Stephen Fry Heads To Vienna - Who Do You Think You Are?

Next, Stephen heads for Vienna and military archives held in the city. Here, he discovers more about Martin Neumann's experiences in the First World War. Aged just 18, Martin volunteered the Austro-Hungarian army and won a medal for his service on the Eastern Front in Romania.

When the conflict ended, Martin visited distant cousins, the Brauns, in Vienna. Martin subsequently married Rosa Braun, Stephen's grandmother. Seeing the apartment block where the Brauns lived, Stephen discovers a plaque that features the names of his great-grandparents, Samuel and Berta. It's a monument to those who lived in the building and were taken to the concentration camps during the Holocaust. Samuel and Berta were among 65,000 Viennese Jews deported to a ghetto in Latvia in 1942.

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. However, Stephens ancestry is in fact of Jewish European descent.

The story that pricked Stephen's interest the most when researching his family was that of his beloved maternal grandfather, Martin Newman. Martin's actual name was Neumann. By the time of his death, when Stephen was just eleven years old, his flamboyance had made an indelible mark on his grandson.

Stephen hopes to discover more about Martin's life and what happened to the other branches of the Neumann family?

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