Pemper helped compile and type Oskar Schindler's now-famous list, which saved 1,200 people from being killed in the Holocaust during World War II.

[1] All Jews in Kraków, including Pemper and his family, were required to wear Star of David yellow badges by the Nazis.

[2] Pemper also acted as a German-Polish interpreter for the Kraków Ghetto residents and typed up radio broadcasts from the BBC.

[1][4] He was assigned as the personal secretary and stenographer to Amon Göth, Płaszów's notorious commandant, due to his previous work at the Kraków Ghetto's Judenrat.

[1] By working in Göth's office, Pemper also became an acquaintance of Oskar Schindler, an ethnic German businessman and industrialist with ties to the black market.

In collaboration with Schindler and others in the Płaszów concentration camp including Itzhak Stern, he compiled and typed the list of over 1,000 Jewish inmates deemed "decisive for the Nazi war effort."

At the end of the war, Oskar Schindler gave a speech to his Jewish factory workers, urging: "Don't thank me for your survival... thank your valiant Stern and Pemper, who stared death in the face constantly.

He worked as a management consultant and an intercultural activist, specifically focusing on Jewish-Christian relations and reconciliation.

Spielberg sought to simplify the film's storyline by creating a composite character, portrayed by actor Ben Kingsley, based on the historical roles of Mietek Pemper, Itzhak Stern and Abraham Bankier.

[5] However, Pemper dismissed his diminished role in the film, saying his accomplishment was not the list that was compiled and typed, but "the multifarious acts of resistance that, like tiny stones being placed into a mosaic one by one, had made the whole process possible," according to The Daily Telegraph.

Pemper submitted to an in-depth film interview in Vienna in June 2005 for UK company Gigatel Cyf (Ltd).

Pemper only agreed to the interview after relentless persuasion for over 18 months by another Holocaust survivor named Edward Mosberg, who was himself imprisoned at the Płaszów, Mauthausen, and Linz camps.