About Meriel
Meriel Schindler spent the first fifteen years of her life growing up in central London before suddenly being moved to a convent school in provincial Austria.
Five years later she moved back to the UK to study French and German at university and is now an employment lawyer, partner and head of a team at Withers LLP, a law firm. Meriel is also a trustee of the writing charity Arvon.
Meriel is married to husband Jeremy and has three grown-up children.
The Lost Café Schindler is Meriel’s first book.
UK edition (out now)
Cover design: Sarah Christie, Hodder & Stoughton
Image courtesy of Niko Hofinger
US edition (12th October 2021)
Cover design: Jason Ramirez, W. W. Norton Company
Top images: courtesy of author; bottom image: Ullstein Bild Dtl. / Getty Images
The Lost Café Schindler
Kurt Schindler was an impossible man. His daughter Meriel spent her life trying to keep him at bay. Kurt had made extravagant claims about their family history. Were they really related to Franz Kafka and Oskar Schindler, of Schindler's List fame? Or Hitler's Jewish doctor - Dr. Bloch? What really happened on Kristallnacht, the night that Nazis beat Kurt's father half to death?
When Kurt died in 2017, Meriel felt compelled to resolve her mixed feelings about him, and to solve the mysteries he had left behind.
Meriel pieced together an extraordinary story taking in two centuries, two world wars and a family business: the famous Café Schindler. Launched in 1922 as an antidote to the horrors of the First World War, this grand café became the whirling social centre of Innsbruck. And then the Nazis arrived.
Through the story of the Café Schindler, this moving book weaves together memoir, family history and an untold story of the Jews of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It explores the restorative power of writing, and offers readers a profound reflection on memory, truth, trauma and the importance of cake.
Praise for ‘The Lost Café Schindler’
“An extraordinary story — so cadenced and so moving.”
— Edmund de Waal, author of The Hare with Amber Eyes
“An extraordinary and compelling book of reckonings — a journey across a long, complex, and deeply painful arc of history, grippingly told — a wonderful melding of the personal and the political, the family and the historical.”
— Philippe Sands, author of East West Street and The Ratline
“Rigorously researched, The Lost Café Schindler successfully weaves together a compelling and at times deeply moving memoir and family history that also chronicles the wider story of the Jews of the Austro-Hungarian Empire... It distinguishes itself through its combination of mystery and reconciliation.”
— The Times T2
Buy ‘The Lost Café Schindler’
UK edition
US edition