Mietek Pemper was doing his job as a secretary taking dictation. One day his boss, Amon Goeth, glanced out the window and saw that a worker did not have a full load of stones in his wheelbarrow. Goeth walked outside and shot the man to death, then returned to his desk and said, “Where were we in the text?”

Goeth was commandant of the Plaszow concentration camp just south of Krakow, Poland, and Pemper was a Jewish prisoner from Krakow whom he had forced to be his secretary. Goeth personally murdered hundreds during the course of World War II, and Pemper regarded his assignment as a death sentence.

So Pemper, with nothing to lose, plotted against Goeth. His acts of defiance included typing the names on what became known as Schindler’s List, a roster of labor camp workers who were supposedly essential to the German war effort and who were thus spared almost certain extermination.

Oskar Schindler was the flamboyant and controversial German industrialist who overcame his membership in the Nazi Party and willingness to profit from the slave labor of concentration camp prisoners to engineer the rescue of nearly 1,000 of his workers and 200 other inmates.

The story was the basis of “Schindler’s Ark,” a 1982 Booker Prize-winning novel by Thomas Keneally, and the 1993 film adaptation of it by the director Steven Spielberg, titled “Schindler’s List.” (The book was also later published under that title as well.)

Spielberg simplified the tale by creating a composite character based on Pemper and Itzhak Stern, an imprisoned Jewish accountant, calling the character Stern (portrayed by Ben Kingsley in the film). When Schindler’s workers were released in 1945, Schindler called the two men the real heroes. “Don’t thank me for your survival,” he told them. “Thank your valiant Stern and Pemper, who stared death in the face constantly.”

Pemper, who was a consultant on the film, died at age 91 on June 7 in Augsburg, Germany, where he lived. His death was announced by the Jewish Historical Society of Augsburg, where he settled in 1958, becoming a German citizen and a management consultant.

In his wartime office from hell, Pemper repeatedly risked his life, using guile to gain access to classified documents and a photographic memory to record them. At one point he learned of the Nazis’ plans to exterminate Jews and others.

He also learned that many of the labor camps were to be closed and that their prisoners would most likely be sent to death camps. Only camps making weapons and other military essentials were to remain open.

Pemper passed the information to Schindler, who had used camp laborers at his enamelware factory but who by then had become devoted to saving his workers’ lives. Pemper encouraged him to expand the operation and offer to make grenade parts so that the Plaszow camp could remain open. To show that the factory was up to the task, Pemper compiled mountains of documentation crammed with made-up statistics.

The ruse worked, and the camp stayed open, prolonging the lives of many of its 20,000 inmates. As the massacre of Jews and others accelerated, Schindler was able to move his workers to another labor camp and save their lives.