Mimi Reinhard, Secretary to Oskar Schindler who Typed Up ‘Schindler’s List,’ Dead at 107

Mimi Reinhard holds a picture of Oskar Schindler in the Israeli city of Herzliya in 2019. Reinhard was briefly a secretary for Schindler, a German industrialist who saved the lives of hundreds of Jews during the Holocaust. (Gideon Markowicz/AFP/Getty Images)

Mimi Reinhard was being held at a Nazi concentration camp near Krakow, Poland, in 1944, but because she spoke flawless German and could take shorthand, she was allowed to work in the camp office. One of her jobs was to compile a list of Jewish prisoners working in factories owned by industrialist Oskar Schindler.

Mrs. Reinhard, then known as Carmen Weitmann, typed 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 a “schreibkraft,” or typist.

“The only practical thing in my life that I learned was shorthand, but I never learned to type,” Mrs. Reinhard told the New York Times in 2007. “I typed with two fingers only.”

As a result, she and more than 1,000 other Jews were saved from near-certain annihilation in the Nazi death camps of World War II.

Mrs. Reinhard, who later became Schindler’s secretary, has died in Israel at age 107. Israeli and European news agencies reported her death, citing an April 8 statement from her granddaughter. The precise date, place and cause of Mrs. Reinhard’s death were not immediately known. She had been living near Tel Aviv since 2007.

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SOURCE: The Washington Post, Matt Schudel