Peter Stoppard / Petr Straussler (M / Czechia, 1935), Holocaust survivor

Peter Stoppard / Petr Straussler (M / Czechia, 1935), Holocaust survivor

Tom Stoppard / Tomas Straussler (M / Czechia, 1937), Holocaust survivor

• KEYWORDS : <Refugees> <Singapore> <India>

Biography

Petr Straussler was born August 21, 1935 in Czechia to Eugen Straussler and Martha Becková. On 15 March 1939, the day the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia, the Straussler family fled to Singapore. Before the Japanese occupation of Singapore (February 1942), Petr, his brother Tom, and their mother were sent on to Australia. Stoppard's father remained in Singapore as a British army volunteer, and died in the war. He and his brother spent three years (1943–1946) in a boarding school in Darjeeling in the Indian Himalayas.

In 1945, their mother, Martha, married British army major Kenneth Stoppard, who gave the boys his English surname and, in 1946, moved the family to England.