Carmen Mimi Weitman - Reinhard

Mimi Reinhardt drew up lists for German industrialist Oskar Schindler that helped save hundreds of Jews during the Holocaust

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/12/world/europe/mimi-reinhard-dead....

Mimi Reinhard, Who Typed Up Schindler’s List, Dies at 107
As a secretary in a forced-labor camp in World War II, she added her own name to the list of 1,100 Jews who would be spared from the gas chambers.

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Sasha Weitman, the son of Mimi Reinhard, held an old photograph of his mother this week in Israel.
Sasha Weitman, the son of Mimi Reinhard, held an old photograph of his mother this week in Israel.Credit...Ariel Schalit/Associated Press
Katharine Q. Seelye
By Katharine Q. Seelye
April 12, 2022
She wasn’t much of a typist, but she knew shorthand and spoke flawless German. And so Mimi Reinhard, an Austrian Jew who was being held in a Nazi labor camp near Krakow, Poland, during World War II, was given an office job. In that capacity, she would play a small but important role in one of the great heroic stories to emerge from the Holocaust, one in which the Nazis were outwitted and the lives of more than 1,100 Jews, including hers, were saved.

The unlikely hero was Oskar Schindler, the Nazi intelligence officer and war profiteer who ran an enamelware factory near Krakow. A womanizer and heavy drinker who was often bribing the German authorities to have his way, he initially exploited the Jews as a source of cheap labor. But as he witnessed the horrors of the murderous Nazi regime, he risked his life and his fortune to become their protector.

His acts of subterfuge included creating a list of workers whom he deemed “essential” for the Nazi war effort. In reality, these were Jews whom he wanted to spare from all but certain annihilation. The list of “workers” included children, women, a girl dying of cancer, rabbis, friends of his and anyone else whose name he could remember.

His list started with about 400 names. While visiting the Plaszow labor camp, where Mrs. Reinhard worked, he would ask her to type up the list, which kept growing as he and others added more names.

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“It was very informal, and every day someone handed her more names, and the list had to be typed again and again,” her son, Sasha Weitman, said in a phone interview on Tuesday from Tel Aviv. She even put her own name on the list and those of three friends, her son said — not two friends, as has been widely reported.

It was Mrs. Reinhard, who never learned to type beyond using two fingers, who produced the final clean manifest of names that would be presented to Nazi officials. Instead of being shipped to the gas chambers, the people listed were all sent to a Schindler munitions factory in the area of Czechoslovakia then known as the Sudetenland, where their lives were spared.

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Mrs. Reinhard in 2007. She had never learned to type beyond using two fingers, but she produced the manifest of more than 1,100 names that came to be known as Schindler’s list.
Mrs. Reinhard in 2007. She had never learned to type beyond using two fingers, but she produced the manifest of more than 1,100 names that came to be known as Schindler’s list.Credit...James Estrin/The New York Times
Mrs. Reinhard was 107 when she died on Friday in an assisted living facility in Herzliya, north of Tel Aviv, Mr. Weitman said.

The saga of the so-called Schindler Jews — the Schindlerjuden — was not made public until 1982, when the Australian author Thomas Keneally published a meticulously researched novel, “Schindler’s Ark,” which appeared in the United States as “Schindler’s List.” Their story reached an even wider audience in 1993 through a much-acclaimed Steven Spielberg movie, also called “Schindler’s List,” which won seven Academy Awards, including best picture.

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The film did not depict Mrs. Reinhard directly; rather, it showed Schindler hiring every person who auditioned for him, with his business manager, Itzhak Stern, portrayed by Ben Kingsley, performing many secretarial functions.

Mrs. Reinhard was never secretive about her role, but it did not come to light publicly until 2007, when she was 92 and moving to Israel from New York, where she had settled after the war. She told of her Schindler connection to the Jewish Agency for Israel, a nonprofit Israeli group that was helping her resettle. When she landed in Israel, she was mobbed by the news media and became an instant celebrity.

She was born Carmen Koppel on Jan. 15, 1915, in Wiener Neustadt, Austria. Her mother, Frieda (Klein) was a homemaker and her father, Emil Koppel, was a businessman. He was also an opera fan and named her for Bizet’s “Carmen,” but she never liked it. Her father later agreed to change it to Mimi, the heroine of Puccini’s opera “La Bohème.”

Before enrolling at the University of Vienna to study languages and literature, she took stenography so that she could take lecture notes in shorthand.

“I never learned to type,” she told The New York Times in 2007, though on Schindler’s list she categorized herself as a “schreibkraft,” or typist.

By 1936 she had married Joseph Weitmann (the original spelling of his surname) and lived in Krakow, where they had their son, Sasha, who was originally named Alexander. In 1939, when Hitler invaded Poland, they smuggled the toddler to Hungary to live with relatives. She and her husband were confined to Krakow’s Jewish ghetto. Mr. Weitmann was shot to death when he tried to escape, and she was sent to the Plaszow forced-labor camp in 1942.

With the Red Army bearing down on Krakow in 1944, the Germans were in retreat and planned to send many of the remaining Jews to Auschwitz, where they almost certainly faced liquidation. At this point, Schindler stepped in and persuaded the Nazis that his essential workers — of whom Ms. Reinhard was one — should be moved instead to a camp in Czechoslovakia, where they could produce munitions for the German war machine.

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On the way to Czechoslovakia in October 1944, their train took a detour to Auschwitz, where the workers were held for two weeks. Schindler stepped in again, this time threatening to charge the Germans with undermining the war effort if they did not allow the essential workers on his list to leave Auschwitz.

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Oskar Schindler in the 1950s. He initially exploited Jews as a source of cheap labor, but as he witnessed the horrors of the murderous Nazi regime, he risked his life and his fortune to become their protector.
Oskar Schindler in the 1950s. He initially exploited Jews as a source of cheap labor, but as he witnessed the horrors of the murderous Nazi regime, he risked his life and his fortune to become their protector.
Once the workers were in Czechoslovakia, they produced very little of value in his munitions factory, but Schindler submitted falsified reports that claimed otherwise. They were liberated in May 1945.

After the war, Mrs. Reinhard reunited with her son and in 1957 moved to the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where she stayed for 50 years. Her second husband, Albert Reinhard, died in 2002 and their daughter, Lucienne Reinhard, died in 2000. Mrs. Reinhard decided to move to Israel in 2007 to be near her family.

In addition to her son, she is survived by three granddaughters, nine great-grandchildren and two great-great-grandchildren.

Mrs. Reinhard saw both sides of Schindler, who died in 1974.

“He was no angel,” she told the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz in 2007. “We knew that he was an SS man; he was a member of the highest ranks. They went out drinking together at night, but apparently he could not stand to see what they were doing to us.”

And, she added, “I saw a man who was risking his life all the time for what he was doing.”

https://www.timesofisrael.com/oskar-schindlers-jewish-secretary-who...

https://www.i24news.tv/en/news/israel/1649436563-schindler-s-secret...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/apr/08/mimi-reinhardt-woman-...

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimi_Reinhardt

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimi_Reinhardt

Carmen "Mimi" Reinhardt (born Carmen Koppel on January 15, 1915 in Vienna , widowed Weitmann ; died before or on April 8, 2022 in Herzlia , Israel ) was an Austrian Jewish secretary. She worked for the industrialist Oskar Schindler and typed the list of “Schindlerjuden” on a typewriter

Together with her husband, she managed to bring her son and grandmother to Hungary after the Nazi occupation of Poland . Weitmann and her husband were arrested; he was shot in front of the gate of the Kraków ghetto while trying to escape from there. At the time, Weitmann was 30 years old. After the liquidation of the ghetto, she was transported with other Jews to the Plaszow camp . Because she could use shorthand, she was employed in the camp administration. There she also met Oskar Schindler, who she already knew treated his Jewish workers well. Weitmann became Schindler's secretary. After Schindler had killed the SS camp commander Amon Göthhad asked for more workers, she began to write the list of workers on a typewriter so that they could then be transferred to the Brünnlitz subcamp , where Oskar Schindler continued his armaments business

Weitmann found her son in Hungary after the war and moved with him to Tangiers in Morocco . There she met and married her second husband, a hotel manager. In 1957 the family moved to the United States and lived in New York City. She had a daughter with her second husband, but she died of an illness at the age of 49. In 2007, at the age of 92, Mimi Reinhardt moved from New York City to live with her son in Herzliya , Israel , where he had immigrated . She died there at the age of 107 in a retirement home

Reinhardt was employed by industrialist Oskar Schindler during the Second World War. She was in charge of drawing up the lists of Jewish workers from the Kraków ghetto who were recruited to work at Schindler’s factory, saving these individuals from deportation to Nazi death camps.

Reinhardt, also Jewish, worked for Schindler until 1945.

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She was a prisoner at the Płaszów Nazi labour camp in a suburb of Kraków in Poland when in 1944 she was asked to help out with the preparation of a document for the camp commander Amon Göth.

It was a list of people in the camp who would be sent to work in a munitions factory owned by an industrialist called Oskar Schindler, where they would be housed in barracks, away from the extreme cruelty of the camp. The record that Reinhard helped to compile, and typed up, later became known as Schindler’s list.

After the war, Reinhard settled for a time in Morocco and then New York, where she lived for 50 years. She kept in touch with other “Schindler Jews” whose lives had been saved by escaping the Plaszów camp under Schindler’s protection, but did not speak publicly about her earlier life until she moved to Israel in 2007.

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After the German occupation of Poland in 1939, the administration wanted to re-establish Kraków as Krakau, a German city. As Jews, Mimi and her husband were forced to live in the Kraków ghetto, established by the Nazis in 1940. Its inhabitants were allowed to leave and return only with special permits. Josef was killed while trying to escape; Sascha was smuggled to relatives in Hungary.

Mimi survived the final liquidation of the Kraków ghetto in March 1943, when 2,000 Jews were slaughtered, because the Nazis deemed her language and secretarial skills useful. She was transported to the Płaszów forced labour camp. “My mother had insisted that I learn something useful,” she said in an interview in 2007. “In the camp there were not so many people who spoke German and could do shorthand and type, so I was put into the administrative barracks.”

Schindler was a Nazi party member, former intelligence agent and businessman who ran enamelware and later ammunition factories. He mixed with the German elite of Kraków, initially hoping to further his interests, but did not go along with the Nazi treatment of the Poles, the Jews and the other subject peoples. He gained a reputation for being more civilised than others in his treatment of his Jewish workers, and as time went on devoted his resources to protecting them.

He had asked Göth for workers for his factories – he was ready to offer bribes and Göth was willing take them. But in March 1943, Göth’s secretary, Mietek Pemper, sent a letter to Schindler informing him that stricter regulations meant his workers could no longer be allowed to walk the two and a half miles from the camp to his factory.

Schindler won permission to build a new factory further away in Brünnlitz in the Sudetenland (now Brněnec in the Czech Republic) and barracks where the workers could stay. Pemper was then tasked with compiling the list of those who would travel to Brünnlitz. Working with him as an administrator, Mimi helped with the list. “When the Germans came with Schindler’s list of the workers that he wanted to take to Sudetenland it was given to me to note and type up … I put my name and the name of two friends on it to make up the quota.”

On the way to Brünnlitz in 1944, the train carrying Schindler’s workers was diverted to Auschwitz. Death seemed inevitable. But Schindler used his military intelligence contacts to stop the diversion, claiming that these workers were vital for his armaments factory. At its peak, the factory employed about 1,750 workers, of whom 1,000 were Jews. Mimi was put to work in Schindler’s office.

At the war’s end, his workers were liberated, and Mimi was reunited with Sascha. She married Albert Reinhard, a hotel director, and they settled in New York and had a daughter, Lucienne. She met Schindler again just once, on a trip to Vienna in the early 1950s. “We were passing a coffee house where there was a group of people sitting. This large man ran across and hugged and started kissing me, saying: ‘Mimi, Mimi ...’ It was then that I realised that it was Schindler sitting with some of the Jews he had rescued.”

Lucienne died in 2000, and Albert in 2002. Five years later, when planning to move to Israel, where her son was a sociology professor, Mimi was interviewed by members of a Jewish resettlement agency about her wartime experiences. It was only then that her connection to Schindler became more widely known.

She is survived by Sascha and by three granddaughters, nine great-grandchildren and two great-great-grandchildren.