Secretary who typed ‘Schindler’s List’ dies

Mimi Reinhard was 107 years young

Mimi Reinhard was being held at a Nazi concentration camp near Krakow, Poland, in 1944, but because she spoke flawless German and could take shorthand, she was allowed to work in the camp office. One of her jobs was to compile a list of Jewish prisoners working in factories owned by industrialist Oskar Schindler.

Reinhard, then known as Carmen Weitmann, typed the names of more than 1,000 Jewish people — including her own and those of two friends — to create what became known as “Schindler’s List.” She called herself a “schreibkraft,” or typist.

“The only practical thing in my life that I learned was shorthand, but I never learned to type,” Reinhard told the New York Times in 2007. “I typed with two fingers only.”

As a result, she and more than 1,000 other Jews were saved from near-certain annihilation in the Nazi death camps of World War II.

Reinhard, who later became Schindler’s secretary, has died in Israel at age 107. Israeli and European news agencies reported her death, citing an April 8 statement from her granddaughter. The precise date, place and cause of Reinhard’s death were not immediately known. She had been living near Tel Aviv since 2007.

Schindler, an ethnic German who lived in what was then Czechoslovakia, was a member of the Nazi Party. Yet he cajoled and sometimes threatened German military authorities in his efforts to protect his Jewish workers.

In 1944, as Russia’s Red Army moved toward Krakow, the Germans retreated and sent many Jewish prisoners at the nearby Plaszow concentration camp — where Reinhard was held — to their death at Auschwitz. Schindler persuaded German officials that the Jewish workers at his enamelware factory near Krakow should be moved to another concentration camp in Czechoslovakia, where they were needed to produce munitions. Reinhard was among those who boarded a train for the trip in October 1944.

“It was a gamble as far as we were concerned,” she told Israel’s Ha’aretz newspaper in 2007. “To go with Schindler was no guarantee of anything. We didn’t believe that Schindler would really succeed in saving us. He was just taking us to a different camp. Who knew? We took a chance only because we believed in Schindler.”

On the way to Czechoslovakia, Reinhard’s train detoured to Auschwitz, where they were detained for two weeks. She described the scene as “straight out of Dante’s ‘Inferno.’ ... We were certain that we were done for.”

Schindler threatened to charge German officers with “undermining” the war effort if they did not permit his Jewish workers to leave Auschwitz. In Czechoslovakia, Schindler submitted false reports from his armaments factory to confuse Nazi officials. The factory produced just one wagonload of ammunition before the war ended in May 1945 and the camp was liberated. An estimated 1,100 Jewish lives were saved.

Schindler died, impoverished and in obscurity, in 1974. Australian author Thomas Keneally brought his story to the public in the 1982 novel “Schindler’s List” (or “Schindler’s Ark” outside the United States). The book was followed by Steven Spielberg’s critically acclaimed 1993 film “Schindler’s List,” which Reinhard avoided seeing for several years.

“It was still fresh in my mind,” she told Ha’aretz. “I just couldn’t. I did not want to relive it.”

The same year that Spielberg’s film was released, Schindler and his wife, Emilie, were named “Righteous Among the Nations” by Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust remembrance center.

“He was no angel,” Reinhard said of Schindler. “We knew that he was an SS man; he was a member of the highest ranks. They went out drinking together at night, but apparently he could not stand to see what they were doing to us . ... I saw a man who was risking his life all the time for what he was doing.”