'Other Schindler' saved dozens in Pinochet's Chile, like German namesake

During the darkest days of Chile's dictatorship, a man named Jorge Schindler saved dozens of leftists by employing them undercover at his pharmacies, risking his own life like a different Schindler during another of history's nightmares.

The South American Schindler's story was published for the first time on Friday in The Chilean Schindler's List, a biography.

It retraces his silent struggle against Augusto Pinochet's brutal regime and the uncanny parallels with Oskar Schindler's secret defiance of Nazi Germany. The two are not related.

Jorge Schindler was active in the Chilean Communist Party when Pinochet overthrew socialist president Salvador Allende on September 11, 1973.

He was soon fired from his government job, an early, ominous sign of the crackdown that would leave more than 3,000 killed and 38,000 tortured by the time Pinochet's demise in 1990.

Instead of fleeing, Schindler decided to open a pharmacy, and hatched a plan reminiscent of Oskar Schindler's manoeuvres to save more than 1,000 Jews from the Holocaust by employing them at his factories, the subject of Steven Spielberg's 1993 film Schindler's List.