Leopold "Poldek" Pfefferberg (March 20, 1913 – March 9, 2001), also known as Leopold Page, was a Polish-American Holocaust survivor who inspired the Australian writer Thomas Keneally to write the Booker prize-winning novel Schindler's Ark, which in turn was the basis for Steven Spielberg's critically acclaimed 1993 film Schindler's List. Life Early life Pfefferberg was born into a Jewish family in Kraków, then a part of the Austria-Hungary. He gained a master's degree in philosophy and physical education from the Jagiellonian University. Pfefferberg was a high-school teacher in Kraków until 1939 and the physical education professor at Kościuszko Gymnasium in Podgórze. The Holocaust After the Germans invaded Poland in 1939, he joined the Polish Army as an officer and took part in the defence of Poland against the invasion. He later explained to the Australian novelist Thomas Keneally how he was wounded on the San River where his life was saved by his sergeant major, who carried him to a field hospital. After Poland was defeated and partitioned between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, Pfefferberg needed to decide whether it would be safer to travel east towards the Soviets or west towards the Germans. He later recalled this choice: We officers had to decide to go east or west. I decided not to go east, even though I was Jewish. If I had, I would have been shot with all the other poor sons of bitches in Katyn Forest. After sneaking back to Kraków, he was imprisoned along with the rest of the area's Jews, in the Kraków Ghetto. Pfefferberg used a German-issued document to visit his soldiers in a military hospital, and also to visit his mother. This is how he first met Oskar Schindler, a Sudeten-German businessman who was taking over an enamelware factory that had been confiscated from Jews. Schindler employed Pfefferberg's mother, an interior designer, to decorate his new apartment. He later began helping Schindler trade on Kraków's wartime black market. In 1941, he married Ludmila "Mila" Lewison, with whom he later had two children. Mila, like Pfefferberg, would become a survivor of the Kraków-Płaszów concentration camp and a Schindlerjude. Through this connection to Schindler, Pfefferberg was employed in Schindler's factory near the Kraków-Płaszów concentration camp outside Kraków. This enabled him to survive the extermination of 3 million Polish Jews, during which his parents, sister, brother-in-law and many other relatives were murdered. Pfefferberg described Schindler