Schindler's secretary moves to Israel at 92
'I feel at home,' says Mimi Reinhardt upon landing in Tel Aviv over 60 years after she helped save hundreds of Polish Jews during Holocaust. Reinhardt joins her son, who has lived in Israel since the mid-70's
The 92-year-old secretary of Oskar Schindler, a German industrialist who saved the lives of hundreds of Jews during the Nazi Holocaust, arrived in Israel on Monday to take up citizenship.
"I feel at home," Mimi Reinhardt told reporters as she got off the plane at Ben Gurion airport outside Tel Aviv.
Reinhardt was in charge of drawing up the lists of Jewish workers from the ghetto of the Polish city of Krakow who were recruited to work at Schindler's factory, saving them from deportation to the death camps.
Her only son, Sacha Weitman, 68, who moved to Israel in 1974 and is now a sociology professor at Tel Aviv University, was overjoyed at her decision to leave her longtime home in New York.
"Our family is finally reunited," he said, as his mother prepared to settle in to a retirement home in the upscale Tel Aviv suburb of Herzliya Pituach.
Austrian-born Reinhardt was recruited by Schindler himself as his secretary and continued to work for him until 1945.
Schindler, who died in 1974, was named by Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust museum as a member of the "Righteous of the Nations" for having saved the lives of some 1,300 Jews at considerable risk to his own life.
Schindler's endeavors grabbed the limelight when film director Steven Spielberg made "Schindler's List" which won seven Oscar awards as well as many other international prizes.
Reinhardt has met Spielberg but acknowledged that she found it difficult to watch his film.
"I was invited to the New York premiere but I had to walk out before the screening - it was too hard for me," she recalled.
