Mimi Reinhardt, who drew up lists for German industrialist Oskar Schindler that helped save hundreds of Jews during the Holocaust, has died aged 107, her family said Friday.
As Schindler’s secretary, Reinhardt was in charge of compiling names of Jewish workers from the ghetto of the Polish city of Krakow to work at his factory, saving them from deportation to Nazi regime’s 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 worked for Schindler’s factory until 1945. After the end of the war, she moved to New York before moving to Israel in 2007 to live with her son, Sacha Weitman, who was then a professor of sociology at Tel Aviv University. She spent her last years at a nursing home north of Tel Aviv.
"I feel at home," she told reporters when she landed in Israel.
Schindler, who died in 1974, was named by Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust museum as a member of the "Righteous Among the Nations" – an honor for non-Jews who tried to save Jews from Nazi extermination. The lists, which Reinhardt compiled for him, helped save the lives of some 1,300 Jews at considerable risk to his own life.
Schindler's 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.
Israeli photographer Gideon Markowicz, who met Reinhardt as part of a project dedicated to Holocaust survivors, spoke of 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 told Agence France-Presse (AFP) on Friday.
