The woman who drew up Oskar Schindler’s lists and helped save hundreds of Jews during the Holocaust in World War II has died aged 107.
Mimi Reinhardt was Schindler’s secretary and drew up the lists of Jewish workers in the Polish city of Krakow to work in the factory of her German industrialist boss.
This was a highly risky enterprise but is estimated to have saved approximately 1,300 Jewish workers from deportation and almost certain death in Nazi concentration camps.
Reinhardt’s granddaughter Nina wrote in a message to relatives: “My grandmother, so dear and so unique, passed away at the age of 107. Rest in peace.”
The Guardian reports that, after the end of the war, Reinhardt lived in New York before moving to Israel in 2007 to live with her son. She spent her last years at a nursing home north of Tel Aviv.
When Schindler died in 1974, he was named by Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust museum as a member of the “Righteous Among the Nations”, an honour for non-Jews who tried to save Jews from Nazi extermination. He is buried on the Mount of Olives just outside Jerusalem.
His selflessly courageous story was told in Thomas Keneally’s bestselling 1982 novel Schindler’s Ark and in the 1993 Oscar-winning screen adaptation by Steven Spielberg, Schindler’s List.
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