The film did not directly portray Ms. Reinhard; rather, it showed that Schindler hired anyone to audition for him, with his business manager, Itzhak Stern, played by Ben Kingsley, filling many secretarial roles.
Ms. Reinhard was never secretive about her role, but it was not publicly revealed until 2007, when she was 92 and moved from New York to Israel, where she had settled after the war. She talked about her connection as Schindler with the Jewish Agency for Israel, an Israeli nonprofit that helped her resettle. When she landed in Israel, she was harassed by the news media and became an instant celebrity.
She was born Carmen Koppel on January 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 “Carmen” after Bizet’s, 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 shorthand so that she could take shorthand notes.
“I never learned to type,” she told DailyExpertNews in 2007, although she labeled herself on Schindler’s list as a “schreibkraft,” or typist.
In 1936, she was married to Joseph Weitmann (the original spelling of his surname) and lived in Kraków, 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 imprisoned in Krakow’s Jewish ghetto. Mr. Weitmann was shot dead while trying to escape, and she was sent to Plaszow Labor Camp in 1942.
As the Red Army attacked Krakow in 1944, the Germans withdrew and planned to send many of the remaining Jews to Auschwitz, where they would almost certainly be liquidated. At this point, Schindler intervened and convinced the Nazis that his essential workers—one of whom was Mrs. Reinhard—should instead be transferred to a camp in Czechoslovakia, where they could produce ammunition for the German war machine.
