Oct. 25, 1980, was an unbearably hot day in Los Angeles. All Australian writer Thomas Keneally wanted was to head home to Sydney the next day. But first he had to replace his aging briefcase, which was finally falling apart. He stopped at the Beverly Hills Handbag Studio and there along with a fine new leather bag, he got an earful from Leopold Page, the store's ebullient proprietor. Page, now 81, insisted on recounting the unlikely story of Oskar Schindler, a German Catholic Nazi-party member who during World War II had saved some 1,200 Jews—including Page himself—by employing them in his enamelware and munitions factories. Over the decades, Page had tried to interest countless writers and filmmakers in Schindler; in Keneally he at last found an audience. The writer spent most of the next 24 hours talking with Page. "Poldek [a Polish diminutive for Leopold] is unstoppable," says Keneally, now 58, who had previously written The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith and Confederates. "And I fell in love with this story in a way that is quite rare."

So, it seems, has much of the world. Keneally's 1982 novel, based on Oskar Schindler's story and originally titled Schindler's Ark, won Britain's coveted Booker Prize and has since become an international best-seller. Now the film based on Keneally's book, directed by Steven Spielberg, has already won numerous awards and is expected next Monday (March 21) to take home many of the 12 Oscars for which it has been nominated. Schindler's List recently provoked an emotional outpouring at openings in Germany, Kraków and Tel Aviv, but, said Spielberg to a German audience, "I don't think this will bring closure. I don't think there will ever be closure on the subject."

According to those who actually knew him, Oskar Schindler closely resembled the dashing and morally ambiguous figure cut by actor Liam Neeson in Spielberg's film. "He was larger than life, likable and gallant," says Eva Scheuer, 79, a close friend and secretary of Schindler's. "He used his charm to get what he wanted."

On the most basic level, he wanted to profit from the war. In late 1939, Schindler, who was an ethnic German from the Sudetenland, part of what was then Czechoslovakia, went to Nazi-occupied Poland to seek his fortune. He bought a bankrupt enamel ware factory in Kraków and manned it with cheap Jewish labor from Plaszow, a nearby work camp.

Though he wined and dined his Nazi compatriots and worked the black market, Schindier was horrified by the random violence and racial hatred of the Nazi regime. He began leaking German military secrets—including the fact that the Nazis were gassing Jews by the thousands—to the outside world and became fiercely protective of his workers, men and women known today as Schindlerjuden, or Schindier Jews. He made sure his workers were relatively well-fed and safe, and he housed them in his factory, rather than in the degrading camp at Plaszow, which was run by the brutal SS officer Amon Goeth (played by Ralph Fiennes in the film). When the Nazis closed Plaszow in 1944 and deported the surviving prisoners to Auschwitz and other death camps, Schindier convinced the authorities that his employees were crucial munitions workers (some of whom actually had no useful skills at all) and had many of them transferred to his new" factory in Czechoslovakia.

By war's end, Oskar Schindler—who spent millions of dollars keeping his workers alive—had lost most of the fortune he had made during the war. After moving back to Germany and trying to go back into business, he and his wife, Emilie, moved to Argentina in 1949 and started a nutria ranch. Eight years later, he abandoned Emilie, now 86 and living in a village near Buenos Aires. ("The Jews, he saved," she has said. "Me, he dumped.")

Schindler's wartime generosity was perhaps his greatest success. He moved back to Germany, where the Schindlerjuden helped support him, and after 1961 he spent six weeks of every year in Israel. He died, alone and broke, of heart disease in Frankfurt, in 1974 at the age of 66, and at his request was buried in Jerusalem. His grave has now become a shrine honored both by tourists and by those he saved—the people Oskar Schindler called "my children."

No one will ever know exactly what made this complex man—a hard-drinking, womanizing "scoundrel," Keneally calls him—do what so few Germans had the courage or inclination to do. The Schindlerjuden, some of whom are profiled in the following pages, know only that Oskar Schindler was their savior. "To know the man was to love him," says Page's wife, Ludmilla, 74. "For us, he was a god."

Oskar Schindler is alive and well on the streets of New Jersey

In 1952, when Abraham Zuckerman signed a contract to build 37 houses in South Plainfield, N.J., the first thing he did was name one of the streets Schindler Drive. "It is a great honor to have a street named after you," he says. "They name streets after kings, you know."

Zuckerman and his business partner, Murray Pantirer, both 69, are responsible for some 20 Schindler Courts, Terraces and Plazas all over New Jersey. To them, Schindler was much more than a king. "The movie didn't show all the little things he did; he came around and greeted you," Zuckerman says. "I had food, protection—and hope."

Before the war, Zuckerman and Pantirer lived around the corner from each other in Kraków. In 1942, when they were both 17, they were reunited at the Plaszow concentration camp. Zuckerman, who toiled in the coal yard there, remembers gratefully how Pantirer, who had a job in the kitchen, would smuggle him food. In 1943 the friends were again separated when Zuckerman's name miraculously made it onto Schindler's list of workers. For a little more than a year, Zuckerman was relatively safe, but when Schindler's factory in Krakow was liquidated, he was crammed with other prisoners into a stifling cattle car and sent to a concentration camp at Mauthausen and later Gusen II, where he was liberated.

Pantirer, meanwhile, was sent to another camp, Gross-Rosen, after Plaszow was shut down. On his third day there, he was chosen as one of 900 workers for Schindler's new factory in Brinnlitz, Czechoslovakia. To this day he has no idea how his name, with the mysterious designation "sheet-metal worker," made it onto the list. Pantirer was present the night Schindler made his farewell speech. "He said, 'Mein Kinder [my children], you are saved. Germany has lost the war,' " he recalls. He told his workers where he kept his guns and ammunition and gave them keys to a nearby factory, where they could find material to make clothing. "I must leave now," Schindler said. "Auf Wiedersehen."

After liberation, Pantirer and Zuckerman found each other again at a displaced persons camp near Linz, Austria, and both met their future wives there before emigrating to America in the late 1940s. Murray and Louise Pantirer have three children and nine grandchildren; Abraham and Millie Zuckerman have three children and seven grandchildren. The two families now live a block apart in homes they built themselves.

When Oskar Schindler would visit the two men in America, he was thrilled to see the streets named after him. But mostly, says Zuckerman, "all he wanted to do was visit his 'children.' My children were his children." Zuckerman gazes at a photo of Schindler taken at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. "Look at that face," he says. "Can't you fall in love with a guy like that?"

Two Schindler survivors, strangers in his factory, marry after the war

For years, Kuba and Helen Beck traveled a terrible parallel course. Both were torn from families in Krakow as teenagers and sent to Plaszow, and in 1943 both were loaded onto trucks there, expecting to die. Instead they landed in heaven-on-earth—Schindler's pot-and-pan factory. And in 1944, when Schindler moved his operation to Czechoslovakia, both Kuba and Helen remained on his list. Helen was among 300 women on a train routed to Auschwitz by mistake but miraculously rescued by Schindler. "I will never forget the sight of Oskar Schindler standing in the doorway. I will never forget his voice—'Don't worry, you are now with me,' " she says. "We gave up-many times, but he always lifted our spirits."

It wasn't until after the war, however, that the two formally met, fell in love and got married. Because men and women were separated at the factory, Kuba and Helen had never even spoken to each other throughout those years, though they had noticed each other across the factory floor. In 1945, though, both returned to Krakow to search for their families. Kuba's brothers and parents had been killed; Helen lost six of her nine siblings along with her parents. But together Kuba and Helen, now 71 and 68, decided to forge a new family, to "start over," Kuba says, "from ashes to life."

In 1949 they emigrated to America, where Kuba eventually went to work as an engineer for IBM. The Becks, who have two sons and four grandchildren, now split their time between Poughkeepsie, N.Y., and Delray Beach, Fla., and devote much of their time to giving speeches about the Holocaust.

When she saw Schindler's List, says Helen, "I thought I saw myself onscreen. It is very close, very true." And she hopes the film will go some small way toward healing all the racial, religious and ethnic tensions that rage today—in Bosnia, in the Middle East. "It hurls us very much," says Helen. "You see the world, they have not learned so much from the past."

A teenager risks his life and leaves the factory to be with his brother

On an August day in 1944, Salomon Pila did the unthinkable: He marched into the head office and asked to be removed from Schindler's list. After living in safety at the Krakow factory for more than a year, the 16-year-old knew only that he had to stick close to his brother, Isak, his one living relative—and Isak was being sent back to a death camp.

Isak, 20, who was recovering from typhus, had made the mistake of falling asleep under a table at the factory the same day that Nazi Commandant Amon Goeth came by for an inspection. When Goeth saw the sleeping boy, he told Schindler to kill him instantly. "Schindler hit him on one side of the face, then the other," Salomon remembers. "Then he said to Goeth, 'He's had enough. I need him.' " That wasn't enough for Goeth; he had Isak blacklisted.

"I didn't want to be alone," says Pila, now 68, in a thick Polish accent. "Schindler asked me twice, 'Are you sure you really want to go with him?' And I said, 'Yes.' Then he said, 'Okay.' Ho couldn't nothing do. He couldn't nothing do."

Though the brothers went to Mauthausen together, a few months later they were separated. Salomon, moved from camp to camp, barely survived the rest of the war and lost 80 percent of his hearing during a beating. In 1947 he found Isak in Munich. Isak had reestablished their family's dairy business, which had been destroyed in Poland by the Nazis. Five years later, Salomon and his future wife, Herta, also a Holocaust survivor, moved to America, married and opened a dairy farm near Rochester, Minn. In 1975, the Pilas joined Isak in Brooksville, Fla., where he had established another successful dairy. (Isak died there in 1984.)

Pila, who has three children and six grandchildren, admits that he was reluctant at first to see Schindler's List. But he is glad he did, he says, though the reality of the war was infinitely more horrifying than Spielberg's portrayal. His remaining goal is to visit Schindler's grave in Jerusalem. "I don't know why he was so good to us," Pila says, "but I would say, 'Thank you very much,' because he saved my life."

A Californian has learned to celebrate life where he finds it

Zev Kedem says his strategy for staying alive during the Holocaust resembled a deadly game. Only 8 years old when his mother, Selma, smuggled him into Plaszow in 1942 (the camp did not allow children under 13), Kedem—who was born Zbigniew Wohlfeiler in Katowitz, Poland—tried hard to blend in with the older boys, making sure the guards noticed his diligence at the brush factory where he worked. "It was like a terrible adventure, where the winning position was staying alive," the 59-year-old builder and filmmaker explains now. "It was basically a concept of celebrating life, which I have done ever since."

After Plaszow was shut down, Dr. Leon Gross, a Jew who was Selma's lover as well as the doctor at Schindler's factory, made sure Selma and Zev and his older sister Krysia were on the list for the Brinnlitz factory (his father died in a concentration camp). Kedem did not last long at Brinnlitz, however. After only a few days there, the town's Nazi commandant caught him and sent him to Auschwitz because he was underage. One day, looking across the railroad tracks at a group of new arrivals, he caught a glimpse of his mother and sister, who were on the train mistakenly routed to the death camp instead of to Schindler's factory. It was the last time Zev would see his mother—who remained behind the Iron Curtain in Poland after the war—for 40 years. They were finally reunited in Poland in 1985. His sister eventually made it to Israel.

Kedem continued to live by his wits, going from the camps after the war to hideout with two polish criminals, then to a German displaced persons camp and then to a British orphanage. After living nearly two decades in Israel (where he changed his name to help forget the horrors of the war), he moved to California in 1980, settling in Sacramento five years later. He believes that Spielberg's film has helped him to finally sort out his own feelings about the Holocaust. "People should understand it's not enough to be good," he says. "One has to act against evil." And for Kedem, who has six children and four grandchildren from two failed marriages, the game of life continues. "Do you want my ultimate statement?" asks Zev, who insisted that his interview be conducted on the ski slopes at Lake Tahoe. "Let's get a few more runs in."

ELIZABETH GLEICK
ABRAHAM RABINOVICH in Jerusalem, LYNDON STAMBLER in Los Angeles, LISA GREISSINGER on Long Island, TOBY KAHN in New Jersey; CINDY DAMPIER and SARAH TIPPIT in Florida and LAIRD HARRISON in Sacramento