mietek Pemper Der rettende Weg: Schindlers Liste – die wahre Geschichte The Road to Rescue – Schindler’s List – The True Story Hoffmann und Campe Verlag, August 2005, 288 pp. ISBN 978-3-455-09493-0 Sixty years on, the persecution of the Jews has lost none of its horror, but how adequately to describe it, either on the page or on the screen? Even Schindler’s List, for all its humanity, has been criticised by some for making its Jewish victims the objects rather than the subjects of the Gentile Schindler’s tale. Mietek Pemper’s astonishing, compelling and moving memoir more than adequately redresses any such tendency. For this is the story of the man who helped Schindler in his wonderful work of rescue from exactly the opposite position – that is, as an inmate of the labour camp where the rescues took place. Schindler had style, he had money, he came literally as a godsend, and Pemper pays warm tribute to his deep humanity and generosity of spirit. But what this book also makes clear is that the survival of the victims at Plaszów, near Krakow, was in no small measure due to their own efforts. Pemper was born in 1920 into a lively, prosperous and cultivated Jewish family for whom everything changed in 1939 when the Germans invaded their country. Evicted from their home, they were forced into the ghetto – where, incidentally, they shared a cramped flat with the family of Roman Polanski, future director of The Pianist – and then into the camp. The author, like all other Jews, felt a mixture of impotence, shame and rage at his predicament, but he very soon realised that armed resistance or defiance would be futile. Instead he used his appointment as stenographer to the sadistic camp commandant Amon Göth to familiarise himself with the workings of Nazi bureaucracy and exploit the system to his fellow detainees‘ advantage. No word could be whispered at the time about these achievements (a poignant fact), such was the fear of retribution right to the end, but after the war Pemper was a key witness at the war crimes trials of Göth and other high-ranking Nazi officers. This makes a fitting coda to a book about a great evil, and what men of courage and virtue once did about it.