Mimi Reinhard, secretary who typed ‘Schindler’s List,’ dies at 107

The secretary who typed up Oskar Schindler’s list of Jews to be spared from the Holocaust has died at the age of 107.

Reinhard’s knowledge of shorthand got her work in the camp’s administrative office, where, two years later, she was ordered to type up the handwritten list of Jews that were to be transferred to Schindler’s ammunition factory.

“I didn’t know it was such an important thing, that list,” she told an interviewer with Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, in 2008. “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.” Later she put her own name, and the names of two friends.

Her account was made into the 1993 film ‘Schindler’s List’ by director Steven Spielberg.

Mimi was born Carmen Koppel in Vienna, Austria, in 1915, and moved to Krakow, Poland, before the outbreak of the Second World War. At the Brünnlitz labor camp, where Schindler’s ammunition factory was housed, she started working in Schindler’s office.

She said that although she worked in Schindler’s office toward the end of the war, she had little personal contact with him. “He was a very charming man, very outgoing,” she recalled, decades after the war. “He didn’t treat us like scum.”

After the war, she moved to the United States, where she lived until immigrating to Israel in 2007 at the age of 92.

Weitman, Reinhard’s son, said that after coming to Israel she “became a kind of a celebrity” because of the Schindler’s List film’s popularity, something he said “pumped another 15 years into her life.”