The Nazis carried out the final "liquidation" of the Kraków Jewish ghetto on 13 March 1943, an act of violence that shocked a factory owner into becoming a saviour. These events were depicted in Thomas Keneally's novel Schindler's Ark and Steven Spielberg's film Schindler's List. But in 1982, Keneally told the BBC that Oskar Schindler's story was handed to him during a chance meeting with a luggage salesman.

Oskar Schindler was living in relative obscurity when his story was first featured on the BBC in 1964. Journalist Magnus Magnusson told viewers of the current affairs programme, Tonight: "You may not have heard of him yet, but one day you will. Today, he lives in Germany; sick, unemployable and penniless. In fact, he lives on charity, but not the poor-box kind. The money that keeps him and his family alive comes from the 1,300 Jews whose lives he personally saved in the last war. Many of them are pledged to give one day's pay a year to the man they call the Scarlet Pimpernel of the concentration camps."

Schindler was in the news that day because it had been announced that a Hollywood film called To the Last Hour was to be made about his life. It came about because a few years earlier, Holocaust survivor Poldek Pfefferberg had shared with MGM producer Martin Gosch the almost preposterous story of how he was among thousands saved by a Nazi war profiteer: a handsome, womanising drunk and wheeler-dealer from Czechoslovakia who had previously demonstrated few heroic qualities. While that particular film would get stuck permanently in development hell, in 1980 Pfefferberg had a chance meeting with an unsuspecting Australian writer that would change both their lives.

Thomas Keneally was killing time at the end of a Los Angeles promotional trip ("I was being put up in unaccustomed grandeur by my publishers at a big hotel in Beverly Hills") and window-shopping for a new briefcase before returning home to Sydney. He told the BBC's Desert Island Discs in 1983 that the leather goods shop owner, "being a good central European," came out to greet him and give him the hard sell.

Keneally said: "[Pfefferberg] did produce a very good briefcase, and while I was waiting for the charges to be cleared on my credit cards – they're very slow to clear Australian credit cards, I've noticed; it's the convict reputation – he began to talk to me about his wartime experience.

"He knew I was a writer, and he said, 'I've got a book for you. I was saved, but so was my wife, saved from Auschwitz by an extraordinary German, a big handsome Hitlerite dream of a man called Oskar Schindler. I have many Oskar Schindler documents. In the 1960s, a movie was nearly made about Oskar, and while we're waiting for your credit card to be cleared, have a look at this material.'

"He told his son to mind the shop, and he took me up to the bank on the corner, open on Saturdays. He talked them into running off photocopies of all this remarkable material, and at once I understood that here was a most astounding European character."

One of those documents was what would become known as Schindler's list. "The list is life," Keneally would go on to write in his best-selling novel Schindler's Ark, and "all around its cramped margins lies the gulf".

Pfefferberg was born into a Jewish family in Kraków, where he had worked as a high school teacher and physical education professor until 1939, when Germany invaded Poland. He joined the Polish army and was wounded in battle. He told Keneally that when Poland fell to the Nazis and was partitioned between Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union, he had to make a

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