When Stoppard's family (then named "Straussler") fled Czechoslovakia to
escape the Nazis, they stopped identifying as Jews. Stoppard was still
a young child when this happened, and by the end of the war, his father
had died and his mother had remarried to a British man named Kenneth
Stoppard, who gave Tom his last name and insisted that the family's
former Judaism be kept secret. Tom was only given very vague
information concerning his family's Judaism until he was far into his
adulthood, when he discovered that all four of his grandparents were
Jewish and prisoners at Terezin (Theresienstadt) Concentration Camp,
where they were murdered by the Nazis. When he became more interested
in exploring his Jewish roots, his stepfather asked (in 1996) that he
stop using the name "Stoppard" because he didn't want his name to be associated
with a Jew. Tom responded that this was an impractical request, since
by that time he was almost 60 years old and had been living, writing,
and winning theater and literary awards under the name "Tom Stoppard"
for a very long time.
