Adrian Phillips has recounted the story my father told him, about how Tom Stoppard’s family (originally the Sträusslers) escaped from Czechoslovakia in 1939.
The key person in saving my family and the Sträusslers was Dr Bohuslav Albert, the director of the Bata hospital in Zlin, where my father, Alexander Gellert, and Tom’s father, Eugen Sträussler, worked as doctors.
After he had secured positions at the Bata outposts in Nairobi and Singapore, and permission from Britain, Adolf Hitler unexpectedly invaded Czechoslovakia. My father was interviewed by the Gestapo over 10 days and failed to get any agreement to leave.
My mother, Nelly (Kornelia), who was very beautiful, bravely went by herself to the Zlin Gestapo HQ and met a lone Gestapo officer, telling him that she was not leaving until he issued her with the exit permits for both families. She stunned him by openly declaring she was Jewish, which he didn’t believe “because she was so beautiful”. However, he was captivated, and she left with all the permits for both families.
When my sister, Vera, who was born a few days before Tom in Zlin, died in 2019, he ended a letter of condolence to me with these words: “Speaking of survival, you may know that I and [his brother] Peter and our parents owed our lives to Nelly in 1939, because she charmed or forced our exit permits from the Gestapo office. There is so much more to say!”
