Where Light and Shadow Meet: A Memoir Book

In spare, eloquent prose, Emilie Schindler tells the story of the woman Steven Spielberg left in the shadows of Schindler's List. The woman who married Oskar Schindler tells the true story of their life together, what they did to save the Jews in their factories, and how this led to "Schindler's list." Emilie Schindler does not consider herself or her husband to have been heroes. As she writes in this moving memoir, "We only did what we had to." Born in Bohemia, she married Oskar Schindler in 1928, and moved from her beloved countryside to the city. It soon became clear that her marriage would have both its passions and its betrayals. Yet, she stayed with Oskar despite his infidelities, through his growing involvement with the Nazis, working for counterintelligence with him. She first, then he later, came to realize the costs of the Nazi takeover and became witnesses to its terrors. Their inward allegiance changed even as they needed to maintain patriotic appearances and close affiliations with the Nazis in power. At their two factories, saving the Jews became paramount. Emilie risked imprisonment for her nursing of their sick Jewish factory workers and her activities in the black market to feed them. Her stubbornness kept her fighting for food, even daring to ask a wealthy mill owner's wife to give them grain to feed her starving workers. This is the story of a woman's daily acts of bravery during Hitler's reign and how it mattered.