VARIOUS: Oskar Schindler's secretary has finally emmigrated to Israel to join her family in the Jewish state

Record ID: 221894

  • Title: VARIOUS: Oskar Schindler's secretary has finally emmigrated to Israel to join her family in the Jewish state
  • Date: 7th December 2007
  • Summary: (BN13) TEL AVIV, ISRAEL (DECEMBER 06, 2007) (REUTERS) (SOUNDBITE) (English) MIMI REINHARD, OSKAR SCHINDLER'S SECRETARY, SAYING: "He didn't treat us as inferior people, he treated us like as if we were equivelant to him and at that time, we were really very...we had very low self esteem".
  • Embargoed: 22nd December 2007 12:00
  • Keywords:
  • Topics: History
  • Reuters ID: LVACH7NXF1NQUR9304A72NS0RKI7
  • Story Text: Oskar Schindler's secretary has finally emmigrated to Israel to join her family in the Jewish state. Many in Israel may owe their lives to 92-year old Mimi Reinhard who typed the list of names of Jews that German businessman Schindler mananged to save from Nazi death camps.
    Looking out the window at the sandy beach strip from her Tel Aviv hotel, 92-year old Mimi Reinhard recalled the "charming" character of her employer, German businessman Oskar Schindler.

    "He was a womanizer, he was a drinker - a heavy drinker - I mean he was no angel but he has a heart of gold," said Reinhard, a well groomed elder woman.

    "He didn't treat us as inferior people, he treated us like as if we were equivelant to him and at that time, we were really very...we had very low self esteem".
    Reinhard approached the Jewish Agency for Israel, a semi-official government body, to assist her in reuniting with her family in the Jewish state, decades after escaping Poland in World War Two.
    When she applied for immigration, the details of her life-changing occupation in Poland became apparent. Reinhard worked as Schindler's secretary in his factory and had typed up the famed list of 1,200 Jews who were consequently saved from being transferred to death camps.
    Corrupting Nazis with bribes, donations, gifts and blackmail between 1942 and 1944, Schindler fought to keep Jews, many of them too ill to work, at his plant in Krakow rather than see them shipped to death camps.

    "He made alot of money during the war, I don't know in what way and he spent it all in bribing Germans, SS, Gestapos just bribing them to let us go...not to kill us and he lost all his money. He survived...he didn't have a penny to his soul," said Reinhard.
    As the Red army advanced, forcing the Germans to pull out of Poland, killing as many Jews as they could on the way, Schindler drew up his now famous list of some 1,200 men and women he said he needed to take with him to set up a new factory further west.

    "I was given the list that he perjured for the people who worked for him. He gave us the list of those people and he requested more. He said he needs more workers when he is going to transfer his factory," said Reinhard. "I put my name on it and I put names of my friends on it".
    The original Schindler archive, discovered last year in the attic of a house belonging to a couple who befriended him and several portraits and pictures of the righteous gentile, are now at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Museum in Jerusalem.
    The story of Schindler's list became widely known after famed movie director Steven Spielberg's 1994 oscar-winning film ''Schindler's list'' hit movie screens across the globe.
    Schindler, who died in poverty in Germany in 1974 at the age of 66, said he spent 375,000 reichsmarks to bribe Nazis and a further 1.56 million went on housing and feeding the Jews in his factory.
    Though all her friends from the factory passed away, Reinhard says she is happy to finally immigrate to the Jewish state to reunite with her family.
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