An archivist at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial archives in Jerusalem, Israel, points to part of the famous list created by Oskar Schindler that saved 1,200 Jewish people from death camps during World War II. File Photo by Jim Hollander/EPA
April 11 (UPI) — Mimi Reinhardt, the secretary who typed up the famous list for Oskar Schindler that saved 1,200 Jewish people during World War II, has died, her family said. She was 107.
Reinhardt was chosen by Schindler, a German businessman, to compile a list of Jewish people to work for him at his factories. Schindler had convinced Nazi leaders to let him keep the people on the list as a way to spare them from death at concentration camps between 1942 and 1945.
Her family said that Reinhardt died on Friday near Tel Aviv, Israel, and was buried on Sunday.
Born as Carmen Koppel in Vienna in 1915, Reinhardt and her family were taken during the war to a concentration camp in Plaszow, Poland, where she met Schindler and became his personal secretary because of her skills in shorthand.
During the war, Schindler was able to convince German officers to divert Jewish people who were originally intended to be sent to Auschwitz to his camp at Czechoslovakia to make munitions. According to Schindler, who spent a great deal of his own money on bribes and black market items to keep up the ruse, his Jewish workers never produced a single weapon.
Croatian Auschwitz survivor Branko Lustig stands next to a poster of the film “Schindler’s List” at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem, Israel, on July 22, 2015. File Photo by Nir Elias/UPI
“It was a gamble as far as we were concerned,” Reinhardt said once, according to the New York Daily News. “To go with Schindler was no guarantee of anything.
“We didn’t believe that Schindler would really succeed in saving us. He was just taking us to a different camp. Who knew? We took a chance only because we believed in Schindler.”
Schindler is credited with saving about 1,200 Jewish people from the Holocaust.
Author Thomas Keneally later detailed the story in the 1982 novel Schindler’s List — which was developed into a 1993 motion picture by Steven Spielberg. The film won seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director for Spielberg. Actor Liam Neeson, who portrayed Schindler, was nominated for Best Actor.
After the war, Reinhardt moved to Morocco and later to New York City, where she lived for 50 years before returning to Israel. Schindler died in 1974.
