During the reign of the Third Reich, Oskar Schindler, a German and member of the Nazi Party, saved more than 1,000 Jews from being murdered in the Holocaust. Schindler’s name has lived on through history as a hero, but the woman who helped him compile the list of names that would eventually get more than 1,000 Jews out of concentration camps is far less known.
Mimi Reinhard was the secretary who typed up “Schindler’s List.” She died on Friday in Israel at the age of 107.
The woman who helped a Nazi save her fellow Jews was born in 1915 in Vienna, Austria. She moved to Krakow, Poland, until 1942, when the Nazis sent her to the Plaszow concentration camp. Since she knew shorthand, she worked in the camp’s office. That’s where she eventually started typing the list of Jews from the camp who would be sent to Schindler’s factories.
Reinhard was also a Jew saved by Schindler. The Associated Press reported: “She was one of 1,200 Jews saved by German businessman Schindler after he bribed Nazi authorities to let him keep them as workers in his factories. The account was made into the acclaimed 1993 film ‘Schindler’s List’ by director Steven Spielberg.”
Reinhard was saved by Schindler when she was being held at the Plaszow concentration camp in Poland, a camp that held many Jews who were then sent to Auschwitz, according to The Washington Post. “Schindler persuaded German officials that the Jewish workers at his enamelware factory near Krakow should be moved to another concentration camp in Czechoslovakia, where they were needed to produce munitions. Mrs. Reinhard was among those who boarded a train for the trip in October 1944,” the Post reported.
Schindler’s typist was vital to him getting hundreds of Jews to safety. Without the list, Schindler would not have been able to get the Jews out of the Nazi concentration camp and to safety. “I didn’t know it was such an important thing, that list,” Reinhard told World Holocaust Remembrance Center Yad Vashem in 2008, the AP wrote. “First of all, I got the list of those who were with Schindler already in Krakow, in his factory. I had to put them on the list.”
Reinhard remembered Schindler as “a charming man” who treated her and the other Jews with respect, and although she said he was imperfect, she saw his courage and heart. “He was no angel. We knew that he was an SS man; he was a member of the highest ranks. They went out drinking together at night, but apparently he could not stand to see what they were doing to us. … I saw a man who was risking his life all the time for what he was doing,” she said, according to the Post.
After World War II, Reinhard moved to the U.S., where she lived in Manhattan until she was 92. She then spent the remainder of her life in Israel. She is survived by her son, Sasha Wietman, along with grandchildren and great-grandchildren.