Mimi Reinhard, Who Typed Up Schindler’s List, Dies at 107

The movie didn’t depict Mrs. Reinhard immediately; slightly, it confirmed Schindler hiring each one who auditioned for him, along with his enterprise supervisor, Itzhak Stern, portrayed by Ben Kingsley, performing many secretarial features.

Mrs. Reinhard was by no means secretive about her position, however it didn’t come to gentle publicly till 2007, when she was 92 and transferring to Israel from New York, the place she had settled after the conflict. She instructed of her Schindler connection to the Jewish Company for Israel, a nonprofit Israeli group that was serving to her resettle. When she landed in Israel, she was mobbed by the information media and have become an instantaneous celeb.

She was born Carmen Koppel on Jan. 15, 1915, in Wiener Neustadt, Austria. Her mom, Frieda (Klein) was a homemaker and her father, Emil Koppel, was a businessman. He was additionally an opera fan and named her for Bizet’s “Carmen,” however she by no means appreciated it. Her father later agreed to vary it to Mimi, the heroine of Puccini’s opera “La Bohème.”

Earlier than enrolling on the College of Vienna to check languages and literature, she took stenography in order that she may take lecture notes in shorthand.

“I by no means discovered to kind,” she instructed The New York Instances in 2007, although on Schindler’s listing she categorized herself as a “schreibkraft,” or typist.

By 1936 she had married Joseph Weitmann (the unique spelling of his surname) and lived in Krakow, the place they’d their son, Sasha, who was initially named Alexander. In 1939, when Hitler invaded Poland, they smuggled the toddler to Hungary to reside with family. She and her husband had been confined to Krakow’s Jewish ghetto. Mr. Weitmann was shot to demise when he tried to flee, and he or she was despatched to the Plaszow forced-labor camp in 1942.

With the Pink Military bearing down on Krakow in 1944, the Germans had been in retreat and deliberate to ship lots of the remaining Jews to Auschwitz, the place they nearly actually confronted liquidation. At this level, Schindler stepped in and persuaded the Nazis that his important employees — of whom Ms. Reinhard was one — must be moved as an alternative to a camp in Czechoslovakia, the place they might produce munitions for the German conflict machine.