She was Oskar Schindler’s secretary and was behind the drafting of the eponymous list which saved 1,200 Jews during the Second World War. Carmen Mimi Reinhardt has died aged 107 in Israel, her family has announced.
“My dear and unique grandmother just passed away at the age of 107. Rest in Peace”, thus addressed in Hebrew to relatives, his granddaughter Nina, in a message that AFP was able to relay.
Austrian-born Mimi Reinhardt had learned shorthand so she could take notes during her language studies at the University of Vienna. It was here that she met her first husband, before following him to settle in the Polish city of Krakow before the Second World War.
After losing her husband during the Nazi occupation of Poland, Mimi Reinhard was transported with other Jews to the Plaszow camp. Employed by the camp administration for her talents as a stenographer, she then met Oskar Schindler, who hired her as a secretary. This, until 1945.
A heroine
These years of work with the German industrialist will obviously be marked by a heroic act. Indeed, it was Mimi Reinhardt who typed up the lists of Jewish employees saved from the Nazi gas chambers by Oskar Schindler, whose story had been made famous thanks to the film directed by Steven Spielberg, The List. of Schindler.
Released in 1994, this production which has since become a classic, had won no less than seven Oscars and many other international awards. Mimi Reinhardt had also indicated having met the director, while confiding that it took years before being able to watch the film.
Morocco, United States then Israel
After the war, the heroine finally found her son in Hungary, and together they settled in Morocco. It was here that she met her second husband with whom she had a daughter, who unfortunately died of an illness at the age of 49.
After moving to New York in 1957 with all her family, she finally decided to immigrate permanently to Israel in 2007 at the age of 92, with the aim of joining her only son, who teaches in Tel Aviv as a professor of sociology at the university. “I feel at home,” she timidly told reporters who were waiting for her at Ben Gurion airport.
Mimi Reinhardt spent her last years of life in a retirement home in Herzliya, in which “she participated in activities”, reported photographer Gideon Markowicz who had met her, as part of a project on survivors of the Holocaust. “She was the bridge champion, she surfed the internet and followed the stock market,” he added to AFP on Friday.
