Tom stoppard, p.2
Tom Stoppard, page 2
The Firm was the shoe-making company Bata, which owned, built, designed and managed the house, the street, the hospital and the town, and controlled the employment, income and lives of most of Zlín’s inhabitants. The Firm’s policies and administrative decisions dominated the life of the young Sträusslers and would play a part in their children’s journeys into the world, like those two children setting out on their long path in the advertisement of Bata’s English rivals, Start-Rite, with the motto: “Children’s Shoes Have Far to Go.”
Zlín, since the turn of the century, was Bata. This otherwise unremarkable Moravian town, 250 kilometres south-east of Prague (about four hours on the train), nestled in a deep valley between high hills, with a river running through it, surrounded by farmlands, mountains and forests, and once known mainly for its plum brandy, slivovitz, became the site of a social and industrial project with a global reach, a project which was, in its own way, as ambitious and unremitting as any empire or ideological movement.
The Bata shoe factory began as a cobbler’s workshop in Zlín in the 1880s. Through the next generations of the Bata family, it became a global enterprise and, in its home town of Zlín, a highly controlled community. “Bata-isation” became, after 1918, a symbol of the new independent Czechoslovakia. Amazingly, it survived two world wars, family feuds, the German occupation and the Communist regime. Tomáš Bata, the cobbler’s son who founded the Bata empire, modelled it on Henry Ford’s assembly-line theory. Everything was geared to speed, productivity, profit and competition. His factory survived the Great War by supplying thousands of boots to the Austro-Hungarian army. His half-brother Jan Antonín, who took over the business in 1932 after Tomáš’s death in an air crash (flying in his own aeroplane from Bata’s own airport), expanded the enterprise to Africa, Canada, France, South America, Singapore, Malaysia and India—where a city called Batanagar was founded. “Bata shoes conquer the world,” was the message. These Bata outposts would be crucial way-marks in the Stoppard story.
The Bata family ruled with a controlling hand over their workforce. (A satirical account of their Orwellian control is given in Mariusz Szczygieł’s book Gottland, while more hagiographical accounts emphasise the family’s benevolent paternalism.) The town was structured in functional sections: workplace, management, leisure, domestic accommodation, healthcare. As well as providing residential housing for all its employees, much admired by Le Corbusier, it founded schools to train up “Batamen” and built an eight-storey Community Centre (now the Hotel Moskva), with facilities for sport, chess, dancing and eating, but no alcohol. The kitchens in the Bata houses were designed small, so as to encourage the employees to eat in the communal canteen. There were signs on the walls and fences of Zlín reading our customer—our master. There were also Bata department stores, a movie theatre, the first Czech skyscraper office block, the first Czech escalator, a company savings bank and a hospital. This opened in 1932 under the direction of the enlightened and pioneering Dr. Bohuslav Albert, with 320 beds and jobs for twenty-six doctors. Dr. Albert hired a large number of Jewish doctors, including Eugen Sträussler and his friend Alexander “Sanyi” Gellert.
Dr. Albert noticed the young Dr. Sträussler’s exceptional qualities, and within four years promoted him as assistant to the head consultant. Others noticed him too. He was a writer and a public speaker as well as a promising doctor. Because he could speak German, he was chosen to give lectures to German-speaking doctors around the country. Between 1934 and 1936, he wrote a number of pieces for the local newspaper, on tuberculosis and its treatment, on visiting the ill, on the workings of the Bata hospital, on sunburn and on sleep. The articles are interested in changing medical practices, and in the way everyday behaviour affects illness. They are commonsensical rather than theoretical, clear-headed and morally sound. On sleep, for instance: “It is important that we realize that the sine qua non of good sleep is good work and that only good work makes good sleep possible…It is not healthy to sleep in underwear worn during the day. Bodily hygiene is a condition of sound sleep…insomnia is relieved by appropriate life-styles…the best therapy for insomnia is orderliness, good will and self-discipline.”
He looked after children and delivered babies. (Quite possibly one of these was John Tusa, broadcaster and arts administrator, who was born in the hospital at Zlín in 1936.) He was the doctor the youngest patients asked for when they had measles or such childhood illnesses. He always made them feel that everything would be all right, and he was well remembered by his patients. He brought “jollity” into the room with him. In his spare time, he relaxed by playing billiards at the hotel in the centre of town, owned by a fellow doctor’s father, Mr. Bájaja. Marta described Eugen, many years later, as “not handsome in the conventional way” but very charming (she was “always fighting off the nurses”). He had a “first class brain,” great modesty and total integrity.
The Sträusslers and the Gellerts were next-door neighbours. Nelly Gellert was Marta’s best friend. They were always dropping in on each other. They went as a foursome to the movies and to dances and Red Cross functions in the Community Centre; their friends would drop in and “stay up half the night talking.” Another friend of the Gellerts at the hospital, Dr. Friedmann, remembered Marta as a charming woman with a “slightly mischievous smile,” a melodious voice and a willingness to join in with his schemes for abolishing some of the strict Bata social rules.
The Sträusslers were well off enough to have a car, and went on local excursions with Sanyi and Nelly. Once, Eugen was driving when they had an accident, and Nelly was hurt. As an apology, Eugen and Marta gave Nelly a ring with a pale-blue, local spinel stone, set with clasps. She wore it all her life—and her daughter wears it still.
Marta had two children during these years. Petr Sträussler was born on 21 August 1935. Tomáš Sträussler was born, two years later, on 3 July 1937. Tomáš was circumcised; Petr wasn’t. Nelly had had her daughter Vera two months before. Marta couldn’t breastfeed her second baby, so Nelly acted as a wet nurse and fed him. Tomik and Vera, almost exact contemporaries, were milk brother and sister, and friends in the cradle: their mothers thought they should get married when they grew up. Marta had a girl who lived in to help and to babysit. She was enjoying her life as a wife and mother in her twenties; she remembered those times as “blissful.”
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For the Sträusslers and the Gellerts, for the other Jewish doctors working in the Bata hospital, and for hundreds of thousands of other Czechoslovakians, those agreeable, domestic, steady patterns of life were now to be wiped out. There had been anti-Semitism in Czechoslovakia, and anxiety in Bata about Hitler’s rise to power for some time, but life had gone on as normal for many people. Then, on 12 March 1938, the Anschluss took place: Nazi Germany invaded Austria. On 29 September 1938, the Munich Agreement permitted the Third Reich’s annexation of parts of Czechoslovakia. On 1 November, German troops occupied the Sudetenland. Large-scale displacements and flights into exile, and the persecution of Jews and Romanis, began. On 15 March 1939, Germany invaded the rest of Czechoslovakia. Two days before that, Jan Antonín Bata left for America; his nephew, Thomas Bata, was already in Canada, from where he would continue to run the business.
Dr. Albert had seen what was coming. He got a phone call early on the morning of 14 March telling him that the Germans had crossed the border. He immediately called in all the Jewish doctors to his house, and told them they had to get out. His wife was there, and she saw the doctors, all smoking, all sweating with fear. Dr. Albert set himself to save as many of them as he could, making contact with Bata branches all over the world and arranging for a number of his employees to be offered jobs there. On 23 March, Jewish doctors were suspended from practising. Eugen and Sanyi discharged themselves from the hospital. Dr. Albert offered them the chance of a refuge in Singapore or a refuge in Kenya. Who chose which destination first became a matter of family legend. The Gellerts remembered that Eugen didn’t want to go to Kenya, and that Dr. Gellert said that it was all the same to him, he didn’t mind where he went; so he took the Kenya offer, and Eugen took Singapore. The Stoppard family would remember it the other way round, that it was Gellert who definitely didn’t want to go to Singapore, so Eugen agreed to swap with him. In any case—it was a matter of chance.
With the job offers in hand, Alexander Gellert went every day to the Gestapo office in Zlín, to get permission to travel. Visas were required for them to get out of the country. The Gestapo office kept telling him to come back the next day. In despair, he gave it up, telling Nelly it was no use. Nelly Gellert got dressed up, went to the office and told the Gestapo officer that she wouldn’t leave until he gave her the permits. The story she would tell her children in the years to come was that the officer was charmed by her and “didn’t believe that she could be Jewish”; that she told him she was proud to be Jewish, and that she was doing this for the sake of her two-year-old daughter; and that he said it might cost him his job, but he would give her the permits. And then—the heroic story continues—she said that she wouldn’t leave without two more permits, for her friends the Sträusslers and their little boys.
The Gellerts, equipped with their green visas, stamped 5 April 1939 and valid for a month, got out on 19 April and set out for Nairobi. The Sträusslers, leaving behind their family, friends, employment and lifelong habits, like millions of other wartime refugees desperately fleeing Europe, set out on their enormous journey to Singapore—probably via Hungary and Yugoslavia and thence to Genoa. Petr was three and a half; Tomik was eighteen months old. In all, about fifteen of the Bata doctors got out. The others did not.
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Rock ’n’ Roll, staged in 2006, nearly seventy years after that journey, has as its central character a young man called Jan, who was born in Zlín and whose family left Czechoslovakia before the German occupation because they were Jewish, but returned—to what was then Gottwaldov—in 1948. In the 1960s, Jan has the chance of staying in Cambridge as a student but chooses to go back to Prague under Communism. The play has the vestigial trace of something Stoppard has often thought of writing, an “autobiography in a parallel world,” in which his family has returned “home” after the war and he has grown up in Communist Czechoslovakia, through the middle of the twentieth century. In the first draft of the play, “Jan” was called “Tomas,” “my given name,” Stoppard writes, adding, a little doubtfully, “which, I suppose, is still my name.”
2
In Transit
Did you ever feel like a refugee?
I don’t think one thinks like that at that age. One accepts one’s fate.
I wouldn’t have known the word “refugee” when I was one…It was just my childhood.
The Czechs from Bata reached the British colony of Singapore in the spring of 1939. A branch of Bata had been set up there in 1930, and a Bata factory was being built. They were housed in the city of Singapore, temporarily, in a semicircular ring of fifteen or so small block-houses, where there were about five other Czech families. In the early days, Marta found it pleasant. Their first experience of the tropical climate, the intense warm heat and greenery of the island, was exciting; the locals were friendly; the food—especially the fruit—was exotic. They had a car, and a daily cleaner from the Bata office, and a kind Malayan ayah who pushed the little boys around in a double cane pushchair and tried to speak Czech to them: “Don’t cry!” “Hurry up, bath-time!” After a while the boys went to a nearby English convent kindergarten, travelling by rickshaw. Some letters came through from the families left behind. Marta and Eugen spoke Czech at home, so that was the language the two-to-four-year-old Tomáš first heard and spoke, but he started to pick up some English. The first film he ever saw, Disney’s newly released Pinocchio, was in English. He would always remember Pinocchio’s nose growing like a branch “for telling lies,” and a bird’s nest on the end of it. There was an English family, the Smiths, living next door, and they went to the open-air swimming club together on Sundays. When Mrs. Smith dropped in, Petr would call out, “Mama! Pani Smithova!” Eugen had a harder time: the situation at the hospital was difficult, he didn’t like the heat and food, and a stomach ulcer he’d had as a student flared up. But they settled in, and started to look for a house nearer the sea.
In Stoppard’s screenplay for the 1987 film of J. G. Ballard’s Empire of the Sun, when Shanghai is falling to the Japanese in 1937, an Englishman at the club advises Jim’s father to get him out somewhere safe: “Singapore.” The irony was not lost on the screenwriter. The fall of Shanghai was rapidly followed by the invasion of the eastern seaboard of China and of Indo-China, and the relentless advance southward of the Japanese by air, land and sea. On 7 December 1941, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. The following day they launched air attacks on British airfields in Malaya and Singapore, and Britain and the United States declared war on Japan. On 11 December, Germany and Italy declared war on the United States. By the end of 1941, Hong Kong had fallen to the Japanese, the campaign in Burma had begun and Japanese troops were fighting their way down through the jungles of Malaya towards Singapore. In January 1942 the British forces withdrew from Malaya to Singapore, which was heavily bombarded by the Japanese. Every night, the Sträussler family went to a friend’s shelter. The boys would remember hiding under a table covered with blankets while bombs were falling, and the smell of sandbags.
On 8 and 9 February, the Japanese army crossed the Johore straits from the Malayan mainland. The big British naval defences, the long-range guns all pointing out to sea, from where the attack had been envisaged, could not be moved. The airfields and the water reservoirs were taken within days. Many people were killed, many taken prisoner. By the end of the week, on 15 February 1942, Singapore fell and the British general surrendered. The island would be occupied by the Japanese until the dropping of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, and the end of the war.
The official evacuation had got underway in January, in terror and confusion. Most of the women and children had left by the middle of January—and many of the ships they were on, heading for Australia, were bombed—but Marta stayed on as long as she could, hoping they would all be able to leave together. She did not want to travel alone to Australia. But by the end of the month she had to take the children and go. Eugen, who like some other Czechs enlisted in a British volunteer Defence Corps, would follow when he could. She got onto a ship with the children, and he spent about two hours with them and then had to leave.
People crowded onto any ship that was there, each of them packed with a thousand or two thousand refugees. On 30 and 31 January, the Empress of Japan, Duchess of Bedford, West Point and Wakefield were among the ships that got out. The Empress (renamed Empress of Scotland on her journey) took seventeen hundred evacuees—including Marta and the boys—to Colombo. Their ship, like others, got off to a slow start. The evacuation ships would pull away from the docks, which were being bombed and shelled, wait for several days to avoid the bombs, return for more passengers, wait to form a convoy, locate the minefields and wait again for the tide. The journey was memorably horrible. There was great fear, and great anxiety about the men left behind. There wasn’t enough to eat, the cabins were overcrowded, children were always getting lost, and people slept on mattresses on the deck. At Colombo, there was utter confusion. People were being pushed onto the decks of other ships, with mattresses, not knowing where the ships were going to. Marta and the boys were put off one ship and put on another. Half of her luggage got lost on the dock, including a bag with photographs and personal documents from home. Then she found that the American ship they were on wasn’t going to Australia but to India. One of her worst moments, when the tragedy of it all struck home, was when she was giving the boys a bath. (Tomik noticed how the soap wouldn’t lather, because it was sea water.) Nelly Gellert had given the boys two little St. Christopher medallions to wear round their necks, engraved with their names. Marta hung them on a hook in the bathroom and forgot them, and when she went back for them, they had disappeared. She cried and cried. The boys never forgot it.
In Singapore, in the week of the invasion, there was chaos. Thousands were milling around on the docks, while bombs and shells were falling, all struggling to push onto the boats. Allied ships were being blown up in minefields. Eugen was wounded while on guard duty and spent a few days in hospital. On 13 February, he and another Czech went to see his English friend Leslie Smith and asked him—he was the manager of a firm making navigational instruments—if he could get them out. Smith took them down to the docks and persuaded the captain of one of the ships to take them. They all shook hands, and that was the last he saw of them. There was a large group of ships assembling to leave as a convoy, and many of them were attacked. In 1999, Stoppard met Leslie Smith, then ninety, and was told that his father’s ship had been bombed and sunk in the strait between Sumatra and the island of Bangka, trying to get to Australia. The Vyner Brooke, a merchant ship hastily requisitioned and terribly overcrowded, with many doctors and nurses on board, was bombed and sunk at 2 p.m. on 14 February 1942, in the Bangka Strait. Those who weren’t killed on board and jumped or fell into the sea were strafed and killed in the water. Another, much smaller ship, carrying some of the Czech Bata employees, the SS Redang, was attacked on 13 February, about fifty miles from the Berhala Strait, which separates the islands of Sumatra and Singkep in the South China Sea. Most passengers were killed; a few survivors reached the coast of Sumatra by lifeboat, but were later taken prisoner. Eugen was killed on one of these two ships.
