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

The movie didn’t depict Mrs. Reinhard straight; reasonably, it confirmed Schindler hiring each one that auditioned for him, together with his enterprise supervisor, Itzhak Stern, portrayed by Ben Kingsley, performing many secretarial capabilities.

Mrs. Reinhard was by no means secretive about her function, but it surely 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 struggle. She informed 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 on the spot 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 review languages and literature, she took stenography in order that she might take lecture notes in shorthand.

“I by no means discovered to sort,” she told The New York Times 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 stay with kin. She and her husband had been confined to Krakow’s Jewish ghetto. Mr. Weitmann was shot to loss of life when he tried to flee, and she or he was despatched to the Plaszow forced-labor camp in 1942.

With the Crimson 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 virtually 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 a substitute to a camp in Czechoslovakia, the place they might produce munitions for the German struggle machine.