“I felt intuitively since the age of about 12 that I was Jewish,” she told a panel at ŠTETL Fest, Brno’s annual Jewish culture festival, which invited descendants of the Kohn family back to the city to see their former home and factory and attend the laying of the stones.
Karen himself never practised Judaism or any other religion but behind the English name and quintessentially British career lay a childhood shattered by Nazism.
He was 13, barmitzvah age, when Hitler invaded Prague and he fled Czechoslovakia with his mother, Margaret.
Both of his parents were Jewish, Eugenie says, although Margaret had converted to Catholicism, which offered no protection from Nazi racial laws.
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Karen's two-seater Bond Bug (Image: Mick from England / Wikipedia)[Missing Credit]
For years there had been uncertainty within the family about Margaret’s Jewish background. Eugenie says a DNA test taken by her father later provided compelling confirmation, showing him to be “pretty much 100 per cent Ashkenazi Jewish”.
“It was easier not to be Jewish in Vienna, where Margaret was born and gave birth to all three of her children, at that time,” says Eugenie. “So her efforts to conceal it are not surprising.”
The family had been deeply rooted in Brno for generations.
“The Kohns were one of the most important Jewish families connected with the development of modern Brno,” says Kateřina Hoferová of ŠTETL Fest.
Their business began around 1850, when Tom’s great-grandfather Gottlieb Kohn founded a brickworks. Under his son Max and grandson Pavel it grew into one of the city’s largest brick manufacturers, employing 650 people at its peak during the 1920s. But their place in Brno went far beyond commerce.
“Several generations of the family lived here, built houses and took part in the social life of the city,” Hoferová says.
That world disappeared with the Nazi occupation.
After the war, Margaret and Pavel returned to Czechoslovakia with their other two children in an attempt to recover the family property, while Tom remained in Britain. Father and son never saw each other again as Pavel died in 1951.
His parents had been enthusiastic aviators, and Tom studied aeronautical engineering at Loughborough University before joining Ford. Still not yet 30, he won a prestigious automobile-design competition.
His career took off in earnest after he became managing director and chief designer at Ogle Design in 1962.
What followed was an extraordinary succession of designs, some practical, some playful and many instantly recognisable. Karen was responsible for the wedge-shaped Bond Bug, helped shape the Reliant Scimitar GTE and became closely associated with the Raleigh Chopper, the children’s bicycle that came to define an era.
His work also travelled far beyond Britain’s roads. For the Star Wars movies he designed Luke Skywalker’s Landspeeder, one of the films’ most memorable vehicles. He later designed the Popemobile used during Pope John Paul II’s visit to Britain.
Yet for all his success in Britain, Moravia never disappeared from his sense of self. After the fall of communism in 1989, Karen returned regularly to the place of his childhood and was delighted to regain his Czech citizenship.
“Dad always felt a huge pride in being Moravian,” Eugenie says.
Karen’s relationship with his Jewish background remained understated. He enjoyed rabbi jokes with Eugenie and was close to his cousins in Britain, but he never embraced Judaism himself – unlike his daughter.
“He appreciated my curiosity and intellectual restlessness,” she says. “He was so fond of his cousins and definitely had an affinity for Jewish people, and I think he recognised this in me also.”
Now living in Manchester, Eugenie has a relationship with Menorah Synagogue. She does not regularly attend services, but Jewish life remains an important part of her identity.
For decades, Tom Karen was known through the things he designed: cars, bicycles and futuristic machines that made him one of Britain’s most distinctive industrial designers.
The brass stones in Brno now mark something more elemental – the family and Jewish world from which Thomas Kohn came, and which the Nazis forced him to leave behind.
