The August German Book Office pick of the month is The Road to Rescue: The Untold Story of Schindler's List by Mietek Pemper, which has been translated by David Dollenmayer and will be released by Other Press on October 21.
Pemper was born in 1920 to Jewish parents in Krakow, Poland, and studied law and business. After the Nazi invasion in 1939, he and his family were forced into the Krakow ghetto and later deported to the Plaszow concentration camp, where Pemper became secretary to the camp commandant, Amon Göth. With information gained from that position, Pemper helped Oskar Schindler save Jewish factory workers from concentration camps. After the war, he testified at the war crimes trials of Göth and other Nazis, studied sociology and settled in southern Germany, where he still works as a corporate consultant.
This memoir, co-written by Holocaust studies expert Viktoria Hertling and literary editor Marie Elisabeth Müller, focuses on how he helped Schindler save lives. Der Spiegel wrote, "Everything that the Brothers Grimm collected about cruelty seems harmless when Pemper begins to write." And the Tages-Anzeiger said that "Pemper's report goes far beyond the 'actual history' of [Schindler's] lists."
Dollenmayer won the 2008 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize for his translation of Moses Rosenkrantz's Childhood: An Autobiographical Fragment.