Dear ladies,
Welcome to join us for some Christmas drinks and nibbles at The Duchess of Kensington. We thought it would be a nice way to end a year of many interesting book meetings. We are fortunate to have the author, Felice Hardy, who will join us and make a presentation of her book “The Tennis Champion Who Escaped the Nazis”.
The story is based on the dramatic escape of Felice’s grandparents and mother from Nazi-occupied Vienna in the months before the Second World War. Her grandmother, Liesl, came from a wealthy family of distillers and was a celebrated athlete. Tennis Champion of Austria in 1930, she was still ranked No. 2 in 1937, when her Jewish heritage forced her to stop competing.
By contrast, Felice’s grandfather David was one of eleven children from a desperately poor family in rural Slovakia. He left home at fifteen for Vienna, where he began work as a butcher. By twenty-one, he owned a major textiles company manufacturing silk stockings.
Still in his twenties, David became president of the largest sports club in Europe. He took its football team to London, where they beat West Ham 5–0 at Upton Park – the first foreign team to defeat a British league side. On the journey home, he rewarded his players with a weekend in Paris and, at the Louvre, met Liesl, his social opposite.
Their daughter Dorli, Felice’s mother, was twelve when the family left everything behind to escape to Britain, with David crawling eighteen miles through the snow across the Czech-Polish frontier.
Once safely in London, Liesl resumed her tennis career. She beat Tim Henman’s grandmother to qualify for the 1939 Wimbledon Championships, where she played singles and doubles. After the war, Liesl and Dorli played competitive tennis together. In 1946, they became the only mother and daughter to have played doubles together at Wimbledon. Dorli went on to compete there for six consecutive years and also played at the US Open.
The book also reveals the terrible fate of the relatives they left behind, including Liesl’s elder sister, who joined the resistance in Slovakia.
Woven through the story is Felice’s search for her own identity. Born and raised in London by a British father and refugee mother, she grew up in a family scarred by survivor’s guilt. Her mother and grandparents buried their pre-war lives beneath a blanket of silence that concealed their dead relatives, their religion and their origins. For half her life, Felice knew little of her roots. Only after her mother and grandparents had died did she begin the journey to discover who she really was.
For any queries, contact event organizers Roopa Girard and Marika Carle at bookgroup@kcwc.org.uk
