Mimi Reinhard, secretary who typed up Schindler’s list saving Jews during Holocaust, dies at 107

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A secretary who typed up Oskar Schindler's list of Jewish people to be spared from extermination by Nazi Germany during the Holocaust has died at the age of 107.

Mimi Reinhard was one of 1,200 Jews saved by the German industrialist after he bribed Nazi authorities to let him keep them as workers in his factories during the Second World War. The story was made into the 1993 film Schindler’s List.

Reinhard, who died last week in Israel, was in charge of compiling lists of Jewish workers from the Krakow ghetto to work at Schindler’s factory, saving them from deportation. She continued working for him until the end of the war in 1945.

Reinhardt in 2019 with a photo of her old boss (AFP/Getty)

She was buried on Sunday in Herzliya, near Tel Aviv, having moved to Israel from the US in 2007, aged 92, to be with her son.

Reinhard was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1915, and moved to Krakow, Poland, before the Second World War. She was sent to the Plaszow concentration camp in 1942 but was saved thanks to her knowledge of shorthand, which led her to work in the administrative office and later in Schindler’s office in the Brunnlitz labour camp.

After two years as a secretary, she was ordered to type up the handwritten list of Jews that were to be transferred to Schindler’s ammunition factory.

“I didn’t know it was such an important thing, that list,” she said 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.

Although she worked in Schindler’s office toward the end of the war, she said she had little personal contact with him.

Sasha Weitman, son of Mimi Reinhard, holds a photograph of his mother in Herzliya, Israel, after her death (AP)

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

Schindler, who died in 1974, saved the lives of around 1,200 Jews despite the risk to his own life.

Reinhard was invited to the premiere of the Steven Spielberg film recounting Schindler’s efforts but said in a later interview that she “had to walk out before the screening, it was too hard for me”.

Additional reporting by AP