Tom Stoppard is a British playwright and screenwriter. He is the son of Eugen Straussler and Martha Beckova.
His father Eugen Sträussler was a doctor employed by the Bata shoe company. His parents were non-observant Jews. On 15 March 1939, the day the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia, the Sträussler family fled to Singapore, where Bata had a factory.
Stoppard, his brother, and their mother fled to India prior to the Japanese occupation of Singapore. Stoppard’s father remained in Singapore as a British army volunteer, knowing that his skills as a doctor would be useful in the city-state’s defense.
When Stoppard was four years old, his father died. His mother passed away in 1996. The family had not discussed their past, and neither brother knew what had happened to the family who had been left behind in Czechoslovakia.
With the fall of communism in the early 1990s, Stoppard discovered that all four of his grandparents were Jewish and had died in Terezin, Auschwitz, and other camps, as had three of his mother’s sisters.
Following his parents’ deaths in 1998, he returned to Zln for the first time in over 50 years. He has expressed grief for a lost father as well as a lost past, but he has no sense of being a survivor at any level. . “I feel incredibly lucky not to have had to survive or die. It’s a conspicuous part of what might be termed a charmed life.