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They kept the same secret in their handbags. It didn't matter where they had settled in the world or whether they were going to the shopping mall in New York, for lunch in Los Angeles or dinner in Melbourne. These women wouldn't leave home without a crust of bread for the journey. Thomas Keneally, the Australian writer, learned about their quirky habit while researching Schindler's Ark, the novel for which he won the Booker Prize and which was the inspiration for the Academy Award-winning film Schindler's List, directed by Steven Spielberg.

In his new book, a memoir first published in Australia last year, Keneally tells how he chanced upon the story of Oskar Schindler, the unlikely saviour of hundreds of Jews who would in all likelihood have met their end in the Nazi death camps had it not been for his intervention. Keneally travelled the world meeting the Schindlerjuden - Schindler Jews - while researching Schindler's Ark.

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He writes of the women and their crusts of bread: "Reason told them that between Dover Heights and Sydney, between New Jersey and Manhattan, they were unlikely to be loaded unexpectedly into a truck and shipped away, but the experience of hunger was so seared into their brains that they could not travel without the irrational fear that the bus or the taxi in which they rode would be stopped, that the trucks of the tyrant would lie in their paths, that they would be taken off their conveyances and packed tight into something in which there was no guarantee of survival, let alone the next meal."

The Schindler story would not be so well known, and might have remained within the confines of the Holocaust survivors who held his memory dear (as does the Jewish state of Israel), were it not for Leopold Page of Beverly Hills, California, real name Pfefferberg but known by the diminutive Poldek. Keneally was more or less manhandled by Poldek into his handbag shop in October 1980 as Keneally windowshopped for a replacement briefcase.

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Keneally tells of Poldek's "exorbitant energy" which was channelled into not only selling the author a briefcase but, upon learning he was a writer, interesting him in the Schindler tale. It was a moment for which the noun serendipity was coined. Poldek, a child of the Krakow ghetto who found relative sanctuary in one of Schindler's dubious factories (as did his wife, Misia) could lay claim more than anyone else to be the keeper of the Schindler fame.

"I know a wonderful story. It is not a story for Jews but for everyone. A story of humanity, man to man, " Poldek told Keneally. The writer was reeled in. Part of the attraction was that Schindler was no knight in shining armour. He was an ambiguous character, a rapacious womaniser who did business on the black market and treated with the SS (he had no option if he was to save lives). He was the lens through which Keneally was able to view the Holocaust on an intimate scale and its impact on individual victims.

"I was a leaf on the stream, being carried along by the current, " reflects Keneally now. "Poldek was the wellspring and the gatekeeper, if you want to change the metaphor.

"I've never been able to make anything up that matches the Schindler story. I've never been able to construct as fantastic and extraordinary a tale."

Keneally has written many exceptional novels and factual books, but he is best known for Schindler's Ark. This can
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