Mimi Reinhard was held in a Nazi concentration camp near Kraków, Poland in 1944, but because she spoke impeccable German and could use shorthand, she was allowed to work in the camp office. One of their tasks was to compile a list of Jewish prisoners who worked in the factories of the industrialist Oskar Schindler.
Ms. Reinhard, then known as Carmen Weitmann, typed in 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 “Typist”.
“The only practical thing I learned in my life was shorthand, but I never learned to type,” Ms. Reinhard told The New York Times in 2007. “I was only typing with two fingers.”
As a result, she and more than 1,000 other Jews were saved from near-certain annihilation in Nazi death camps during World War II.
Ms. Reinhard, who later became Schindler’s secretary, died in Israel at the age of 107. Israeli and European news outlets reported her death, citing an April 8 statement by her granddaughter. The exact date, location and cause of Ms. Reinhard’s death were not immediately known. Since 2007 she lived near Tel Aviv.
Schindler, an ethnic German living in what was then Czechoslovakia, was a member of the Nazi Party. Nonetheless, he flattered and sometimes threatened the German military authorities in their efforts to protect his Jewish workers.
In 1944, as the Russian Red Army was advancing on Kraków, the Germans retreated and sent many Jewish prisoners to the nearby Plaszow concentration camp – where Ms. Reinhard was being held – to their deaths in Auschwitz. Schindler convinced German officials that the Jewish workers at his enamelware factory near Kraków should be transferred to another concentration camp in Czechoslovakia, where they would be needed to manufacture munitions. Mrs. Reinhard also boarded a train for the journey in October 1944.
“It was a risk for us,” she told the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz in 2007. “Going with Schindler wasn’t a guarantee of anything. We didn’t think Schindler would really be able to save us. He just took us to another camp. who knew We only took a risk because we believed in Schindler.”
On the way to Czechoslovakia, Mrs. Reinhard’s train made a detour to Auschwitz, where they were held for two weeks. She described the scene as “right out of Dante’s ‘Inferno.’ … We were sure we were done for.”
Schindler threatened to charge German officers with “undermining” the war effort if they didn’t allow his Jewish workers to leave Auschwitz. In Czechoslovakia, Schindler submitted false reports from his armaments factory to confuse Nazi officials. The factory only produced one carload 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 the dark 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 Ms. Reinhard did not want to see for several years.
“It was fresh in my mind,” she told Haaretz. “I just couldn’t. I didn’t want to experience it again.”
The same year that Spielberg’s film was released, Schindler and his wife Emilie were named Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial.
“He wasn’t an angel,” Ms. Reinhard said of Schindler. “We knew he was an SS man; he was a member of the highest ranks. They used to go out drinking at night but apparently he couldn’t bear to see what they were doing to us. … I have seen a man who was constantly risking his life for what he was doing.”
Carmen Koppel was born on January 15, 1915 in Vienna, then the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, which was dissolved at the end of the First World War in 1918.
Little is known about her early life, except that she studied languages and literature at the University of Vienna. In 1936 she was married and living in Kraków. She and her husband had a son in 1939 and later smuggled him to Hungary to live with relatives during the war.
She and her husband were arrested and imprisoned in the Kraków Jewish ghetto. Her husband was killed trying to escape. Ms. Reinhard was later housed in the Plaszow forced labor camp.
After the war she reunited with her son, lived in Morocco for several years, remarried and had a daughter. She moved to New York in 1957 and lived on Manhattan’s Upper West Side for 50 years. She maintained her connections with other “Schindlerjuden” or Jews rescued by Schindler, but never told strangers about her past life.
Her daughter, Lucienne Reinhard, died in 2000. Her second husband, Albert Reinhard, died in 2002. Five years later, when Ms. Reinhard was planning to move to Israel, where her son was a sociology professor, members of a Jewish resettlement agency interviewed her about their war experiences. Only then was her connection to Schindler revealed.
Survivors include her son, Sasha Weitman, and several grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
More than a dozen years after the end of World War II, Mrs. Reinhard was walking down a street with her aunt in Vienna when she heard someone calling her former name, Carmen Weitmann. It was Schindler, sitting in a café.
“He recognized me,” Ms. Reinhard later recalled. “He sat in the café with other Jews who had worked for him. Irritated, my aunt asked me where I knew this man from.”