Mimi Reinhardt first met the industrialist Oskar Schindler in the Plaszow camp.

Schindler had an enamel factory in the neighboring city of Kraków, which also produced ammunition parts.

It was therefore a "wartime" company, and Schindler was allowed to request forced laborers from the SS.

It was 1944, the Red Army was advancing on Kraków, the Wehrmacht was retreating.

Schindler wanted to move its factory west.

And he managed to take the Jewish forced laborers with him.

He gave the Plaszow camp commandant a list of the names of more than a thousand Jews that he needed for his factory.

"Schindler's List" saved them from the gas chambers of Auschwitz, where most of the other Jews from Plaszow were deported.

Mimi Reinhardt typed the list.

Jochen Stahnke

Political correspondent in Berlin.

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She added the names of friends and her own married names until Schindler's quota negotiated with the SS was fulfilled: "Weitmann, Carmen, January 15, 1915, typist" is number 279 on the list.

The rescue almost went awry when she and the other people on the list were initially taken to Auschwitz until Schindler was able to successfully negotiate their onward transport.

They had to stay in Auschwitz for two weeks.

Mimi Reinhardt later compared the time to Dante's "Inferno".

Shorthand "is the only practical skill I've studied in my life," Mimi Reinhardt told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz many decades later.

Only at the age of 92 did Mimi Reinhardt publicly talk about this time.

That was in New York in 2007, shortly before she emigrated to Israel.

She hadn't been able to bring herself to premiere the Steven Spielberg film "Schindler's List" in the early 1990s.

Typed with two fingers

She was not at all a fast typist.

She typed the list into the machine with two fingers.

She had learned shorthand at the request of her Viennese parents, who were retail salespeople, and who had urged her to learn something practical.

Shorthand helped her to take notes of the lectures at the University of Vienna.

She studied languages ​​and literature.

In Vienna she met her first husband, with whom she soon moved to Kraków.

A few weeks before the start of the war in 1939, her son Sascha was born there.

When the Wehrmacht occupied Kraków, they were able to bring Sascha to relatives in Hungary and save him.

But her husband was shot while attempting to escape from the Kraków ghetto, and she herself was deported to Plaszow in 1942.

There the SS used her as a typist in the camp administration because of her knowledge of German and shorthand.

After the war she married again.

She moved to New York with her second husband and was to spend half a century there.

Her son emigrated to Israel in 1974: Sascha Weitmann taught as a professor of sociology at Tel Aviv University.

When Mimi Reinhardt's second husband died and her physical strength dwindled, Sascha Weitmann finally took her to a nursing home in Herzliya, a neighboring city of Tel Aviv, in 2007.

There she lived until the age of 107.

Mimi Reinhardt died on Friday and was buried in Herzlija on Sunday.