An extraordinary memoir of a Jewish family spanning two world wars and its flight from Nazi-occupied Austria. Meriel Schindler spent her adult life trying to keep her father, Kurt, at bay. But when he died in 2017, he left behind piles of Nazi-era documents related to her family’s fate in Innsbruck, Austria, and a treasure trove of family albums reaching back to before World War I. Meriel was forced to confront not only their fractured relationship, but also the truth behind their family history. The Lost Café Schindler re-creates the journey of an extraordinary family, whose relatives included the Jewish doctor who treated Hitler’s mother when she was dying of breast cancer; the Kafka family; and Alma Schindler, the wife of Gustav Mahler. The narrative centers around the Café Schindler, the social hub of Innsbruck. Famous for its pastries, home-distilled liquors, live entertainment, and hospitality, the restaurant attracted Austrians from all walks of life. But as conditions became untenable for Jews in Austria during the Nazi era, the Schindlers were forced to leave, and their café was expropriated. Meriel reconstructs the color and vibrancy of life in prewar Innsbruck against the majestic backdrop of the Austrian Alps, as well as the creeping menace and, finally, terror of the Nazi occupation. Ultimately, The Lost Café Schindler is a story of tragic loss―several relatives disappeared in Terezín and Auschwitz―but also one of reclamation and reconciliation. Beautifully written, it is an unforgettable portrait of an era and a testament to the pull of family history on future generations.
Goodread‘s description of The Lost Cafe Schindler: One Family, Two Wars, and the Search for Truth is effusive in its praise, definitely more praise than expected after I finished reading the book. Well written? Yes. Interesting? Yes. Extensively researched? Yes. Standing above and beyond any one of thousands of family histories written by descendants of victims and perpetrators on either side? Probably not. It’s not a book I’ll likely read again (especially since I’ll be adding it to the Little Free Library in front of my house).
Unfortunately, the story arc is familiar to Jews in Europe before and during World War II: assets stolen, arbitrary incarceration, successful and unsuccessful attempts to acquire exit visas to leave, deportations and murder at concentration camps, attempts by survivors for compensation delayed/deferred by those who want to forget and move on. The truly unique part was the Jewish doctor who received special dispensation from Hitler and the Nazis for his care of Hitler’s mother Klara. A personal journey for the author; for me, meh.
What did interest me were the mentions of different archives the author used during the course of investigating her family’s history.
At the end of the First World War, all the Austro-Hungarian records were send back for safekeeping to the empire’s nations, with no inkling that a second war would cause the destruction of many of them….
… The archivist at the Vienna War Archives [Kriegsarchiv] looks utterly baffled when I ask him if there are records for each individual company. Slightly condescendingly, he reminds me that millions fought on the Southern Front. [p90]
I am in the [Innsbruck] City Archives, this time tracking down images of the Innsbruck institutions that my grandfather Hugo and great-uncle Erich created. I type into the computer’s search engine: ‘Cafe Schindler’. Forty hits. Surprised at the wealth of pictures that pop up, I enjoy spending the next hour or so opening one after the other…. [p119]
In fact, Hugo and Eric – whose names I could not find in the local land registry – must have leased No. 29 from Bauer & Schwartz, who owned the building. [p122]
In the City Archives I found a beautiful gouache sketch done for the Cafe Schindler, in bright blue and cream. …
I asked for the original drawings to be brought to me out of storage. It arrived half an hour later, wrapped in tissue paper. I unwrapped it carefully, feeling an intense pleasure as I hed it in my hands ….
The City Archives also contained an original menu from the Cafe Schindler, with the prices for ‘3.30 in the afternoon’ given in Kronen: from those details, it was clear that the menu was printed before December 1924, the date on which the currency was switched from Kronen into Schillings. [pp129-130]
When I look through the local newspapers for Spring 1938, I am surprised at how quickly in February the advertisements appear for the sale of swastika flags and badges. [p174]
The Gestapo told Lilli they were ‘confiscating’ the cards and gave her a receipt, a worn copy of which would survive, eventually to be lodged by my cousin John at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. [p189]
The Linz City Archives hold the original 1938 lists of the city’s Jewish inhabitants, which the archivist hands me in a slim cardboard folder. The pages are from a ledger, bearing thin blue lines to mark out columns. The typist has used the first two columns for the details of each entrant: the address appears first, and slightly indented below are the name, title, and year of birth. In a neighbouring column is a number so that the bureaucrats can keep an accurate tally of the remaining Jews. [p204]
I knew that the Nazis liked to have an official reason for arresting Jews, and I wondered what their pretext was for Hugo’s arrest. I visited the County Archives in search of files for a criminal case against him. In the state prosecutor’s handwritten list of names of people charged in 1938 with crimes in the Tyrol, I found an entry for both Hugo and my great-uncle Erich: Bestechung – ‘bribery’. [p211]
I have grown up knowing that out of all my father’s memories from the Anschluss year of 1938, there was one that was so vivd, and so traumatic, that it became pivotal to his life …. The night in question was 9-10 November 1938, but the world came to know it better as Kristallnacht, ‘crystal night’. …
In order to understannd exactly what happened and what he saw, I applied to the Innsbruck County Archives for the witness evidence from 1945-6 when the perpetrators finally faced justice …. Now it has arrived in London, in a large white envelope. [p233]
Rather than just reference the source material in the bibliography, again and again she talks about her investigative process, finding different clues from different archives or museums or governmental records or whatever.
I find this amazing and exciting: I assumed that records would have been destroyed or otherwise lost as a side effect of the war. Even though Austria was technically part of the Third Reich during the war, perhaps the damage wasn’t on par with Berlin, perhaps the chaos was more contained. Granted, Germans love their record keeping and there’s plenty existing even today, but Austria was, in many respects, an occupied country – the original victims – so I would not have been surprised if Germany plundered the country severely and rid Austria of anything controversial.
And yet the records still exist. The Linz City Archives goes back centuries. I should have been an archivist ….
