Leopold Pfefferberg was a gymnastics teacher at a Jewish high school in Kraków. After the invasion of Poland in September 1939 he fought in the Polish army. He was taken prisoner by the Germans but managed to escape. In March 1941 he and his wife Ludmila had to move into the Kraków ghetto. On its liquidation in March 1943, the couple were among 8,000 ghetto inmates taken to nearby Plaszow forced labor camp, where Pfefferberg worked as a mechanic in the camp commandant Amon Göth’s garage until 1944.
In the camp, Pfefferberg made the acquaintance of the German factory-owner Oskar Schindler, who was a regular visitor and gained Pfefferberg’s trust. Through gifts and long negotiations, Schindler obtained Göth’s permission to house his Jewish forced laborers separately and to defer their transport to Auschwitz.
Pfefferberg was one of 1,000 Jews moved with Schindler’s ammunition factory to Brünnlitz (Brněnec) in 1944. He was put on one of the life-saving lists for transfer since he was passed off as a “qualified worker.” After the war, Pfefferberg settled in the United States, where he changed his surname to Page and worked towards recognition for Schindler.