Mimi Reinhard, who has died aged 107, was a prisoner at the Płaszów Nazi labour camp in a suburb of Kraków in Poland when in 1944 she was asked to help out with the preparation of a document for the camp commander Amon Göth.
It was a list of people in the camp who would be sent to work in a munitions factory owned by an industrialist called Oskar Schindler, where they would be housed in barracks, away from the extreme cruelty of the camp. The record that Reinhard helped to compile, and typed up, later became known as Schindler’s list.
After the war, Reinhard settled for a time in Morocco and then New York, where she lived for 50 years. She kept in touch with other “Schindler Jews” whose lives had been saved by escaping the Plaszów camp under Schindler’s protection, but did not speak publicly about her earlier life until she moved to Israel in 2007.
In the meantime, Schindler’s story was told first in Thomas Keneally’s 1982 novel, Schindler’s Ark, which won the Booker prize, and in 1993 in a film by Steven Spielberg, Schindler’s List, which won seven Oscars and reached a huge audience worldwide.
Mimi was born Carmen Koppel in Vienna, daughter of Frieda and Emil Koppel. Her father, an opera-loving grain merchant, chose her name after Bizet’s Carmen, but she did not like it and was nicknamed Mimi (after the character in La Bohème). She studied languages at the University of Vienna, taking shorthand to help with her note-taking. In 1936 she married Josef Weitmann, who owned a curtain-making business in Kraków, and the couple settled there and had a son, Sascha.
After the German occupation of Poland in 1939, the administration wanted to re-establish Kraków as Krakau, a German city. As Jews, Mimi and her husband were forced to live in the Kraków ghetto, established by the Nazis in 1940. Its inhabitants were allowed to leave and return only with special permits. Josef was killed while trying to escape; Sascha was smuggled to relatives in Hungary.
Mimi survived the final liquidation of the Kraków ghetto in March 1943, when 2,000 Jews were slaughtered, because the Nazis deemed her language and secretarial skills useful. She was transported to the Płaszów forced labour camp. “My mother had insisted that I learn something useful,” she said in an interview in 2007. “In the camp there were not so many people who spoke German and could do shorthand and type, so I was put into the administrative barracks.”
Schindler was a Nazi party member, former intelligence agent and businessman who ran enamelware and later ammunition factories. He mixed with the German elite of Kraków, initially hoping to further his interests, but did not go along with the Nazi treatment of the Poles, the Jews and the other subject peoples. He gained a reputation for being more civilised than others in his treatment of his Jewish workers, and as time went on devoted his resources to protecting them.
He had asked Göth for workers for his factories – he was ready to offer bribes and Göth was willing take them. But in March 1943, Göth’s secretary, Mietek Pemper, sent a letter to Schindler informing him that stricter regulations meant his workers could no longer be allowed to walk the two and a half miles from the camp to his factory.
Schindler won permission to build a new factory further away in Brünnlitz in the Sudetenland (now Brněnec in the Czech Republic) and barracks where the workers could stay. Pemper was then tasked with compiling the list of those who would travel to Brünnlitz. Working with him as an administrator, Mimi helped with the list. “When the Germans came with Schindler’s list of the workers that he wanted to take to Sudetenland it was given to me to note and type up … I put my name and the name of two friends on it to make up the quota.”
On the way to Brünnlitz in 1944, the train carrying Schindler’s workers was diverted to Auschwitz. Death seemed inevitable. But Schindler used his military intelligence contacts to stop the diversion, claiming that these workers were vital for his armaments factory. At its peak, the factory employed about 1,750 workers, of whom 1,000 were Jews. Mimi was put to work in Schindler’s office.
At the war’s end, his workers were liberated, and Mimi was reunited with Sascha. She married Albert Reinhard, a hotel director, and they settled in New York and had a daughter, Lucienne. She met Schindler again just once, on a trip to Vienna in the early 1950s. “We were passing a coffee house where there was a group of people sitting. This large man ran across and hugged and started kissing me, saying: ‘Mimi, Mimi ...’ It was then that I realised that it was Schindler sitting with some of the Jews he had rescued.”
Lucienne died in 2000, and Albert in 2002. Five years later, when planning to move to Israel, where her son was a sociology professor, Mimi was interviewed by members of a Jewish resettlement agency about her wartime experiences. It was only then that her connection to Schindler became more widely known.
She is survived by Sascha and by three granddaughters, nine great-grandchildren and two great-great-grandchildren.
• Mimi Reinhardt, Holocaust survivor, born 15 January 1915; died 8 April 2022
