She wanted to devote herself to the beautiful things in life, she had enrolled at the university for literature and languages. But then came the Nazis and the war, and in the end a very profane skill proved to be a blessing for Mimi Reinhardt: she had also learned shorthand. In the Płaszów concentration camp, where she was taken with other Jews from Kraków in 1943, Oskar Schindler made her his secretary. She typed Schindler’s list, which saved her and 1,200 other Jews’ lives. Mimi Reinhardt has now died at the age of 107 near Tel Aviv.
It has been a century of life in which the worst low point had to be suffered. When she was born Carmen Koppel in Vienna in 1915, Emperor Franz-Joseph was still in power there. In 1936 she moved with her husband to Kraków, Poland, where she was initially locked up in the Kraków ghetto after the Nazis invaded. When it was dissolved in 1943, she was sent to the Płaszów concentration camp. Her husband was shot by the Germans as he tried to escape. Her son was able to be smuggled to Hungary by his grandparents with false papers.
In Płaszów, she met Oskar Schindler, the German NSDAP member who ran a factory using Jewish forced laborers from the concentration camps – and ended up putting himself in danger by helping his workers survive. He compiled the list of 1200 names of those Jews who were saved in the end. And Mimi Reinhardt typed them out – with two fingers, as she later reported. Her name was on it too. Job Title: Typist.
The story of these “Schindler Jews”, as they called themselves, was later the focus of the multiple award-winning film “Schindler’s List”, which was released in cinemas in 1993. The list typed by Mimi Reinhardt is kept today in the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, where Schindler is also honored as “Righteous Among the Nations”.
Mimi Reinhardt found her son again after the war and moved to Morocco with him. There she married a second time, emigrated to the USA in 1957 and lived in New York for five decades. In 2007, when she was 92 years old and lonely, she dared to move one last time – to Israel to her son, who taught there as a sociology professor at Tel Aviv University.
Only then did she also reveal her role in connection with Schindler’s List. Before that, she had never spoken about it publicly and only hinted at it to her closest relatives. “I just didn’t want to talk about it. I wanted to start a new life without the old one,” she told the 2007 Süddeutsche Zeitung. When it came to immigrating to Israel, however, employees of the Jewish Agency asked her in detail about her past. What she reported there quickly caught the attention of the media.
So Mimi Reinhardt only came into the limelight in her last years. The relatives only announced her death last Friday and her funeral in Herzlija Pituach afterwards in an obituary notice.