Mimi Reinhard, a secretary in Oskar Schindlers 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 early 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 acclaimed 1993 film Schindlers 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.
Reinhards knowledge of shorthand got her work in the camps administrative office, where, two years later, she was ordered to type up the handwritten list of Jews that were to be transferred to Schindlers ammunition factory.
I didnt 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 put her own name, and the names of two friends.
At the Brnnlitz labor camp, where Schindlers ammunition factory was housed, she was put to work in Schindlers office.
She said that although she worked in Schindlers 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 after the war. He didnt 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 the age of 92.
Weitman, Reinhards son, said that after coming to Israel she became a kind of a celebrity because of the Schindlers List films popularity, something he said pumped another 15 years into her life.
(AP)
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