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Mimi Reinhardt with a photo of Oskar Schindler (2019): »I just typed the list«
Photo:
GIDEON MARKOWICZ / AFP
Mimi Reinhardt wrote the list with which the industrialist Oskar Schindler saved more than a thousand Jewish people from the Holocaust.
Schindler's former secretary died in Israel last Friday at the age of 107.
Her son Sasha Weitman confirmed that she was buried in Herzliya near Tel Aviv on Sunday.
Her granddaughter wrote in a message on Friday, according to AFP: "My dear and unique grandmother passed away at the age of 107.
Rest in peace."
Work in the concentration camp administration office
Reinhardt, an Austrian born in Vienna in 1915, had moved to Kraków, Poland, before the outbreak of World War II.
After the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939, she was imprisoned in the Kraków ghetto and sent to the nearby Plaszow concentration camp in 1942.
Thanks to her shorthand skills, Mimi Reinhardt got a job in the camp administration office, where she was given the task of typing the handwritten list of Jews who would work in Schindler's munitions factory.
Schindler gave around 1,200 people the status of so-called Schindlerjuden, who were protected from the gas chambers.
"I didn't know that this list was so important," Reinhardt later recalled.
“I was just typing the list.
I did what I was told," said Reinhardt, according to the Haaretz newspaper.
Reinhardt worked as Schindler's secretary until 1945.
Decades later, the factory owner's rescue operation became world famous in Steven Spielberg's Hollywood film »Schindler's List«.
She was only able to see the film years after its premiere, Reinhardt once said.
Spielberg invited her to the New York premiere of the film: "But I had to leave before the screening, it was too difficult for me."
Tel Aviv »like at home«
After the war, Reinhardt initially lived in New York.
In 2007, at the age of 92, she immigrated to Israel.
"I feel at home," she said when she arrived in Tel Aviv.
She spent the last years of her life in a retirement home in the coastal city of Herzliya.
Reinhardt's son, Sasha Weitman, said she became a minor celebrity in Israel after arriving.
That extended her life "another 15 years."
ptz/AFP/AP