[This is the conclusion to
my small tribute to Tom Stoppard, the wonderful British playwright who died on
29 November at the age of 88. If you
haven’t read Part 1 of “Tom
Stoppard Remembered,” published on 3
December, I recommend that you turn back and do so now before reading Part 2, below.
[This installment consists
of just one piece of writing, an autobiographical essay Stoppard wrote in 1999
about his discovery of his Jewish roots, kept hidden from him until he was in
his 50’s. As you’ll read, it had a profound
effect on him, and eventually led to his writing his last play, Leopoldstadt, in 2020.]
“TOM STOPPARD: ON
TURNING OUT TO BE JEWISH”
["On Turning Out to Be
Jewish" is the title of a widely-read autobiographical essay originally
written by Tom Stoppard and published in the inaugural September 1999 issue (vol.
1, no. 1) of Tina Brown's Talk magazine
(which ceased publication in February 2002). In the essay, Stoppard
recounts his surprise discovery through contact with distant Czech relatives in
the mid-1990s that he and his parents were fully Jewish, a fact that had been
suppressed by his family after they fled Czechoslovakia during the Nazi era.
[The playwright’s mother
had avoided discussing the family’s Jewish roots, only confirming details after
Stoppard began asking more questions following her death at 85 in October 1996. Stoppard, who was born Tomáš Sträussler in
1937 in Zlín, Czechoslovakia, learned that all four of his grandparents were
Jewish and had perished in Nazi concentration camps, including Auschwitz and
Terezín.
[Stoppard describes his
prior self-professed “almost willful purblindness” about his heritage and his
regret for not questioning his mother further during her lifetime. He wrote of feeling “no more Jewish than I
felt Czech” after the revelation, but the discovery prompted him to reckon with
his family's history, which later inspired his play Leopoldstadt, his final work for the stage,
which explores Jewish assimilation, loss, and identity.
[I haven’t had time since I put together this tribute to Stoppard to get to a library that might have a
paper or microfilm copy of the issue of Talk with the dramatist’s essay, and
there’s apparently no online version. This
publication from The Huntington, the
program guide and occasional online outlet of the Huntington Theatre Company
(Boston, Massachusetts), appears to be a republication of Stoppard’s essay.
[The Huntington’s “Tom Stoppard: On Turning Out to be
Jewish” was posted on 11 September 2024, 25 years after the Talk publication. The essay was republished in support of the Huntington
Theatre Company’s staging of Leopoldstadt, Stoppard’s last play which was inspired
by his discovery of his lost heritage.
The production ran ftrom 12 September to 13 October 2024 and was produced
in association with Washington, D.C.’s Shakespeare Theatre Company (which ran
the show from 30 November to 29 December 2024).
[On 22 October 2022, I
posted a collection of articles on and reviews of Leopoldstadt on Rick On Theater as “Tom
Stoppard & Leopoldstadt.” On 26 December 2022, I published “Tom
Stoppard” by my friend Kirk Woodward, accompanied by a report by Dick
Brennan of WCBS-TV, who talked about the play and the playwright with Brandon
Uranowitz, the 2023 Tony-winner for the Best Performance by an Actor in a
Featured Role in a Play for his work in the Broadway production of Leopoldstadt.]
Here, now – here and now in this room in the only country
that is my country and among books in the only language I can remember speaking
– the English writer who is myself considers the Czech family Beck in 1908.
There are seven of them. Dressed up for the studio photographer: Rudolf and
Regina, my maternal grandparents: my future aunties Wilma, Berta, Anny, and
Irma: and their little brother Ota in his sailor top. They stare back across 90
years of war and peace and war and peace. This is a photograph we have seen
countless times, each time different, the family group who never made it
together through the Holocaust.
My table is covered with old photographs newly acquired from
Wilma’s son and from Berta’s grandson. Here are the Beck children again, a few
years older, in front of the same backdrop. There is a fifth girl now. The new
sister, from her scuffed boots to her clapped-on bonnet, is a heartbreaker. She
is pushing palms-down with her clasped hands as though literally holding
herself still. She is trying not to smile and not quite succeeding. This is my
mother, Martha, in 1914, age three.
Privately, I always hesitate over the word Holocaust – a headline
writer’s word for an act too actual for trope, too vast and monstrous for
summation. But until quite recently it didn’t seem to be my place to jib at
it.
When my mother was in her sixties I asked her to write down
as much as she could remember about her life before I could remember it for
myself. I sent her a leatherbound notebook as an incentive, which was a
misjudgment. She sent it back years later, unmarked (“It seems a waste”), and
instead filled a few pages in a cheap exercise book.
The move to England, she wrote, had been
so sudden, unplanned, an[d] drastic that I – perhaps subconsciously –
decided the only thing to make it possible to live and truly settle down (I
mean the three of us [Stoppard seems to be referring to his older brother
Petr, who later became Peter]) was to draw a blind over my past life and
start so to speak from scratch. Whether this was realistic or possible I don’t
know. I mean whether it was the right thing to do.
Her little memoir does not raise the blind very far. My
mother wrote it when she was 70 in 1981, which happened to be the year Ota, the
boy in the sailor top, died. There is no mention of this brother, and I did not
learn of his existence until later. As to the names or number of her sisters,
or what happened to them, the memoir is equally uninformative. She writes about
family life before and after her marriage and about my father. She describes
her parents and my father’s parents but does not say when or where or how they
died. The word Jew or Jewish does not occur.
~
When I was born, in July 1937 in Zlin, a small town in
Moravia, Czechoslovakia, my name was Tomas Straussler – Tomik to my mother and
father. We left Czechoslovakia – my parents, my brother Petr, and I – when the
German army moved in [16 March 1938]. By the time I understood that there was a
connection between these two events I was an English schoolboy, Stoppard Two at
prep school (Peter being Stoppard One), Tommy at home.
[Of the three historical regions of what became Czechoslovakia in 1918 (after World War I, when the Austro-Hungarian Empire was dissolved), Moravia is the second largest and was in the middle of the newly formed nation. (The other two historical regions are Bohemia and Czech Silesia [so named because parts of Silesia are in Poland and Germany].) As a province, it was named Moravia-Silesia; it now forms the eastern end of the Czech Republic, though it is no longer a province (země or ‘land’). It has a significant German-speaking population.
[Stoppard’s family name at
birth was actually Sträussler (pronounced stroy-sler)
because they were Czechs of German descent. His father’s given name was Eugen (oy-ghen), the German form of Eugene,
not Evžen (ev-zhen), the Czech
name.]
So we were Jewish? My mother would give a little frown and
go “Tsk!” in her way and say, “Oh, if anyone had a Jewish grandparent at that
time . . .”
I believe I understand her “Tsk!” It was less to do with
denial than irritation. To ask the question was to accept the estimation put on
it not by her but by the Germans. She had no sense of racial identity and no
religious beliefs. Of course there were Jews in Zlin, she said, but they were
proper Jews who wore black hats and went to the synagogue and the rest of it,
Jews who were Jewish.
During the last 18 months of her life – I did not know this
then – my mother corresponded with a researcher in Zlin, Dr. Emil Máčel [chronicler
of Jewish life in Zlín], who was trying to put together the almost forgotten
story of the Bata Jews. Zlin was the world headquarters of the Bata shoe
company, and my father was a doctor at the company hospital. “In
Czechoslovakia,” my mother wrote (in Czech) to Emil, “there were so many mixed
marriages that the matter lost importance. In my family the ratio was about
50-50. Three nephews and one niece lived in Bohemia, three generations in a
modest Catholic environment.”
[At the time the Sträusslers lived in Czechoslovakia, Bohemia was the westernmost province (země or ‘land’) of the country. Formerly a sovereign principality, it was the largest and most populous province of Czechoslovakia; the national capital, Prague, was in Bohemia. It has a large and influential German-speaking minority. (In today’s Czech Republic [Czechia], Bohemia is no longer a separate administrative district, but it remains a significant historical region.]
As I understand it, if l do, “being Jewish” didn’t figure in
her life until it disrupted it, and then it set her on a course of
displacement, chaos, bereavement, and – finally – sanctuary in a foreign
country, England, thankful at least that her boys were now safe. Hitler made
her Jewish in 1939. By the spring, comfortably before the European war started,
all that was behind her, literally: We embarked at Genoa [Italy] for Singapore [a
British colony until the Japanese invasion in 1942], in good time for the
Japanese onslaught.
For the Japanese were a different story. They killed my
father and did their best to sink the ship that got the rest of us to India,
but it wasn’t personal, we weren’t on a list, it was simply the war and being
in the wrong place at the wrong time.
My mother remarried in India in November 1945 and died in
Devon in the west of England in October 1996, age 85, of cancer. The last words
she spoke – in the front passenger seat of my car when we were taking her to
the hospital – were (crossly), “And Tom hasn’t got any sweets!” She persisted
in the idea that sweets in the car were a surety against the likelihood of my
falling asleep at the wheel on my journeys back to London. I was 59.
~
My stepfather, formerly Major Kenneth Stoppard of the
British army in India, believed with Cecil Rhodes [1853-1902; British mining
magnate and Prime Minister of the Cape Colony (roughly half of British South
Africa’s land area centered on Cape Town), 1890-96] that to be born an
Englishman was to have drawn first prize in the lottery of life, and I doubt
that even Rhodes, the Empire builder who lent his name to Rhodesia, believed it
as utterly as Ken. Ken’s utopia would have been populated by landed gentry, honest
yeomen, and Gurkhas [members of the dominant ethnic group in Nepal]. When my
mother had just died, the words that came to him were “She was a very gallant
lady,” a formulation dating from Kipling’s hill stations and the officers’
mess. He was already ill himself, and he died nine months later, by which time
his Raj-nurtured sense of superiority over what [Rudyard] Kipling [1865-1936;
English journalist, writer, and poet] called the lesser breeds had long since
festered into a bile against Jews, blacks, Irish, Yanks, foreigners in general,
and the urban working class. (Homosexuals were hardly mentioned because they
were hardly mentionable.) He was an unlikely personality to have married a
Czechoslovakian Jewess with two children. But marry her he did, and brought us
to England four years to the day after we landed in Bombay. “Don’t you
realize,” he once reproached me when, at the age of nine, I innocently referred
to my “real father,” “don’t you realize that I made you British?”
Ken was one of the very few Englishmen my mother had known
before she got here, so perhaps it’s not surprising that she thought Peter and
I would be given a hard time at school and in English life if we were to start
off as foreign Jews. As it turned out she was quite wrong, at least about the
schools we went to.
She herself remained engagingly foreign, keeping her accent
and making us plum dumplings powdered with cinnamon and delicious jam-filled
buns called buchti that often found their way into the parcels
of “tuck” [British slang, mostly among children, for ‘snack food’] she sent to
us at school. Her tuck parcels were misshapen triple-wrapped double-trussed
Kellogg’s boxes overstuffed with things she thought were good for you, like
glucose tablets and dried fruit, to offset the quantity of things that were
definitely not.
She had a third son, Richard, in 1949, and a daughter,
Fiona, in 1955. Her concern for the good health of her children on the one hand
and of the rest of mankind on the other weighed about equal, even when we were
grown up with children of our own.
When we came to visit, she’d see us off by pushing bags of
toffees and homemade rock cakes [small traditional British dried-fruit-filled
cake or bun with a rough, uneven surface that resembles a rock] and the
occasional scarf, pair of gloves, or piece of crockery at us, at the last
moment rushing back into the house for a bag of prunes but alas forgetting the
fruitcake, which she would lament when we phoned in to report that we’d
survived the journey home.
But for every homemade cake and knickknack she gave out, my
mother held back much more, whole histories.
~
Some things I knew. Auntie Irma had married and gone to live
in Argentina well before the war. The two sisters wrote to each other regularly
until Irma died in 1995. I remember her. In 1948 or thereabouts, Irma came over
to visit us. She and my mother spoke rapid emotional Czech while Peter and I
bore up under Irma’s tears and kisses.
Nor was it any secret that we had family in Czechoslovakia.
Letters in Czech, photographs, and Christmas cards were occasionally exchanged,
but as time went on the signal died. I was busy being English and seldom
thought about these mysterious distant relatives.
One of them, I discovered when I read my mother’s memoir,
was my father’s sister: After a while I had the feeling she did not
want any letters from here. Her husband became a Judge of the People’s Court,
whatever that means, and of course I never wrote again. It was safer not to, as
not to embarrass him.
That was the other thing. Having relatives “in the West” was
not good in communist Czechoslovakia. When newspapers began referring to my
Czech background, my mother would become cross and fretful. “Why do they harp
on about that? It’s got nothing to do with your life now. Can’t you stop
them?”
But there came the day when the communists fell and the
blind went up.
I was in Czechoslovakia, President [Václav] Havel’s Czechoslovakia,
for a PEN conference [PEN International, a worldwide association of writers founded to promote friendship and intellectual co-operation among writers]. Returning very late from Pilsen to my hotel in Prague, I
found a young man waiting for me in the lobby. I learned later that he had
traveled from his home in another town and had been waiting in the lobby for
several hours. He had read in a newspaper that I was coming to Prague. It was
now about two in the morning. He couldn’t speak much English, and I couldn’t
work out what he was trying to tell me. He had an old photograph album that he
put on the hotel counter and opened. There was a photograph of me and my
brother Peter with the family spaniel in the garden of our first house in
England.
[Havel (1936-2011) was a Czech
statesman, author, poet, playwright, and dissident. He served as the last
president of Czechoslovakia from 1989 until 1992, prior to the dissolution of
Czechoslovakia on 31 December, before he became the first president of the
Czech Republic from 1993 to 2003. Havel was the first democratically elected
president of either country after the fall of communism on 10 December 1989.]
Alexandr, I discovered, was the grandson of my mother’s
sister Berta. There were many photographs, including that one of the Beck
children in 1914, and – even more astonishing to me – Martha in 1927, age 16, a
flapper in beads, slave bracelet, Charleston shoes, and party dress, looking
amazingly pretty; and again in 1930, almost glamorous, with carefully plucked
eyebrows and a fur-collared coat. The fact that my mother was beautiful had
escaped me, and the realization was shocking – and then touching, when I saw
that the dress had obviously been run up at home and the coat was a poor girl’s
best. She is wearing the coat again in cold weather in 1931, on a park bench
with Wilma and Wilma’s sons Jaroslav and Milan near trees and water among the
buildings of the Baca hospital.
By this time, 1994, I knew that my mother had started life
with four older sisters and an older brother. I knew their names and I knew how
Wilma, Berta, and Anny had died. The person who had told me was the daughter of
one of the boys in the photograph on the park bench: Wilma’s granddaughter
Sarka.
The year before, Sarka had written to my mother from
Germany, where she now lived, proposing to visit her in Devon, and my mother (I
can see it all) had slightly panicked because Ken would not have been receptive
to this sort of thing and could not be relied on to behave gracefully. So we
met in London, in the restaurant of the National Theatre, where I was working
that day: my mother, my sister (half-sister, but I never call her that), my
sister’s little girl, and Sarka and I, who was Sarka’s father’s cousin.
After a while, at one end of a long table cluttered with the
remains of the meal, I got into a tête-à-tête with Sarka. She wrote down the
family tree of my mother’s generation on a sheet of foolscap [paper of 8 × 13
inches (203 × 330 mm)], which she turned sideways to get them all in. This was
the first time, at least in my memory, that my Czech family had been given
names and relationships, and I was conscious that my English family, myself not
least, must be looking distinctly odd to Sarka. It was a little embarrassing,
even shameful, and I immediately made it worse.
“Sarka, were we Jewish?”
“What do you mean?”
I adjusted.
“I mean, how Jewish were we?”
“You were Jewish.”
“Yes, I know we were Jewish, my father’s family . . .”
“You were completely Jewish.”
I looked at the family tree. I went left to right.
“What happened to Wilma?”
“She died in Auschwitz.”
“Berta?”
“Auschwitz.”
“Anny?”
“She died in a different camp. I don’t know where.”
“Ota?”
“He survived.”
Irma was dying in Argentina, nearly 90, a widow and
childless. Martha, the youngest, was busy with my sister and my niece at the
far end of the table.
My grandparents all died at the hands of the Germans. My
father’s parents, Julius and Hildegard Straussler, were part of a “transport”
of Moravian Jews taken to Terezin, in Bohemia in northern Czechoslovakia, where
they arrived on December 2, 1941. On January 9, 1942, they were among 112
prisoners transported “to the East,” to Riga in Latvia. This is the recorded
date of their deaths because it is the last fact known about them.
[There are two posts on ROT
about the Terezin (aka: Theresienstadt)
Concentration Camp: “’Performing
for Survival – Cultural Life and the Theatre in Terezin‘” by Bahar
Akpinar (7 March 2022) and “The
Last Cyclist (2 and 5 September 2022). A personal note: both my paternal
grandparents were from German Jewish families from Eastern Europe and emigrated
to the U.S. as children at the turn of the 20th century. My grandfather was
born in the Ukraine when it was part of the Russian Empire, but my grandmother came
from Riga, Latvia (also part of Imperial Russia).]
Rudolf and Regina Beck, my mother’s parents, were also
transported to Terezin, and died there, in July and April 1944, while we were
in India – Peter and I at school, my mother in charge of the Baca shoeshop in
Darjeeling.
~
From a few paces’ distance, the interior walls of the
15th-century Pinkas Synagogue in Prague seem to shimmer with tracery tight as
knitting. But it’s not tracery, it’s names – the nearly 80,000 Bohemian and
Moravian Jewish victims of the Nazis. I am here with Sarka and her father,
Jaroslav. They have been here before. We three find the names again, the
Strausslers and the Becks. Anny, I tell Sarka, died at Riga, on January 9,
1942, as far as anyone knows – the same place and date as my father’s parents.
(I’m the one with the information now. A year earlier Peter and I had returned
to Zlin for the first time, to meet Dr. Emil Máčel, my source.) Anny was the
sister who never married. Wilma, the eldest, and Berta, the next eldest married
gentiles, but that had not saved them.
Jaroslav and I were meeting today for the first time since I
was in my pram. Jaroslav was 16 then. He remembered that he took two-year-old
Petr for a walk, holding him by the hand. Petr had a runny nose; Jaroslav wiped
it for him. After leaving the Pinkas Synagogue, Sarka and Jaroslav took me to
the station for the train to Zlin, three or four hours to the southeast.
On the train with me I had a fold-out gazetteer of “Jewish
Monuments in Moravia and Silesia.” Zlin merited only three lines and two items
of interest: There was a small Jewish section in one of the cemeteries, and it
was the birthplace of the English playwright Tom Stoppard, “in proper name
Tomas Straussler (born 1937).”
~
All my life I have been told that I “take after my mother,”
whatever that is supposed to mean, and now it does appear to mean more than a
compliment. In August 1968, when the armies of the Warsaw Pact [the Warsaw
Treaty Organization, a military alliance of the Soviet Bloc nations to
counterbalance NATO, 1955-91] put down the movement for reform in
Czechoslovakia [the Prague Spring, 5 January-21 August], my then wife was
firstly incredulous and secondly infuriated that I didn’t get worked up about
it as a Czech. It was true. I had no special feeling other than the general
English one of impotent condemnation, tinged with that complacency one feels
when the ogres of one’s personal demonology behave true to form. I knew I was –
used to be Czech, but I didn’t feel Czech. That year I had some money for the
first time, and I was buying first editions of Jane Austen, Charles Dickens,
and Evelyn Waugh and beginning to collect 19th-century English landscape
watercolors in a thatched cottage in a commuter-belt mock-up of rural England.
I felt about as English as you could get.
Even when, in 1977, I made my first return to
Czechoslovakia, I felt no identification at all. Everything – the landscape,
the architecture – looked interestingly foreign. My purpose was to write about
human rights, and I could as well have been in Poland or Hungary. Indeed there
was something slightly irritating about the way newspapers then and later would
call up to ask for a quote or an article about Czech affairs – of which I
usually knew little – as though I were a Czech expert.
Earlier that year I had been to Moscow and Leningrad on
another human rights story, the imprisonment in psychiatric hospitals of Jews
who applied for exit visas to Israel [“refuseniks”]. I continued to write about
this persecution and sometimes to speak from platforms, finally in 1986
organizing a 24-hour “event” in London, for which I recruited scores of
notables (Senator Bill Bradley [b. 1943; American Democratic politician and
former professional basketball player; U.S. Senator from New Jersey: 1979-97; unsuccessful
candidate for the 2000 Democratic presidential nomination] flew over
specially). As a result I received letters thanking me as a Jew, and I remember
that once or twice, feeling obscurely that I was receiving credit under false
pretenses, I replied that I was not Jewish or at any rate not really Jewish. I
had become habituated to the unexamined idea that although – obviously – there
was some Jewish blood in me (my father’s father’s?), enough to make me more
interesting to myself and to have risked attention from the Nazis, it was not
really enough to connect me with the Jews who died in the camps and those who
didn’t.
This almost willful purblindness, a rarely disturbed absence
of curiosity combined with an endless willingness not to disturb my mother by
questioning her, even after – no, especially after – our meeting with Sarka,
comes back to me now in the form of self-reproach, not helped by my current
state of mind now that I’m Jewish. I feel no more Jewish than I felt Czech
when, 22 years ago, I went to Prague for a week to do my English bit for
Charter 77.
[Charter 77 was an informal
civic initiative in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic from 1976 to 1992,
named after the document Charter 77 from January 1977. The Charter criticized
the government for failing to implement the human rights provisions of a number
of international documents it had signed. Despite explicit rejection of “oppositional
political activity,” the Charter was declared illegal and the government launched
retaliation against its supporters and signatories.]
Moreover, unlike my attitude toward the Czechness of things,
which always had the neutrality of disinterest, I am definitely uneasy with
Jewish orthodoxy, which I do not exempt from the general unease I feel with all
manifestations of exclusive ritual and heightened religiosity – bleeding
Christs, Hindu temples, Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, etcetera. And another
thing. Before I was Jewish my attitude toward Israel teetered between
admiration and a disquieting sense that the Palestinians were paying for the
Allies’ conscience about what the Germans did – picking up the bill for the
Nazis, in fact – and now that I’m Jewish I have the same disquiet.
My friend Manny Azenberg [Emanuel Azenberg (b. 1934);
American theater producer and general manager] in New York has been asking me
for years to go with him to Israel. I’ve never had the time (that is, of
course, enough interest to make the time) and now I have the odd sense of its
being too late. I don’t want to be claimed as if I’ve turned into someone else.
This is why I think I understand my mother going “Tsk!” But we shall see. Until
a couple of years ago I never had any interest in going back to Zlin.
~
Zlin, 15.11.97
Dear Sir,
When studying the archives of the Bata Company in Zlin I
found a personal file of your father Mr. Eugen Straussler M.D. who lost his
life in Singapore when his ship was sunk by Japanese bombers in 1942.
In this file is perhaps the only preserved photograph of
your father. I sent your mother a copy of the file. I would like to mention
that I exchanged letters with your mother for about two years, but for one year
I did not hear from her. In her last letter she wrote she was ill and since
then I am without news about further life . . .
My mother had been dead for 13 months when Emil Máčel
introduced himself by letter.
My brother Peter and I went to Zlin to meet Emil in May last
year, 59 years after we’d got out. Neither of us had any memory of being there.
We found our family home, a brick cube with its own garden, one of scores of
similar houses built by Bata in a grid of leafy streets not far from the
hospital. My parents moved into it in July 1934, a month after they were
married.
From my mother’s notebook memoir:
When I left school I took a secretarial course and like
everyone else joined the Finn [sic: this is probably an error and
should read “the Firm,” referring to the Bata shoe company, a major employer in
Zlin]. After I started working, I must have been 18 then, life became less
restricted. I started skiing and going to dances (with my mother sitting
there). On one ski trip – away day only – and without my mother! – a young
doctor from the hospital invited me to a dance there, and that’s where I met
your father, who was still studying but working there during vacations. He was
one of a group of students from various universities . . .
I was saving like mad knowing we will be poor to start
with. Continental custom is very different. The man does not (or does not have
to) provide a thing. In most cases men expect and get a dowry. Money. And to
marry a girl without money is heroic. Well, he was and he did . . .
The next five years were blissful. We must have had our
ups and downs but as always one only remembers the good times. Just as
well.
Your father was perhaps not handsome in the conventional
way, he was very intelligent, had great charm (I was always fighting off the
nurses!) and had a first class brain, but was very modest. His integrity was
total. Everyone in the hospital liked him – the staff and the patients. I don’t
want to sound too fulsome but this is how I remember him and when I die there
won’t be anyone left to say what kind of a person he was. What he would have
finally achieved one can only guess. He had no intention of going into general
practice and was well on the way to becoming a heart and lung specialist.
In my mind I always knew what my father looked like, and my
memory of him is supported by (or perhaps consists in) a few tiny snapshots.
The Bara [sic: Bata] archive adds a few dispassionate touches to
the portrait. His letter of employment in February 1932 promises him board and
lodging at the hospital and 200 crowns per week (there were 140 crowns in an
English pound). His personal property was “nil,” his savings were “nil,” his
debts were “nil,” the money he had to tide him over till his first payday was
“nil.” He had been recruited by the head of the Ba[t]a hospital, Dr.
Albert.
Germany annexed Austria in March 1938, and in September the
disputed Czech territory of Sudetenland was ceded to Hitler. On September 19,
my mother (who in her memoir wrote I have no recollection of any
special holidays and I am sure we did not go abroad) was issued her first
passport.
In February 1939 she received 30 English pounds from the
Firm – “Mrs. Straussler is going with her husband, who will stay in Singapore
for at least three years.”
On March 14, the company’s “Social and Health Institute”
reported that Dr. Straussler and family were fit for the tropics.
In April this year [1999, when Stoppard originally wrote
this essay], the 96-year-old widow of Dr. Albert, chief of the Bata hospital,
receives me in her flat in Prague, with her two daughters, Senta and Zaria. She
is telling me what happened on March 14, 1939. Very early in the morning, Dr.
Albert got a phone call from the Ba[t]a directorship to tell him that the
German army had crossed the frontier. He then got on the phone himself and
called the Jewish doctors to his house. “My husband said, ‘You have to get out,
right now.’” Bata had factories and offices in many countries, and the Jewish
doctors (Emil believes there were 15) were assigned to places where they’d be
out of danger. Mrs. Albertova shows me a photograph. “This is the room where
they met.” Most of the photograph is occupied by a bookcase, which I realize is
also in the room I’m sitting in. Her younger daughter Zaria was only six years
old but she remembers the meeting: “Afterward the room was full of
smoke.”
All three remember Dr. Straussler. The two “girls” tell me
he was considered the nicest of the young doctors, the one they asked to have
when they had measles and other childhood illnesses. “When Dr. Straussler
talked to us we knew everything would be all right.” It seems, too, that among
Dr. Albert’s young assistant physicians, Dr. Straussler was the highflier, the
chief’s favorite. “When there was a problem, my husband would send for him and
tell him, ‘You sort it.'”
When Zaria was very young she put her hand through a glass
pane and cut it. Dr. Straussler stitched the cut. Zaria holds out her hand,
which still shows the mark. I touch it. In that moment I am surprised by grief,
a small catching-up of all the grief I owe. I have nothing that came from my
father, nothing he owned or touched, but here is his trace, a small scar.
Your father chose Singapore. It was all marvelous in the
beginning. I liked the heat, the exotic fruit, the food, and the local people.
You had a perfectly sweet Malayan ayah [South Asian female servant or
nanny, usually one working for a European family] who pushed you and Peter
around in a double cane pushchair and tried hard to speak Czech to you. She
Would say, “Oh, don’t cry!” or “Hurry up – bathtime!” It was her party piece
and she loved you both. Later you both went every morning in a rickshaw to a
kindergarten.
We lived in a small house belonging to a Dutch shipping
company or KLM, can’t remember. The house was for temporary occupation and we
had just started looking at houses nearer the sea when war broke out. Even now
I can’t write about it all. We were not panicking and we were together but like
for everyone else it was traumatic. By the middle of January, a lot of women
and children left because they wanted to but by the end of the month all women
and children were evacuated. I stayed as long as I could, specially as I did
not want to go on my own to Australia. Hoping that we might all go eventually.
It just did not work out and the last few days were chaotic, boats, days, and
times always being changed. The journey from Singapore was pretty dreadful. We
were bombed just about everywhere. In the harbour, standing three days just off
Singapore, then on the way to Australia, then turned back to Singapore and
finally to India.
At the time we were so worried about the men left behind
in Singapore we did not really notice or mind anything. Cabins were overcrowded
and mattresses on decks preferable. Children were always getting lost (not
mine!) but I cried myself silly one night because I lost two silver medallions
engraved with your names my best friend gave you. Hung them on a hook in the
bathroom instead of putting them into my pocket – will I never learn?
I remember this. I remember the medallions, and the loss,
and most of all my mother crying.
Personally I did not like being in India. The constant
worry about your father, what happened, where he was – did he know where we
were and mainly did he survive? Nobody had any information although the Red
Cross and Czech Consul in Calcutta tried hard for us all. There were columns of
notices in the Calcutta papers where people wanted information about missing
husbands, wives, even children.
The four years seem even now like a lifetime and a
nightmare. I have no idea how and why I came to Darjeeling. By that time I was
feeling rather ill, depressed, and it was all getting too much. Darjeeling was
the change I needed. The air was so good and I was busy working and enjoying
it. Otherwise it was just a matter of waiting and waiting. Once I was asked to
go to Calcutta, only to be told that after all the people were accounted for,
your father was amongst those missing, presumed lost, and as they were all
listed as civilians, it was all they could do.
I returned the next day to Darjeeling but did not tell
you. Rightly or wrongly. Rightly, I think. You had enough to cope with.
But one day in Darjeeling a woman friend, at my mother’s
request, took Peter and me for a walk and told us that our father was dead.
Then she walked us back to the house, where my mother was waiting for us,
teary-eyed and anxious about how we had taken it. For my part, I took it well,
or not well, depending on how you look at it. I felt almost nothing. I felt the
significance of the occasion but not the loss.
How had my father died? On land? At sea? No one seemed to
know. As far as I was told he had simply disappeared. But in fact there were
people who did know and at least one of them, a Singapore survivor married to a
close friend of my mother, must have told her. So that was something else she
preferred not to go into.
~
In Singapore in one of those Dutch company houses there
lived an English family, Leslie and Katherine Smith and their son Tony, who was
the same age as my brother Peter. Leslie, today a spry and dapper 90, was the
manager of a British company that made optical and navigational instruments. He
got in touch with me this year. Our families, he said, had been friends. On
Sundays sometimes we would go to the Singapore swimming club together.
Katherine Smith and Martha used to have each other in for coffee. When Peter
answered the door he would shout, “Mama! Pani [Mrs.] Smithova!”
Two days before the fall of Singapore: said Leslie, after
the women and children had left, my father and another Czech, Mr. Heim, came to
his office one evening. They said, ‘Look, we have to get out. Can you help?’
Because of my work, I had a pass to the docks and I knew the ships’ captains.
So we got into my car. It was dark. The sentry at the docks let us through.
There were several ships but only one of them seemed to have any activity going
on. We went on board. I knew the captain and I asked him if he would take these
two Czechs. He said yes, he would. Your father tried to persuade me to go with
them, but I said I couldn’t leave my staff. So we all shook hands and that was
the last I saw of your father.”
The ship was sunk by the Japanese in the strait between
Sumatra and the island of Bangka, trying to make it to Australia.
~
A few days after my mother died, Ken, whom from England
onward I had called “Daddy” or “Father” or “Dad” (though he objected to “Dad,”
which he thought was lower-class) wrote to me to say that he had been concerned
for some time about my “tribalization ” by which he meant mainly mv
association, 10 years earlier, with the cause of Russian Jews, and he asked me
to stop using “Stoppard” as my name. I wrote back that this was not
practical.
Leaving aside the anti-Semitism and, frankly, the dottiness,
I know what made Major Stoppard, himself the father of two half-Jewish
children, so angry. Whatever his opinions about Jews, his prejudice had an
obverse side, a paternalism toward other races who were grateful to adopt
English ways and modes of thought. Blacks were admirable when they were
Anglophile Indians. Gurkhas were especially admirable. But when it came to Jews
(or Indians) who to their good fortune received honorary membership in the club
but persisted in their “tribal” ways nonetheless – that was sheer ingratitude,
an insult to his country. Don’t you realize I made you British?
Until I went to the bad, and the first sign of that was when
I turned out to be arty, I was coming on well as an honorary Englishman. Ken
taught me to fish, to love the countryside, to speak properly, to respect the
monarchy. In the end I disappointed him. And yet, did he but know it, it’s all
too late, this going back, these photographs, that small scar on Zaria’s hand.
They have the power to move, but not to reclaim. I was eight and a half when
our ship docked at Southampton on a freezing February day. My feet were so cold
I cried. We had to travel halfway up England to Ken’s mother’s house.
The train journey from Southampton to Retford was
nerve-racking to say the least. I hope I wasn’t irritable or cross with you.
You could not possibly have known what state I was in! I did not know what to
expect at the end of that long journey. As it turned out, it was all very
friendly, and Ken’s mother could not have been kinder to us.
I was still Tommy Straussler, but English was my only
language when Ken gave me his name three weeks later, and long before he asked
for it back Englishness had won and had lost.
