Mimi Reinhardt, who typed Oskar Schindler’s list of Jews saved from destruction by Nazi Germany, died in Israel on Friday. She was 107 years old.
Reinhard was laid to rest in Herzliya near Tel Aviv on Sunday, news agency AP quoted his son Sasha Weitmann as saying.
Reinhardt, a secretary in the office of German businessman Schindler, was one of 1,200 Jews who were later rescued after bribing the Nazis to keep them as workers in their factories.
It was this record that Mimi Reinhardt helped set was set in director Steven Spielberg’s 1993 award-winning film Schindler’s List.
As the AP reports, Reinhard was born as Carmen Koppel in Vienna, Austria, in 1915. She moved to Krakow, Poland, before the start of World War II. The report said he was confined to the Krakow ghetto after Nazi Germany invaded Poland in 1939, and then deported to the nearby Pleszów concentration camp in 1942.
Reinhard knew shorthand, which got him a job in the camp’s administrative office. Two years later, the report said, he was asked to type in a 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 said in 2008 during an interview with the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, Yad Vashem. “First, I got a list of people who were already in Krakow with Schindler at his factory. I had to put them on the list.”
The AP report said that he added his and two friends’ names to the list.
Irish actor Liam Neeson plays Oscar Schindler in ‘Schindler’s List’, directed and co-produced by Steven Spielberg. The film won seven Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director, seven BAFTAs, and three Golden Globes.