The woman who drew up lists of people for the German industrialist Oskar Schindler that helped save hundreds of Jews during the Holocaust has died aged 107.
Mimi Reinhardt, who was employed as Schindler’s secretary, was in charge of drawing up the lists of Jewish workers from the ghetto of the Polish city of Kraków who were recruited to work at his factory, saving them from deportation to Nazi death camps.
“My grandmother, so dear and so unique, passed away at the age of 107. Rest in peace,” Reinhardt’s granddaughter Nina wrote in a message to relatives.
Austrian-born Reinhardt, who was also Jewish, was recruited by Schindler himself and worked for him until 1945.
After the second world war, she moved to New York before deciding to move to Israel in 2007 to join her only son, Sasha Weitman, who was then a professor of sociology at Tel Aviv University.
“I feel at home,” she told reporters when she landed in the country.
Schindler, who died in 1974, was named by Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust museum as a member of the “Righteous Among the Nations”, an honour for non-Jews who tried to save Jews from Nazi extermination.
The lists that Reinhardt compiled for him helped to save about 1,300 people at considerable risk to his own life.
His initiative was recounted in the bestselling 1982 novel Schindler’s Ark and the award-winning film adaptation by Steven Spielberg, Schindler’s List.
Reinhardt, who spent her last years at a nursing home north of Tel Aviv, had said she once met Spielberg but found it hard to watch the movie.
The Israeli photographer Gideon Markowicz, who met Reinhardt as part of a project dedicated to Holocaust survivors, described her as an active woman.
“She took part in the activities of the nursing home and was a bridge champion. She surfed the net and monitored the stock exchange,” he said.
