Mimi Reinhard, who typed Schindler’s list, dies aged 107

JERUSALEM – Mimi Reinhard, a secretary in Oskar Schindler’s office who typed up a list of Jews he saved from Nazi extermination, has died in Israel at the age of 107.

Reinhard died early Friday and was laid to rest on Sunday in Herzliya, near Tel Aviv, her son Sasha Weitman confirmed.

She was one of 1,200 Jews saved by German businessman Schindler after he bribed the Nazi government to keep them as workers in his factory. This account was included in the popular 1993 film Schindler’s List, directed by Steven Spielberg.

Reinhard was born Carmen Koppel in Vienna, Austria, in 1915, and moved to Krakow, Poland, before the outbreak of World War II. After the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939, she was imprisoned in the Krakow slums before being sent to nearby Plaszow concentration camp in 1942.

Reinhard’s knowledge of shorthand helped her work in the camp’s administrative office, where, two years later, she was ordered to type a handwritten list of Jews to be delivered to an ammunition factory by Schindler.

“I didn’t know it was such an important thing, that list,” she told an interviewer with Yad Vashem, World Holocaust Memorial Center, in 2008. “First, I had the list. who were with Schindler. in Krakow, in his factory. I had to put them on the list”. Then she gave her own name, and the names of two friends.

At the Brünnlitz labor camp, where Schindler’s ammunition factory was located, she was put to work in Schindler’s office.

She said that although she worked in Schindler’s office at the end of the war, she had very little personal contact with him.

“He was a very charming man, very outgoing,” she recalls, decades after the war. “He doesn’t treat us like scum.”

After the war, she moved to the United States, where she lived until immigrating to Israel in 2007 at the age of 92.

Weitman, Reinhard’s son, said that after arriving in Israel, she “became a kind of celebrity” because of the popularity of the movie Schindler’s List, which he said “pumped another 15 years into her life.” she.”

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