MIMI Reinhardt, Oskar Schindler’s secretary, died in Israel on April 8 at the age of 107.
Born Carmen Koppel in Vienna to a Jewish family, Mimi Reinhardt worked for Schindler during the latter half of World War II, 1942-1945, drawing up lists of Jewish workers to be employed at Schindler’s factory.
Schindler famously saved over one thousand Jews by employing them at his factories, which produced enamelware and ammunitions.
In 1962, a tree was planted in his honor on the Avenue of the Righteous at Yad Vashem.
He was also posthumously named one of the Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem along with his wife, Emilie.
Reinhardt’s skills in shorthand landed her a job in the administration of the Plaszow concentration camp, where she was deported after the evacuation of the Krakow ghetto and the death of her husband at the hands of the Nazis.
There she met Schindler and became his personal secretary, assisting him in saving hundreds of her fellow Jews.
After the war, Reinhardt was reunited with her son Sasha Weitman, and the two moved to Morocco where she met her second husband. The family moved the New York City, where Reinhardt lived for the next five decades.
Weitman made aliyah in 1974 and became a professor at Tel Aviv University.
In 2007, at the age of 92, Reinhardt joined her son in Israel where she lived out her last fifteen years.
Reinhardt is mourned by her son and his family, as well as the thousands of people whose parents and grandparents she helped escape certain death.
JERUSALEM POST
