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

The movie didn’t depict Mrs. Reinhard instantly; somewhat, it confirmed Schindler hiring each one that auditioned for him, together 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 mild publicly till 2007, when she was 92 and transferring to Israel from New York, the place she had settled after the battle. She advised 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 superstar.

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 advised The New York Occasions in 2007, although on Schindler’s record 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 have been confined to Krakow’s Jewish ghetto. Mr. Weitmann was shot to loss of life 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 have been in retreat and deliberate to ship lots of the remaining Jews to Auschwitz, the place they nearly definitely confronted liquidation. At this level, Schindler stepped in and persuaded the Nazis that his important employees — of whom Ms. Reinhard was one — needs to be moved as a substitute to a camp in Czechoslovakia, the place they may produce munitions for the German battle machine.