Mimi Reinhardt, the secretary who created the famous list of Oskar Schindler, the German industrialist who saved the lives of more than 1,000 Jews during World War II, has died in Israel at the age of 107, her family said on Friday. .
“My dear and only grandmother died at the age of 107. May she rest in peace,” her granddaughter Nina wrote in Hebrew to relatives in a message seen by AFP.
A Jew of Austrian origin, Mimi Reinhardt lived in Krakow, Poland, before World War II, and was employed by Oskar Schindler, for whom she worked until 1945.
During the war, she compiled lists of Jewish officials saved from Nazi gas chambers by Oskar Schindler (1908-1974). The story was popularized by Steven Spielberg’s film “Schindler’s List”, which won seven Academy Awards and dozens of international congratulations. However, the secretary is not part of the film, in which the lists of Jewish names are drawn up by an associate of Schindler’s.
Reinhardt claimed to have met Steven Spielberg, but admitted it took him years to watch the production. “I was invited to the New York premiere. But I had to leave before the screening, it was very difficult for me,” he said.
Reinhardt, who lived in New York after the war, moved to Israel in 2007, aged 92, to join his only child, Sacha Weitman, then a professor of sociology at Tel Aviv University, and his grandchildren.
“I feel at home,” she told reporters waiting for her at the airport.
For the past few years, she has lived in a nursing home in Herzliya, a coastal town north of Tel Aviv.
A few years ago, photographer Gideon Markowicz, from the Israeli newspaper “Israel Hayom”, met her while working on a project on Holocaust survivors.
“She participated in nursing home activities, was a bridge champion, surfed the internet and followed the stock market,” she told AFP on Friday.
