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British Broadcasting Corporation Home. Stephen Fry seems as English as tweed, silver toast racks and the London black cab he can be seen driving around the streets of the capital. The story that pricked Stephen's interest the most was that of his beloved maternal grandfather, Martin Newman. Martin's actual name was Neumann, and he was a Jew of eastern European descent.

By the time of his death, when Stephen was just eleven years old, his flamboyance had made an indelible mark on his grandson. Martin had left Surany, a small town in what is now Slovakia, in , with his wife, Rosa, and their daughter Gertrude. They settled in Bury St Edmunds, England. During the s, Britain was keen to develop its sugar beet industry and Bury St Edmunds was chosen as the best place to situate a factory.

In Surany, Martin was working as an agricultural advisor in the largest sugar beet factory in Europe, and was hired to teach the British a thing or two about the cultivation of sugar beet. Stephen was interested in discovering more about Martin and his family's life prior to their move to East Anglia. And what of the other branches of the Neumann family?

By the late s, with the spectre of Nazism beginning to loom in Germany, widespread anti-Semitism was already affecting the lives of millions of Jews across mainland Europe. What had been the fate of those Neumanns who had stayed behind when Martin came to England? Despite being just eighteen years old when he volunteered, he won a medal on the Eastern Front - where millions of men lost their lives - in the battle for Romania.

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He worked his way from the rank of private to corporal. When the war was over, he visited some distant cousins, the Brauns, in Vienna. A member of the Braun family, Rosa, would eventually become his wife.