The Road to Rescue: The Untold Story of Schindler's List, by Mietek Pemper, translated by David Dollenmayer. New York; Other Press, 2008. 250 pages. $24.95. In a New York Times book review (December 26, 2008) of Thomas Keneally's memoir Searching for Schindler, Keneally is quoted as saying, both commercial reasons and reasons of passion, I didn't want this book stuck in that section against the back wall of most American bookstores labeled JUDAICA. Tfoe Road to Rescue certainly belongs in that spurned section, for at its heart is the story of the cruel disruption and ultimately loss of life suffered specifically by Jews when Nazi Germany invaded and terrorized Poland in September 1939. The original memoir - Der rettende Weg - has been fluently translated from the German into an equally sober and unadorned prose. The Road to Rescue embodies both a personal memoir - the author and several members of his family were on Schindler s list - and the broader history of the Generalgouvernement that the Nazis imposed on Poland. In the latter case, the memoir provides significant information about how tht irta, was governed, the mutual antagonisms among Nazi leaders who were responsible for administrating it, and the power struggles between the Generalgouvernement and Berlin. If that were all this book had to offer, it would be worth reading. Pemper begins his narrative in Krakow, a city that was once home to one of the oldest Jewish communities in Poland. Within months of the German attack on Poland, Jewish civilians were rounded up, the white armband with Jewish star was introduced, the Polish press was shut down, and Krakow became an important center for the Reich, and specifically for the administration of the Generalgouvernement. Pemper's testimony has a double edge in that his fluency in German allowed him to penetrate the network of the German occupation, initially as an interpreter for thousands of Polish refugees who had been deported in 1938 from Germany to Poland, then as a member of the ghetto Judenrat in the summer of 1941, but above all as personal stenographer to Amon Goth, who became commandant of the Krakow-Piaszow camp in February 1943. For more than six months, until the end of 1943, Pemper had access to the personnel files of all the SS men in the camp and was able to keep abreast of news from Nazi Germany by clandestinely reading German newspapers like the Volkischer Beobachter. Pemper begins his narrative, however, well before Goth took up his job as commandant and thus before the relationship between Goth and Oskar Schindler. His story will ultimately rest on Schindler and his list, but the reader needs patience as Pemper carefully tracks the escalating hardships that were imposed on the local Jewish population. In the fall of 1940, for example, 60,000 Jews were ordered to leave Krakow to make room for German officials, the SS, and war profiteers from Germany. In March 1941, the announcement was made that the Generalgouvernement would be'judenfrei, and in November the Beizec camp was completed where 600,000 Jews were killed within eight months. Pemper never allows the reader to disassociate the famous list either from the historical context that preceded it or indeed later from the many intricacies that shaped it. …