Woman who typed Schindler’s list is dead

Sasha Weitman, son of Mimi Reinhard, a secretary in Oskar Schindler's office who typed up the list of Jews he saved from extermination by Nazi Germany, holds an old photograph of his mother in Herzliya, Israel, Monday, April 11, 2022. Mimi Reinhard died Friday in Israel at the age of 107. (AP Photo/Ariel Schalit)
Sasha Weitman, son of Mimi Reinhard, a secretary in Oskar Schindler's office who typed up the list of Jews he saved from extermination by Nazi Germany, holds an old photograph of his mother in Herzliya, Israel, Monday, April 11, 2022. Mimi Reinhard died Friday in Israel at the age of 107. (AP Photo/Ariel Schalit)

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

Reinhard died Friday and was laid to rest 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 Nazi authorities to let him keep them as workers in his factories. The account was made into the 1993 film "Schindler's List" by director 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 Nazi Germany invaded Poland in 1939, she was confined to the Krakow ghetto before being sent to the nearby Plaszow concentration camp in 1942.

Reinhard's knowledge of shorthand got her work in the camp's administrative office, where two years later she was ordered to type up the handwritten list of Jews who were to be transferred to Schindler's ammunition factory.

"I didn't know it was such an important thing, that list," she told an interviewer with Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in 2008. "First of all, I got the list of those who were with Schindler already in Krakow, in his factory. I had to put them on the list."

Later she added her own name and those of two friends.

At the Brunnlitz labor camp, where Schindler's ammunition factory was housed, she was put to work in Schindler's office. She said that although she worked in the office toward the end of the war, she had little personal contact with him.

"He was a very charming man, very outgoing," she recalled decades later. "He didn't treat us like scum."

After the war, she made her way to the United States, where she lived until immigrating to Israel in 2007 at age 92.

Weitman, Reinhard's son, said that after coming to Israel she "became a kind of a celebrity" because of the "Schindler's List" film's popularity, something he said "pumped another 15 years into her life."

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