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
“The Lost Café Schindler seamlessly melds two riveting histories, the tumultuous story of Jewish life in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the gripping tale of a remarkable family. Meriel Schindler’s account is a powerful personal journey of discovery. This extremely well-researched and beautifully written story is one that will linger long after the last page.”
— Gerald Posner, co-author of Mengele: The Complete Story
“Schindler takes us on a journey that spans 150 years and threads across countries and continents as she uncovers her family’s history. Weaving her relatives’ personal lives into the turbulent frame of European history, Schindler moves back and forth between the public and the private realms. Lovingly written and astutely observed, The Lost Café Schindler is a meditation on loss: personal loss and loss of historic significance.”
— Deborah Dwork, co-author, with Robert Jan Van Pelt, of Flight from the Reich: Refugee Jews, 1933–1946
“This almost unbearably touching book traces an extraordinarily diligent and sensitive process of family rediscovery. Meriel Schindler shows us how short the window of opportunity for Central European Jews was and how lasting an imprint they nonetheless left behind.”
— Peter Hayes, author of Why? Explaining the Holocaust
“Meriel Schindler’s research is prodigious, her writing compelling, and her discoveries large and small reunite her with her far-flung family and with the community that exploited them, impoverished them, persecuted them, and even murdered some of them. Through the history of one family, the entire history of the Holocaust and the struggle to rebuild after the Holocaust unfolds. . . . I was moved to take this journey with her.”
— Michael Berenbaum, professor of Jewish studies and director of the Sigi Ziering Institute
“In tilling the past Meriel has uncovered the most fascinating - and devastating - family history. The Lost Café Schindler is not just a genealogical exploration, though; it sets out the wider experiences of the Jewish population of the Austro-Hungarian empire, weaving in the story of how antisemitism took root.”
— Sunday Times
“An impressively researched account of Jewish life in the Tyrol up to and during the Second World War.”
— Evening Standard
“The scale of the crimes committed during these years can never be fully comprehended, but through tales like these they become relatable and the sense of loss, shared.”
— Press Association
“Compelling and beautifully written... a remarkable and inspiring story that attests to the strength and compassion of the human spirit in overcoming the tragedy of persecution... Fascinating family history.”
— Daily Express
Buy ‘The Lost Café Schindler’
UK edition
US edition