We are quickly losing the last of the people who fought against some of the greatest evil that humanity has ever seen.
Mimi Reinhard, a secretary in Oskar Schindler's office who typed up the list of Jews he saved from extermination by Nazi Germany, has died in Israel at the age of 107.
Reinhard died early Friday and was laid to rest Sunday in Herzliya, near Tel Aviv, her son Sasha Weitman confirmed.
She was one of 1,200 Jews saved by German businessman Schindler after he bribed Nazi authorities to let him keep them as workers in his factories. The account was made into the acclaimed 1993 film "Schindler's List" by director Steven Spielberg.
That epic film, starring Liam Neeson as Schindler and Ralph Fiennes as perhaps one of the most vile villains in cinema history, is one of the most powerful period pieces about WWII and the Holocaust that has ever been made. It is near impossible to watch that movie without feeling the gravity of the horrors the Nazis committed in the name of progress.
Reinhard was born Carmen Koppel in Vienna, Austria, in 1915, and moved to Krakow, Poland, before the outbreak of World War II. After Nazi Germany invaded Poland in 1939, she was confined to the Krakow ghetto before being sent to the nearby Plaszow concentration camp in 1942.
Reinhard's knowledge of shorthand got her work in the camp's administrative office, where, two years later, she was ordered to type up the handwritten list of Jews that were to be transferred to Schindler's ammunition factory.
"I didn't know it was such an important thing, that list," she told an interviewer with Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, in 2008. "First of all, I got the list of those who were with Schindler already in Krakow, in his factory. I had to put them on the list." Later she put her own name, and the names of two friends.
Reinhard moved to the U.S. after the war, where she lived until 2007 when she moved to Israel.
Weitman, Reinhard's son, said that after coming to Israel she "became a kind of a celebrity" because of the Schindler's List film's popularity, something he said "pumped another 15 years into her life."
There are at least 8,500 descendants of the 1,200 Jews that Schindler rescued during the Holocaust. That number will only continue to increase in future generations.
Talk about a legacy!
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