The Letters Project, Part 1

 

[From 2016 to 2024, I worked on and off on a huge project.  I called it “The Letters Project” because it concerned the 1945 correspondence between my future mother and father from just after they met until just before their wedding almost exactly a year later.  It was the end of World War II.   

[The collection contains 182 pieces of correspondence, and on 18 February 2024, I wrote up the last two letters in the collection.  Now, ten years after I started the project, I’ve decided it’s finished.  I’ll be posting the result on Rick On Theater in installments, starting today. 

[On 23 March 2024, I posted a kind of preview of this series, “The Letters Project,” in which I wrote, “In one respect, I had two contrasting reactions simultaneously.  It was fascinating and strange at the same time.”  I think readers will now see what I meant.

[There are some surprises and revelations in the letters, often little items that illuminate a time and place that few of us here now were around to witness.  Some of that was history, of course, such as the deaths of President Franklin Roosevelt and Adolf Hitler, for example, and the surrender of Germany.  Most of it, though, was just life in 1945.

[Near the end of that preview post, I also wrote, “These are the voices of my parents, after all, and I’m eavesdropping on them from [over] 80 years in their future.”  Remember that, readers, please.]

LETTERS FROM THE FRONTS
January-December 1945

Introduction

[On 12, 15, and 18 June 2015, I posted transcriptions on Rick On Theater of some letters my father wrote to my mother in September and October 1962.  I called the three-part post “Home Alone” because the letters were from the time my dad was in Germany starting on his job as a Foreign Service Officer before my mom joined him.  Mom had saved Dad’s letters, but Dad hadn’t returned the favor—or they hadn’t survived the decades since.

[Now I’ve worked through another, older collection of letters—this time from both correspondents.  These are the letters my future parents exchanged in 1945, between their first meeting and their wedding a little over a year later.  The period covered by the correspondence included Dad’s deployment to Europe at the end of the war against Germany and the end of his army service.  I call the post “Letters from the Fronts” because, while Dad’s letters are mostly from the European combat zone, Mom’s are from the home front.

[The letters run from 8 January, a week after Mother and Dad met, to 2 December 1945, two days before Dad was released from military service.  Mom had graduated from college on 1 September 1944 and was working for the American Red Cross during the period of the correspondence.  She was 21 when she met her future husband; my father-to-be was just 26.

[Dad had entered active duty with the army on 19 March 1941 and embarked for Europe on 27 February 1945, arriving in France on 11 March.  On 22 August, he departed for the U.S., arriving on 7 September.  He was separated from the army on 4 December and returned home to New York City.

[Unlike in the case of the “Home Alone” letters, I haven’t merely transcribed these messages.  I’ve quoted selectively (though sometimes extensively) and summarized the rest of each letter, adding commentary and explanations as I felt it was necessary.  Rereading my folks’ letters from 80 years ago, I must confess that I found them really interesting, but I don't know if anyone else will find them so.

[Of course, I’ve read the letters more than once, the first time many years ago—I was probably in my early teens or younger.  For the past several years, though, I’ve wanted to compose a post for ROT based on the letters. 

[It’s not that I think they’re so remarkable—well, they are from a personal and family point of view, but I know that many wartime couples have similar collections of letters—but that I find my parents’ letters fascinating not just because of the affection expressed in them, but the little clues about the life and death going on around them: the home front in Mom’s letters to Dad and the battle front and its repercussions in Dad’s letters.  Needless to say, I’m biased; I guess we’ll see if anyone else finds the letters as engaging as I do.

[(A note here about my transcription of the letters and other correspondence: I’ll be summarizing parts of the letters, but I’ve tried to be true to my parents’ writing where I’ve transcribed their prose, even the idiosyncratic and incorrect bits, except where it interferes with comprehension.  This includes not only vocabulary, but spelling, grammar, and punctuation.  Where I think it’s necessary, I’ll insert comments or explanations. 

[(In some instances, things my folks told me or that I know from experience throw revealing light on something the correspondents have written, and I’ve provided that information peripherally.  As my future mother admonished my father—though she might have also been addressing me!—in an early letter, “Good Lord, don’t go looking for poor sentence structure, and rotten spelling!!!” 

[(I also haven’t intentionally omitted remarks my future parents made that today are embarrassing or politically incorrect.  Let’s keep in mind, shall we, that these letter-writers were pretty young and living in a different era. 

[(They also didn’t know that we’d be kibitzing on what they were saying to one another!  While Cecily Cardew—of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (1895)—may have declared that her diary, “a very young girl’s record of her own thoughts and impressions,” was “consequently meant for publication,” I somehow don’t think my parents ever figured their wartime letters would be consumed by the public from a perspective of eight decades in the future!)]

Background

My mother, the former Judith Carol Freedman (b. 7 April 1923) died on 26 May 2015 at the age of 92.  She’d been a widow since 6 February 1996, almost 20 years.  My father, Eugene Monroe K***** (b. 5 November 1918), died of complications from Alzheimer’s disease at 77 and he’d been non compos mentis for a year or more before his death, so he had no idea that the previous 6 January had been his and my mother’s 50th wedding anniversary. 

(I posted a tribute to my mother, simply called “Mom,” on Rick On Theater on 1 November 2016, and one to my father, entitled “Dad,” on 20 June 2010, which was Father’s Day that year.) 

Dad was a World War II vet, a battery commander in Europe after D-Day, but in December 1944, he was a recently promoted artillery captain, CO of the Headquarters Battery of the 529th Field Artillery Battalion stationed at Camp Hood (later Fort Hood) in Killeen, Texas. 

(A battery in the artillery is the equivalent of a company in the infantry or a troop in the cavalry and air cavalry.  Camp Hood was 158 miles south of Dallas and 194 miles northeast of Houston.  The nearest big town was Waco, 65 miles northeast.

(During World War II, the army’s artillery units were divided into two corps: the Field Artillery Corps, Dad’s branch, armed with mobile artillery pieces used to support armies in the field, and the Coast Artillery Corps, which was responsible for coastal, harbor, and anti-aircraft defense of the United States.  In 1950, the Coast Artillery was merged with the Field Artillery, and in 1968, the Air Defense Artillery Branch was formed to conduct anti-aircraft warfare operations with rockets and missiles.) 

Like many stateside GI’s, Dad, a native New Yorker, came home on leave for the holidays.  He had celebrated his 26th birthday the previous 5 November.  (Two days later, Franklin D. Roosevelt [1882-1945; 32nd President of the United States: 1933-45] was elected U.S. president for the fourth and last time.  Dad once told me that the first ballot he cast after he turned 21—the minimum age for voting in those days—was for Roosevelt; that would have been on 8 November 1940, for FDR’s third term.)

Mom was also born in New York City but her family moved to Trenton, New Jersey, when she was little (see “Horsman Dolls,” posted on ROT on 14 February 2017).  Since graduating from college in September 1944, she was doing social work out of the Trenton Chapter of the American Red Cross with servicemen and -women who were far away from their homes.  

At one naval base in New Jersey, she met a young WAVE ensign named Clarice, known as Kris, who also came from New York.  Kris and my mom were only a month apart in age, and they became friends.  My mother-to-be had turned 21 on 7 April 1944. 

Kris was assigned to Skillman Airport in Ewing Township in West Trenton, Mercer County, with duty at the nearby General Motors Inland Fisher Guide Plant, which in 1941 converted from manufacturing auto body parts to making the Navy’s Avenger torpedo bomber as part of GM’s newly formed Eastern Aircraft Division.  Kris (b. 1923) died on 9 February 2017 at 93.  She had a U.S. Navy honor guard at her funeral. 

(The WAVES, which stood for Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service, were the women’s reserve of the U.S. Navy during World War II.  An ensign is the lowest-ranking naval officer, the equivalent of an army second lieutenant [pay grade: O-1].  The carrier-based Avengers were test-flown at Skillman Airport, later returned to civilian control and renamed Mercer County Airport and now Trenton-Mercer Airport.) 

Mom’s parents, Harry (1895-1967) and Valerie (1900-74) Freedman, were married on 1 January 1920, so they held a combination New Year’s Day/anniversary party every year.  It was mostly for my future grandparents’ friends, but Mother was encouraged to invite a friend of her own so she wouldn’t be the only young person in the house.

Mother invited Kris.  A few days before the party, Kris called her friend and explained that her big brother was home from the army and had nowhere to go on New Year’s Day and asked if she could bring him to the party. 

My mother and her parents gladly agreed and when Kris arrived at my grandparents’ house on Fisher Place in Trenton, she was accompanied by a nice-looking young man with blue eyes and wavy blond hair (although, being on active duty at the time, he probably had his hair cut pretty short). 

Do I have to say that Kris’s brother, Gene, was, in fact, my future father?  That party, Monday evening, 1 January 1945, my future grandparents’ 25th wedding anniversary, was when my parents met.

That’s not the whole story, however.  My dad-to-be proceeded to get drunk at the party and fell asleep on a sofa in the living room of my grandparents’ home.  He refused to leave, he declared, until he got my mom in his Christmas stocking.  Well, that didn’t happen exactly, of course, but they got him to a bed in my grandparents’ house while my mother spent the night at her friend Natalie Cohen’s house. 

(I’m not certain who Natalie Cohen was—she comes up frequently in the letters—but it’s clear she and Mom were close at the time.  Next to Kris, with whom Mom remained close the rest of their lives, Natalie Cohen seems to have been Mom’s other best friend.)

According to the story of my parents’ meeting, my dad was extremely contrite the next morning—not to mention hung-over as well—and he returned to his parents’ home in New York.  I imagine the two spoke on the phone over the next days; I’m pretty sure Dad didn’t come back to Trenton and that Mom didn’t travel into the city, but they apparently spoke occasionally by phone until Dad left on Sunday, 7 January, to return to duty in Texas. 

Almost immediately, Dad began writing to the girl he’d just met—and Mom replied.  This began a year‑long correspondence that continued when Dad was sent overseas and even while he was fighting across western Europe, through France, Belgium, Holland, and Germany until V-E (Victory in Europe) Day (8 May 1945) and upon his return to the States after V-J (Victory over Japan) Day (15 August 1945). 

Dad came back to the States in the fall of 1945 to muster out of the army at Fort Bragg in North Carolina and he and Mom were married in Trenton on 6 January 1946.  (I arrived 11½ months later in Washington, D.C.) 

Now, I imagine there are lots of couples with a similar tale, but what I find remarkable, all these years later, is that not only Mom, back in the safety and comfort of Trenton, New Jersey, but Dad, in the hectic activity and chaos of combat, managed to keep the letters they’d received from each other. 

I don’t know exactly when, but sometime in the early years of my parents’ marriage, Dad took the two caches of letters and had them mounted and bound in two large, leather scrapbooks—one for Mom’s letters to him and the other for his letters to her.  (I don’t know this, but it’s fun to imagine that Dad presented Mom the bound letters on their first anniversary—the “paper” anniversary.)   

“Letters of Judith C. Freedman, January to December 1945” was gilt-debossed on the navy-blue leather cover of one and “Letters of Eugene M. K*****, January to December 1945” on the ruby-red cover of the other.

They kept the two volumes, housed in a fitted blue fabric-and-leather slipcase, in our home, taking the books with them whenever they moved, including their sojourn in Germany with the United States Information Agency (USIA) in the ’60s and back to Washington. 

(USIA was the federal agency responsible for “public diplomacy,” including propaganda, principally of a cultural nature; it was folded into the Department of State in 1999.  For more about this and that stay in Germany, see “An American Teen In Germany” on ROT, 9 and 12 March 2013, and “Home Alone,” referenced in the introduction.) 

Eventually, Mom brought the letters with her to the assisted-living residence in Bethesda, Maryland, which was her penultimate home, and when she died, among the first things I made certain to safeguard in my own apartment in New York (where I’d moved following my release from my own military service in 1974), was the two-volume set of bound letters. 

Dad apparently called Mom Sunday morning, 7 January, from New York.  Though it was 11:30 a.m., he woke her!  Nevertheless, she told him “a long distance call is always pleasant.”  (In those days, even a call just from New York City to Trenton, New Jersey, all of 67 miles away, was long distance!  The caller needed an operator to place the call—direct dialing and area codes hadn’t been invented yet.) 

Dad left from New York City’s Pennsylvania Station on a train to central Texas.  I gather he had to change trains in Washington, D.C., about four hours south by rail, and then he overnighted in St. Louis, Missouri, about a day’s ride further west.

8 January – 24 January 1945

The first letter in the collection is from my father, written on Monday, 8 January, a week after he and my mother had met.  He was at the “New Hotel Jefferson” (as declared on the letterhead of the stationery on which he wrote) in St. Louis—“Queen City of the Mississippi,” according to Dad’s inscription. 

The letter was little more than a shot at making contact, but it begins to demonstrate the transportation problems the country was having, especially in the civilian sector, during the war years.  Apparently there were some weather problems of which he complained, but he contemplated flying to Texas. 

Dad hadn’t waited to hear back from Mother: he wrote again from Texas on Thursday night, 11 January, and recounted his transportation woes.  He’d arrived in St. Louis at 12:30 on Monday afternoon to find that the city was in the midst of a snowstorm. 

Despite the weather, Dad reported, the airline confirmed that it was flying, so he “decided to take a chance” and flew out of St. Louis Monday night, arriving in Dallas at 3:00 the next morning.  (Commercial airline passenger service had only been inaugurated in the U.S. in 1926.) 

He still had to get to Camp Hood, just under 160 miles by road from Dallas, and he found that the only transportation available was “an interurban trolley” to Waco that didn’t leave until 5:30 a.m. 

(The Texas Electric Railway was a historic interurban railroad that operated from Dallas to Denison, Corsicana, and Waco.  It began operation in 1908 and became the largest interurban railway operator in the southern U.S. before its demise in 1948.)

Dad “wandered around for two-and-a-half hours in the deserted streets, feeling very frustrated.”  He “finally” arrived in Waco, still 65 miles from his post, at 8:30 “and was once more confronted by the lack of transportation problem.” 

Out of desperation, Dad called the military police station at the camp and learned that they had a car going out to Camp Hood, so, though “as a general rule,” he pointed out to Mom, “I have nothing to do with M.P.’s,” he caught a ride.  He made it to Camp Hood at noon on the 9th—“only a day and a half late.”  “Everybody was overjoyed to see me,” Dad reported, “so we had a party that night.”  I presume he was being a little facetious—that would have been my dad as I would come to know him.

In her 11 January reply to Dad’s first note, Mom asked “what sort of hot water” he’d gotten into for reporting to duty late, but in Dad’s answer on 14 January, he acknowledged, “Nothing at all seems to be forthcoming” for the delay.  He added, however, “If you’d have been in Washington”—where I gather he’d had to change trains for the trip west and was stranded for many hours in the city where, coincidentally, he and his new bride would be moving in a little over a year—“I’d still be AWOL, I fear”!

Dad signed the note “G”—for Gene. (My dad’s name was Eugene; his mother was a fan of the poetry of Eugene Field [1850-95], he told me once.)  Mom, incidentally, opened her response to Dad’s 8 January note: “Greetings to my favorite drunkard!”—confirming the family lore of the circumstances of my parents’ meeting. 

My future father addressed his second letter on the 11th to “Dearest Rusty,” a nickname for my mom he seems to have made up.  (Mom’s name was Judith; everyone called her Judy.)  No one ever called her Rusty before to my knowledge—at least no one’s ever copped to doing so—and as far back as I can remember, Dad didn’t continue to call her Rusty after they were married. 

(“Rusty” suggests that Mom had red hair—or reddish maybe.  But she was a brunette all of my cognizant lifetime (until it turned gray and then white).  I turned out to have red-brown hair and Mom’s sister had reddish hair—but not my mother.  I have no idea where the pet name came from—and I never asked either of my parents when I had the chance.  Later in the correspondence, in his letter of 22 July, below, Dad does explain the nickname.)

Now, my dad had a nickname in college (“Doc”) and only his old schoolmates used it—though we knew about it.  After Dad died and his obit appeared in his college alumni magazine, there were some old schoolmates who wrote to offer condolences and admitted they hadn’t known Dad’s real name! 

But Dad’s name for Mother was pretty certainly a private (and short-lived) pet name because in her next letter, dated 15 January, she signed herself, “Ever ‘Rusty’” and then added a little note with an arrow pointing to her “signature”: “I like that.”  Mom, in her turn, usually wrote to “Gene”—except, of course, that first letter.

Apparently Dad called Trenton again on Saturday evening, 13 January (it seems that letters between New Jersey and Texas took only two days), but Mom was in New York City and missed the “long distant call.” 

Mom added that the call “came thru to the tune of a very ‘southern’ accent”—probably actually a southwestern accent, from a Texas long-distance operator.  (How many of you remember when you needed an operator to place a long-distance telephone call?  Hell, how many of you remember operators?) 

She was sorry to have missed Dad on Saturday, but happily he called again the next day, ending the weekend, Mom declared, “with a big bang!”  A visit back east to “dear old New Jersey” was hinted at, but, noted Dad on 14 January, “For reasons of security I can’t say anything.”

It seems Mom had had a Saturday evening out in New York with Kris and Natalie Cohen, on the 13th (when Dad had called), seeing a movie (possibly The Hairy Ape with William Bendix and Susan Hayward [United Artists, released in June 1944], based on the 1922 expressionistic play by Eugene O’Neill [1888-1953]) and having a “swanky” dinner at “the Sherry-Netherland’s officers club” (on 5th Avenue at 59th Street); Kris was a WAVE officer, you’ll remember.

(The Sherry-Netherland Officers’ Club was a space in the famous luxury hotel, turned over to the Officers’ Service Committee to operate, that offered military officers in the city of New York a place to go for lunch or dinner, drinks, a game of cards, or where they could meet other officers or friends and socialize at reasonable prices.  It opened in 1943 and remained in operation for the duration of the war and into the mid-’40s. 

(The OSC was a volunteer organization that offered assistance to visiting officers in New York City in finding a place to stay, eat, or have a drink and also to offer movie passes and theater tickets for their entertainment.)

Then Mom paid her first visit to Kris’s (and my dad’s) parents’ apartment on Lexington Avenue near 23rd Street, where the young women “giggled and gossiped for many hours” until they “dropped off to slumberland long after 3:00 A.M.”  Mom reported that the “family album” was trotted out and everyone uttered “ooo’s and ah’s” over the snapshots of Dad as "an adorable baby”!  (I have some of those photos—including the traditional naked-baby-on-the-rug shot.  It’s all right: I have one of my mother, too.)

(A word about my dad’s family’s home: the residence, in a small apartment building on the southwest corner of Lexington and 23rd, was above my future Grandpa Jack’s pharmacy on the street level.  The two premises had different entrances and house numbers: the residence was at #18 and the Peerless Drug Store was at #20, but it was the same structure.  The building no longer exists; a modern high rise sits on that corner now.)

I get the impression that this period wasn’t very active militarily at Camp Hood because Dad wrote on the 14th that he’d been assigned “quite a number of tasks,” but they seem to have been make-work jobs.  On the 16th, Dad wrote that he’d completed “the chores assigned me,” and he took to staying out of the way so as not to be on anyone’s “list of available workhorses.” 

He stayed out of battalion headquarters and spent his time at the dispensary—a common army term for the infirmary or the medical officer’s office—where he and the “Doc” had become buddies and would “drink fine coffee and discuss the topics of the day.”  It sounds a little “Sergeant Bilko” to me! 

(The Phil Silvers Show was a sitcom which ran on the CBS Television Network from 1955 to 1959.  It was colloquially known as Sergeant Bilko for its lead character, Master Sergeant Ernest G. Bilko of the United States Army, played by comedic actor Phil Silvers [1911-85].  The show centered on the soldiers of the post motor pool, who seemed to spend little time performing their duties.  Bilko, the NCO in charge, especially spent much of his time trying to get others to do his work for him.)

Evenings at Camp Hood seem to have been devoted to socializing.  Dad mentioned parties or dinner with comrades-in-arms and then drinks and dancing at “the club,” obviously the post officers’ club.  Most of the officer corps at Camp Hood seems to have been married and accompanied by their wives; Dad wrote on the 21st that he “generally makes up a group of five, but we don’t seem to suffer any ill-effects from the odd number.”  (Many of Dad’s photos I have of that period show his fellow officers and their wives.)

Commenting on Mom’s first meeting with her future in-laws, Dad affirmed that his parents were “pretty much fun” and, in reference to the family album, that “they’re . . . pretty doting.”  He was “afraid,” though, that “my going to war is going to be more trying for them than for me.” 

I bet there were a lot of GI’s with the same fear.  Soldiers stateside may not have known exactly what awaited them, though by 1945 there must have been many officers and NCO’s at places like Camp Hood who’d been rotated back to the States from battle fronts, just as in my day there were men at Fort Knox, Kentucky, where I started active duty in 1969, who’d seen combat in Vietnam. 

(Although I was a military intelligence officer, I was at Knox, home of the U.S. Army Armor Center and School at the time, for the armor officers’ basic course from December 1969 to February 1970.  For those not up on military taxonomy, armor is the branch of the army that uses tanks, armored personnel carriers, and helicopter gunships.  In that last category, the ’copters were piloted mostly by warrant officers. 

(Warrant officers are experts in specific fields—in this instance, combat helicopters—and were sometimes commissioned in the field and then sent back to the States for officers’ basic.  There were several newly commissioned former warrant officers in my class at Fort Knox—and they had stories to tell.)

The Allies had been fighting in North Africa since 1942, Italy since September 1943, and western Europe since 6 June 1944 (D-Day); fighting in the Pacific had been underway since Pearl Harbor was attacked on 7 December 1941. 

Men like my father surely had an idea that they were going into harm’s way, but their families, especially once the men had left U.S. territory for the war front, would be left to imagine what their sons and brothers and husbands were facing.  I imagine everyone knew at least one Gold Star family.  Getting any kind of mail out from a combat zone was problematic and must have only heightened the anxiety of the families back home. 

(I recall a family story about my grandfather on my mother’s side, who was a World War I vet—the grandfather whose anniversary was the reason for that New Year’s Day party at the beginning of this account.  In a time when long-distance communication was almost 30 years more primitive than it was in my dad’s army days, it was obviously harder to get information from the battle fronts to the families back home. 

(Grandpa Harry was wounded in combat and the army sent his parents in New York City a telegram: “Harry Freedman shot in buttocks,” it said—according to Freedman family lore.  Well, those great-grandparents weren’t newcomers to these shores—my mother’s family had been in America for several generations already—but the word ‘buttocks’ was apparently not familiar to them; or maybe it was the geography of France. 

(My grandmother—who, of course, didn’t know Harry yet, I don’t think—told me that his parents and sisters pored over a map of France—which is all they knew about his whereabouts—looking for a town called Buttocks!  My post “Horsman Dolls” includes some brief biographical details about Pop-Pop H.F.

(From what I’ve been able to piece together regarding my grandfather’s World War I service, he was an infantryman in Flanders, Belgium, and Cambrai, France, from 17 May to 26 December 1918.  According to his military records, he was “severely” wounded on 29 September, which corresponds either to the Fifth Battle of Ypres in Flanders, 28 September-2 October, or the Battle of St. Quentin Canal near Cambrai, France, 29 September-10 October.

(If the sequence of Private Freedman’s overseas service is the same as the notation in his record, it’s unlikely he would have received his wound in Flanders and then gotten sent to France, so I assume he served in Belgium first, then was sent to northern France, where he was wounded, probably on the first day of the Battle of St. Quentin Canal.)

Furthermore, security provisions, such as the ones my father alluded to in that 14 January letter, prevented soldiers, sailors, and airmen from telling their families what they were doing, or even where they were stationed in many cases or where they were going when they were reassigned.  (“Loose Lips Sink Ships” was the reminder on posters all over military posts, defense plants, and many streets and public places in the civilian quarter.) 

In the 21 January letter, Dad repeated, “I can’t say too much in violation of military security,” and then hinted that a change might be forthcoming. Then he made a broad hint about the potential trip east: “I have no intention of having you anticipate ‘fanciful things’ with no possibility of realization,” Dad wrote, implying that what he’d suggested earlier wasn’t “fanciful.”  “I don’t render opinions or pass on rumors,” he continued.  “This should give you something to work with—and very shortly, too.” 

Though I imagine that Dad’s family and my mother-to-be could guess the purpose of the implied move—his battalion was being sent into combat in Europe; if the battalion were going to the Pacific, they’d most likely be sent to the West Coast, not New York—but I notice he never actually writes the words.  In fact, aside from two remarks about his “going to war,” Dad never wrote directly about that prospect—until he was actually in it.  It must have been, however, the elephant in the room for everyone.

When Mother wrote on Friday, the 19th, a new topic came up.  Not new for Mom, but new in the correspondence; I presume she’d told Dad about all this during the New Year’s week when he was in New York.

After some chit-chat about her daily doings and her work at the “R.X.” (Mom’s abbreviation for “Red Cross”), Mom wrote about “another great temptation lying in my path.”  As you’ll recall, Mom was a Red Cross social worker on area military posts (that’s how she met Kris, after all) to help out GI’s, especially ones who were stationed far from their homes, who needed a sympathetic ear or help with “marital and financial problems.” 

She’d “been fighting like fury” to get a post overseas and had apparently been showering the “National” Red Cross with so many letters “they must have a single file for my letters alone.”  She’d been turned down repeatedly because they deemed her “too young” (Mom was probably barely 21 when she started applying; in a later letter, written on 13 June, she explained that the Red Cross had some kind of minimum age requirement for overseas assignments), and finally “gave up in despair.” 

Now she said her “chapter has received a wire [i.e., a telegram] . . . stating there’s a dire emergency & need for Home Service R.X. workers for overseas work.”  So Mom “couldn’t resist the temptation to start the nagging all over again.” 

What my mother had told me about her wartime plans before she met my father fills some of this in.  Mom started at Elmira College in upstate New York in the fall of 1941; she was on track to graduate in May 1945 if her college tenure had followed the traditional path. 

Mom, however, took summer courses at New York University in 1944 to attain credits to transfer to Elmira so she could graduate early, and she got her degree on 1 September 1944.  (According to the Elmira College Bulletins of 1943-44 and 1944-45, Mom majored in sociology-psychology—and graduated as a “Scholar of the Second Rank” with an 86-89% grade average.  I never knew either of those factoids.) 

Her goal was to join the Red Cross and go overseas as an ambulance driver in a combat zone.  Hence the cascade of letters about which she wrote Dad.  Now, Mom was just 21 in September 1944, barely out of her minority in those days (society didn’t recognize 18-year-olds as adults until several decades later—for instance, 18-year-olds couldn’t vote in federal elections until July 1971, when the 26th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified) and her father simply forbade her to go abroad. 

As readers know, she was serving as a Red Cross social worker in the Trenton area at the time of this occurrence.  Ironically, had Mom gotten her original wish and gone overseas in 1944, she might never have met my dad since it was through Dad’s sister Kris that they were introduced, and Mom got to know Kris through her work on stateside military posts in the area of her Trenton home.

Curiously, my father supported Mom’s “ambitions and desires to go overseas.”  Dad expressed the same wish, which he wrote on 24 January he’d had “for years now.”  (Dad had enlisted in 1941, shortly after he graduated from college—he told me that word of the fall of France to the Germans came the day of graduation.)  

I can picture him writing letter after letter requesting assignment to the front, like Lieutenant Roberts in the 1948 play and 1955 movie Mister Roberts, until he makes his CO, Captain Morgan, angry.  I’m certain my father didn’t actually do that; it’s just the image I get from his letter to Mom. 

(Dad’s college commencement ceremony took place on 7 June 1940.  Germany had begun its invasion of France on 10 May and by the end of the month, had defeated most of the forces of France and its British allies.  The Wehrmacht didn’t occupy Paris, however, until 14 June, and the armistice between France and Germany didn’t take effect until 25 June.

(A brief note about the start of my father’s military service: it wasn’t quite straightforward.  He enlisted in the army in March 1941—but he had actually served in the navy for about five months before that.  I won’t go into his reasons for the branch transfer, as it’s called—the army and the navy are different branches of service—and I have no information on his naval service.  I have only one photo of Dad in his white swabby suit, annotated “Panama City, Oct. 1940”—but I don’t know if the location was Panama City, Panama, or Panama City, Florida, both of which were navy towns.)

Dad added that though he hoped Mom would “make it very shortly—but not before I get to see you at least once more.”  Then he continued, “That, incidentally, is the one mental drawback to my present proximity to going to war.  Why couldn’t it have happened either six months ago or six months hence.” 

Oddly, that would have meant, again, that he and Mom might not have met!  I don’t think he thought of that.  Or maybe he did—and would rather have never met Mom than face the possibility of not seeing her for God-knows-how-long.  (The war would end in September, but no one could have known that in January.  And we know that Dad survived combat intact and came home to marry Mom—but in January 1945 no one could have known that, either.) 

Also in his 24 January letter, Dad informed Mom that he was trying to counsel an NCO in the battery he used to command.  The sergeant, “an excellent soldier and a competent man,” was “undergoing great mental anguish” because his wife back home was pregnant with their first child and her doctor “anticipated trouble.”  The NCO had gotten “two conflicting telegrams” from the Red Cross and “the poor boy is completely in the dark about what has or is happening.” 

The sergeant sought Dad out, and my father was worried because the man was “very hot headed” and might “take matters into his own hands”—by which I think Dad meant he was afraid the guy might go AWOL—the result of which “would be catastrophic.”  (I suspect Dad was considering that AWOL during wartime could be construed as desertion, the penalty for which can be execution.) 

Dad had asked the Red Cross to try to get more detailed information, but any answer wouldn’t arrive before the next day (Dad was writing at night), and he hoped that he’d been able to calm the man down for the night at least.  At the end of this report, Dad quipped, in response to Mom’s remarks about her Red Cross work, “You see dear, you aren’t the only one serving as a confidant and ‘father confessor.’” 

(Unfortunately, Dad never wrote Mom about the outcome of the sergeant’s problem.  In 2½ weeks, Dad would arrive back in New York City preparatory to shipping out for Europe and the war at the end of February.  He may have told Mom on the phone what transpired—though she didn’t mention it in her next couple of letters—or told her when they saw one another in New York where he was briefly at liberty before confinement to his temporary post.  I presume, though, that the excitement of transferring to temporary quarters and then to the transport ship drove all other thoughts from both Dad’s and Mom’s minds.)

[That’s the beginning of a year’s exchange of letters, notes, cards, and the occasional telegram.  As you can see, my mother- and father-to-be wrote back and forth every few days—and that even remained essentially true when Dad was deployed to the European Theater of Operations and rolled across Western Europe from France into Germany with his artillery battalion.

[I haven’t worked out a schedule of postings for “Letters from the Fronts,” but since there will be about 20 installments, I won’t be posting them consecutively.  I’ll probably post an installment about once or twice a month. I’d estimate.  “The Letters Project, Part 2” will be posted on Sunday, 4 October 2026.  (After each new installment is posted, I’ll go back to the previous one and insert a link to the new one.)]

Tom Stoppard Remembered, Part 2

 

[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.