She was secretary to German industrialist Oskar Schindler during World War II. Mimi Reinhardt, who wrote her employer’s famous list that saved more than 1,000 Jews from Nazi barbarism, died in Israel, her family said on Friday (April 8th). “My beloved and unique grandmother passed away at the age of 107. Rest in peace,” wrote in Hebrew to relatives his granddaughter Nina, in a message seen by AFP.
Of Austrian origin and Jewish herself, Mimi Reinhardt lived in Krakow, Poland, before the Second World War and had been hired by Oskar Schindler for whom she worked until 1945. During the war, she had drawn up the lists Jewish employees saved from the Nazi gas chambers by his employer. The unusual story of Oskar Schindler was popularized in 1993 by director Steven Spielberg’s film, Schindler’s Listcrowned with seven Oscars and dozens of international awards.
Installed after the war in New York, Mimi Reinhardt had late made her aliyah, her immigration to Israel, in 2007 at the age of 92, in order to join her only son, then professor of sociology at the university. of Tel Aviv, and her grandchildren. “I feel at home”, she then explained timidly to the journalists who came to wait for her at Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv.
Mimi Reinhardt had indicated having met Steven Spielberg, while admitting to having taken years before being able to watch his film. “I was invited to the premiere of the film in New York. But I had to leave before the screening, it was too hard for me”, she said. For the past few years, she has been living in a retirement home in Herzliya, a palm-fringed coastal town north of the Israeli metropolis Tel Aviv.
A few years ago, photographer Gideon Markowicz of the Israeli daily Israel Hayomhad met her as part of a project on Holocaust survivors. “She participated (then) in the activities of the retirement home, she was the bridge champion, she surfed the internet, and followed the Stock Exchange”, he told AFP on Friday.