This essay by Tom Stoppard was originally published in Talk magazine, September 1999.
Here, now – here and now in this room in the only country that is my country and among books in the only language I can remember speaking – the English writer who is myself considers the Czech family Beck in 1908. There are seven of them, dressed up for the studio photographer: Rudolf and Regina, my maternal grandparents; my future aunties Wilma, Berta, Anny, and Irma; and their little brother Ota in his sailor top. They stare back across 90 years of war and peace and war and peace. This is a photograph we have seen countless times, each time different, the family group who never made it together through the Holocaust.