As a young woman, longtime Castro Valley resident Mathilde Apelt Schmidt was interned in a prisoner of war camp.

She survived that time during World War II and made her way to America in 1953. The energetic 85-year-old tells all in her recently self-published memoir, My Life on Two Continents.

She has been working on the book for the past twelve years, she says, drawing from her own memory, as well as letters and notes, plus the recollections of her three sisters. “This was something I wanted to accomplish before I die,” she notes, “because I have had a long and colorful life.

“The first third of it was spent growing up in Germany and watching Hitler rise to power. That was very interesting, to say the least. But when I came to America to be with my oldest sister, I fulfilled the dream of my lifetime.”

Mathilde’s life journey took her from Ohio, where she lived with her sister for a few months, to working the “cotton trail” in the South.

Eventually, she found herself at the home of a college friend from Germany in California. She met and married her friend’s brother, Leo Schmidt, and had four children with him.

They lived in Lodi for a decade, and then moved to Castro Valley in the Bay Area in 1963. She has lived here ever since working as teacher, substitute teacher, and finally, as a special-education teacher. She also taught evening Adult school for more than twenty years.

She is now long retired, and says that traveling is one of her passions—she and her husband have enjoyed traveling to Europe to visit her family and friends.

Although she has set down her life in the book, she is not resting just yet. She is already hard at work on her second book, the time a work of fiction titled The Lake Dwellers. It is a book about storytellers and their tales.

And she is not bitter about the bad experiences in life. “The bottom line is that you have to keep a positive outlook; everyone will have troubles, and it’s what you do and how you move forward that is important.”

“And it’s very important to keep busy,” she says.