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Obituary: Mimi Reinhard
Forced labour camp typist who expanded Schindler’s List and helped save some 1,200 Jewish lives
June 30, 2022 14:16
Forced labour camp typist who expanded Schindler’s List and helped save some 1,200 Jewish lives
June 30, 2022 14:16Her secretarial skills weren’t up to much; she could only type with two fingers. But she was skilled in shorthand and her German was excellent. That was enough to secure Mimi Reinhard, who has died aged 107, a job in the administrative barracks at the Nazi forced labour camp of Płaszów, near Kraków in Poland.
And it was there that in 1944 she would end up typing a list for the camp’s infamous commander, Amon Göth. Decades later that list would become the subject of a Booker Prize-winning book, Thomas Keneally’s Schindler’s Ark (1982). And in 1993 that book would form the basis for Steven Spielberg’s multiple Oscar-winner movie Schindler’s List.
Reinhard was only 29 when she ended up in Płaszów, but her life had already been touched by tragedy. Born Carmen Koppel in Vienna to Frieda Klein and Emil Koppel, a grain merchant who was passionate about opera, she was named after Bizet’s famous protagonist. The problem was she hated the name so she reached a compromise with her dad and adopted that of La Bohème’s heroine.
Mimi studied languages and literature at the University of Vienna; she also learned shorthand to help her take notes at lectures – it was at the behest of her mother, she would say later, who wanted her to “learn something useful”. In fact it would help save her life.
In 1936 she married Joseph Weitman, who owned a curtain-making business in Kraków, where they settled with their son Sasha. When Hitler invaded Poland in 1939 they barely managed to smuggle Sasha to Hungary to stay with relatives but Mimi and her husband were forced into the newly established ghetto.
Joseph was shot dead while trying to escape and Mimi was deported to Płaszów in 1942. Thanks to her secretarial skills she was able to avoid the back-breaking work the other inmates were forced to do, but in 1944, with the German army in retreat and the Red Army advancing, it looked as if Mimi and her fellow inmates would also be destined for Auschwitz.
It was then that Oskar Schindler came up with his list. Mimi had been in the camp long enough to know Schindler and what was said about him. She knew he was a Nazi intelligence officer, a womaniser, a war profiteer who ran his factories – producing enamelware and later ammunitions – by exploiting the cheap labour undertaken by the camp’s Jews. He drank with the Nazi officers, socialised with them, bribed them but somehow found he could not be complicit with their murderous actions.
At first Oskar Schindler just used his friendship with the Nazi officers to get prisoners to work in his nearby factory but as their situation deteriorated he came up with a much more ambitious plan. He devised a list of workers supposedly essential for the war effort who would work in his ammunitions factory in the Sudetenland area of Czechoslovakia.
The list was for Goth, the camp commander, and Mimi was the person tasked with typing it. But among Schindler’s ‘essential workers’ were children, terminally ill people, rabbis, friends of his and just about anybody he knew needed saving. The original list had 400 names but Schindler kept coming up with new ones – Mimi herself added her own name and those of three friends – so the list kept on growing and Mimi kept revising it.
Schindler was such a smooth operator that he always managed to talk – or bribe – his way out of a tight spot. Like in 1944 when the train carrying the Schindlerjuden (Schindler Jews) to the Sudetenland factory was diverted to Auschwitz, where they were held for two weeks that Mimi would later describe as “out of Dante’s Inferno”. Schindler managed to convince his Nazi friends to reverse their decision, accusing them of undermining the war effort and thus saving the detainees’ lives.
Reputedly, these essential workers’ output turned out to be negligible, but again Schindler managed to cook the books to make it look otherwise. All in all, Schindler’s cunning is reputed to have saved about 1,200 Jewish lives.
As for Mimi, she worked in Schindler’s office until 1945 when the camp was liberated and she was finally reunited with her son Sasha. She moved with him to Tangier where she met and married Albert Reinhard, a hotel manager. The family moved to New York in 1957 where Mimi and Albert had a daughter, Lucienne.
Although she kept in touch with some of her fellow ‘Schindler-Jews’, Mimi met Schindler only once after the war, by chance, during a trip to Vienna in the early 1950s. She was walking past a coffee house when she heard her name being called; a large man ran towards her and started hugging her: it was Oskar Schindler, who had been having a coffee with some of ‘his’ Jews.
By her own account, Mimi never saw Schindler with rose-tinted glasses: “He was no saint,” she said. “He was an SS man… but apparently he could not stand to see what they were doing to us. He was risking his life all the time for what he was doing.”
Mimi lived in New York for 50 years but in 2007, with both Lucienne and her husband having died (in 2000 and 2002 respectively), at the age of 92 she decided to move to Israel to be near her son, who was a professor of sociology at Tel Aviv University.
She had never hidden her role in the Schindler story, she just didn’t make a big thing of it. However, when she told her story to the Jewish Agency for Israel, which had helped her resettle there, she became an instant celebrity and the focus of a great deal of press attention.
Her final years were spent in a Tel Aviv assisted living facility, but even there Mimi kept her mind and body active: a bridge champion, she regularly surfed the net and kept a close eye on the stock exchange.
She is survived by her son, Professor Sasha Weitman, three granddaughters, nine great-grandchildren and two great-great-grandchildren.
Carmen (Mimi) Reinhard: born January 15, 1915. Died April 8, 2022
