Remembering brave ones
Tomorrow is the birthday of Oskar Schindler of Spielberg’s 1993 film “Schindler’s List.”
After the war his secretary Mimi Reinhard, who’d been held prisoner near Krakow, found her way to New York. Eventually she reunited with son Sasha. Mrs. Reinhard lived for about 50 years in an Upper West Side two-bedroom efficiency.
Soft-spoken, impeccably turned out, hair invariably coifed, she typed a list of 1,200 Jews destined for camps. As depicted in “Schindler’s List,” she saved multiple lives from Nazi extermination.
Mrs. Reinhard quickly closed her door so none could see inside. Guarded, always certain the door stayed locked even when removing trash. Her neighbor was book writer Jim Fragale who moved there in 1970.
Prepping for Mimi’s lectures
Mariah Carey’s now a professor. So far Yale’s not signing her but she’s teaching singing. She’s also saying:
“My opera singer mother attended Juilliard, debuted at Lincoln Center and was taken aback when as a child I sang for her. It’s how I began.”
Yeah, but Clive Davis also helped.
MasterClass.com — $180 a year — also does Ron Howard, David Mamet, Samuel L. Jackson, Bill Clinton.
Maybe one day Kamala? Her subject might be “Who am I?”
B’day blessings
Thank you’s to former President Donald Trump and current Sen. Chuck Schumer for their Happy Birthday calls to me. Never heard from whatever’s our Manhattan boro president who once vowed to improve local businesses. So many stores shut now, he’s probably busy — or hiding.
A ‘Killing’ in her name
Every 20 minutes another Bill O’Reilly best seller. His 11th “Killing” book, “Killing the Killers: The Secret War Against Terrorists,” is out Tuesday, May 3.
St. Martin’s first print — 500,000 copies — is timed to the anniversary of 2004’s horrific Abu Ghraib story. The torture of Islamic terrorists triggered intense reaction.
The book documents how ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi would not have been tracked and killed in 2019 by American special forces without this use of “enhanced interrogation.” Baghdadi was responsible for murdering Americans including young Arizona relief worker Kayla Mueller whom he personally tortured and raped.
O’Reilly asks: If Kayla were your daughter would you object to tough interrogation in order to bring al-Baghdadi to justice?
This “Killing” book is chilling.
Send in the clones
Surgeon Dr. Martin Lee Fox talked of Streisand cloning her dog for $250K. Hampton Sheet publisher Joan Jedell: “If really possible, why waste it on a pooch?” Result? The doc’s first-time novel “Raising Father” is about a magnate having himself cloned.
Forget replicating Biden. Or his family.
At East 60th’s Canaletto restaurant, another diner celebrating his own nativity told me: “Friends didn’t know what to get me. I suggested, ‘How about gift-wrapping a saloon?’ ”
Only in New York, kids, only in New York.