The Miracle Typist

by Leon Silver

  When the article was published, Jews in Poland were in their last stages of annihilation, with the cooperation of some of the population. Witnesses like his brother Ijio could testify that a sentence had been passed and executed. Jan, in his article, laid the groundwork for a Polish national criminal indictment of its Jews. He had simply been establishing a case for the prosecution after the hanging sentence had been carried out. Surely when the war was over the world was bound to ask, ‘Why the Polish people? Why did they, of all Europeans, help with so much enthusiasm to wipe out a helpless ethnic minority?’

  ‘Guilty as charged,’ would be the rallying call the Correspondent had established.

  Of course Jan Bielatowicz had known what was going on. Rivers of information flowed out of Poland through the active Home Army underground. Everything was passed on to the Government in Exile in London – did the Correspondent not, right in the middle of the war, manage to get a typed note out by dispatch rider? Did he not rush in through the snowstorm to deliver the message that Klara and Juliusz were now hidden by the Church? Yes, Jan was genuinely thrilled with the news. This was one Jewish family he wanted to save because he knew Tolek and liked him. If only all the other Poles had got to know all the other Jews and saved their families.

  On the day of their confrontation in the wrecked Italian farmhouse, when Tolek had shared what he had witnessed in the woods, Jan had put his notepad away without writing one word.

  * * *

  After the Korean War started in 1950, Tolek feared it would transform into another world war. He needed to get Bruna and their daughter out of Europe. The Klings family stayed in Milan until they got landing documents for Australia. They left their thriving business, their partners, their beautiful apartment and their good friends. They sailed from Genoa – where Tolek had sent the Hungarian refugees with new passports wrangled from the Poles. It was 1952, their daughter was five years old, and Bruna’s mother, Nonna Bianca, came with them to help establish a new life in the blessed country.

  The family stood at the rails of a Lloyd Triestino liner: a huge black ship with a white rim, tall masts at each end and round funnel in the middle; a migrant mule. Their Italian and Polish friends came to see them off and a band played on the docks. It was a party atmosphere, a far cry from Tolek’s European departure so many years before, stealing away in the middle of the night from Split in Yugoslavia. Now, in this ship decorated with streamers in all colours of the rainbow, they waved from the upper deck. Soon Europe would disappear forever. A new country was ahead of them, a new future and a new family. It would finally be over. But this time his wife, child and mother-in-law were by Tolek’s side.

  Standing on that ship, leaning over the rails, they were already beyond the manic scenes on the dock below them. Technically, they had already left Europe. Their goodbye yells disappeared into the music and noise.

  Tolek’s past, his history, had been obliterated from Europe. It was no longer a place for him. Tolek strived to erase from his mind that visit to see the Modena Speakers. He struggled not to remember the touch of those skeleton hands. Those people of his age, ancient before their time.

  The ship sailed away slowly, the band’s music faded, the streamers stretched and broke. Two streamers resisted the separation. Tolek slammed his fist down, severing them. He and Bruna held their daughter up to the rails and cried. Tolek told himself that maybe he had, after all, done the right thing.

  Downstairs in their cabin was a copy of Jan Bielatowicz’s book Brygada Karpacka (Carpathian Brigade), a history of the war. It carried a personal dedication to Tolek Klings.

  2. Translated from Polish by the Australian Commonwealth Department of Immigration and Ethnic Affairs Translation Service. 16 December 1985

  21 G’day, sport…

  The new Klings family arrived in Australia in 1952.

  Ted – the ex-law clerk and veteran of several armies – started a business with a partner selling ladies’ underwear to small-town haberdashery stores while Bruna ran the office and Nonna looked after their gorgeous daughter. No more law clerk, no more honoured soldier, but with his poor command of English and his new Aussie name, he had to start somewhere. On one of his first trips, Ted loaded up the car as usual at four am on Monday and headed to the bush. By the end of that day he was completely lost.

  He stopped at night on a narrow country road, miles from anywhere in a teeming rainstorm. Ahead of him a narrow bridge’s sign declared: NO PASSING ON BRIDGE. Ted stopped the car and sat, believing it was forbidden to drive on the bridge. Perhaps it wasn’t safe. Not knowing what to do, he huddled in the freezing car, wrapped in his coat, resigned to the idea of having to wait out the night.

  After some hours, a farmer drove by in an old pick-up truck. He passed Ted’s car and crossed the bridge. Ted told himself off for being stupid enough not to cross the bridge and tried to start the car to follow, but it was so cold now that the car refused to start.

  The farmer turned around, came back and stopped opposite Ted. He rolled down his window and leaned out into the rain.

  ‘What’s the trouble, mate?’

  Ted pushed the starter button a few times. Nothing. He rolled down his window, and hit the door with frustration. ‘The bloody car won’t start.’ Ted had learned that word soon enough upon arriving in the country.

  ‘Sounds like a flat battery to me, mate.’

  ‘Where can I get it charged?’

  ‘Not tonight, mate, you can’t.’ The man paused. ‘Better come home with me.’ The farmer stepped out into the rain, tall and quite old, wearing baggy trousers, gumboots and a cotton shirt with the sleeves torn out. And an Australian Army slouch hat.

  ‘You a Digger?’ Ted asked.

  ‘Yep.’ The farmer lifted the bonnet of Ted’s car and unscrewed the dead battery. The cold and rain didn’t seem to worry him. Embarrassed to stay in his car, Ted got out.

  ‘We’d better take this with us and get it charged up in the morning.’ The farmer lifted out the battery.

  ‘I’m a Rat of Tobruk,’ Ted said, showing him the medal pinned onto his lapel. ‘Ted Klings – I fought with the Aussies in the desert in Africa.’

  The farmer straightened up, the rain falling in a stream from his hat’s brim. He looked at Ted as if for the first time. ‘Jeff Wilson.’ They shook hands. ‘What army?’

  ‘Polish.’ Ted danced a little to keep his feet warm. ‘Attached to the British.’

  ‘In Tobruk?’ Jeff was still holding the dead battery aloft.

  ‘Tobruk and all over the desert. We landed by sea from Alexandria to relieve the Aussies who were sent back to fight in New Guinea.’

  ‘I was in Tobruk.’ The farmer placed the battery in the back of his ute and covered it with a tarpaulin. He got into his car and Ted hesitated.

  ‘I’ve got four suitcases of samples in the boot… Maybe I’d better take them with us.’

  ‘What’re you selling, mate?’ Jeff got out again to help.

  ‘Ladies’ underwear.’

  They piled the suitcases in the back and covered them with the same tarpaulin.

  ‘One night in Tobruk, in the front-line trenches, the A-line, the Germans bombarded us all night so that we couldn’t even lift our heads. I pressed down hard into the dirt but something was digging into my ribs. When the bombardment lifted, I saw that it was the elbow of a dead Aussie soldier covered in layers of dirt from the collapsed trench.’

  They drove to the Wilsons’ farmhouse. The house was similar in style to the shot-up Italian farmhouse outside Ancona where he’d drunk whisky with Jan. The walls and roof were intact, of course, and the big window facing the paddocks shone in the moonlight, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that he was walking on utensils and rice that had been spilled all over the floor.

  Ted shook himself out of the reverie as he was introduced to Jeff’s wife and four kids.

  ‘This is Ted Klings, a mate from Tobruk.’

  Ted was shown to the bathroom to wash up, then ha
d a dinner of lamb chops, mash, green beans and tomatoes with the family. After dinner the kids did homework, the wife cleared up, and the two men, having a beer, sat and reminisced about the war. How many died, how many survived, who was lucky enough to escape the slaughter. Ted’s many close escapes raised the farmer’s eyebrows.

  Ted had a shower, put on a loaned pair of freshly pressed pyjamas, and was bedded down in one of the son’s beds, the boy having moved in with his brother for the night. In the morning, after a hearty breakfast of bacon and eggs, Jeff was about to drive him to the garage to get a tow truck when Ted took out a wad of Aussie pounds.

  ‘I need to fix you up, Jeff, for this super Wilson motel for one night’s accommodation and delicious tucker.’

  ‘Don’t be silly, Ted, we’re war mates, aren’t we?’

  When Ted got home late on Friday night, he told his wife the story. ‘I’m a foreigner, a reffo, a Jew with broken English and a Semitic face. Making a living as the ghetto Jew hawking schmatiz. Rags. They treated me like I was the prime minister and refused payment. No suspicion, no hostility or fear, no simmering hate or prejudice… And my own colleagues, my own Polish comrades in arms –’ Pause. ‘I’m so glad we came to Australia, Bruna.’

  * * *

  On his travels, Ted stayed in pubs. Whenever he leaned on the bar to order a beer, paying up front, he couldn’t help but think of the day when he was thirteen and had his hair cut then helped Tatte in the restaurant. The eight big Poles who came in and ordered the stew and the barrels of vodka. How Tatte was so worried about making them pay when they’d finished. Tatte would have just loved the Aussie pub system; no money upfront, no beer. No need to call the constable and make the culprits promise to pay ‘another day’.

  ‘Klings United.’ Ted chuckled to himself when he saw the ‘Carlton United’ signs. ‘Klings United.’ He imagined this sign over the bar in Tatte’s pub.

  War memories were everywhere. Ted saw himself again and again slamming his hand down to cut those last streamers connecting the migrant ship to the European shore. He hadn’t done such a sterling job. He was still connected to that shoreline in his head. Even though he was now Ted and not Tolek, he couldn’t fool those streamers; it was impossible to go through a day or a week or a month without one of those stubbornly attached streamers leading him to Jews who had survived the war through some miraculous turn of events. Through the RSL and the Polish Embassy, Ted tried to find out what happened to Tatte’s cousins, the Nester family in Stryj, the dry-cleaning specialist. He discovered that the entire community perished.

  Schrenzel, the Lwów solicitor, Ted’s boss, who could’ve gone for a holiday to England, then Australia, died in a concentration camp with his wife and eight-year-old son.

  Every Yom Kippur prayers, Ted saw himself sitting in the Hungarian village synagogue after he was robbed in the woods. He thought of the other Jewish soldier who’d decided to risk making it back home. He had hugged Ted then crossed the Hungarian border back to Poland and disappeared without a trace. Still, Ted thought, he could’ve rescued his family and fled to Israel or South America.

  He remembered the two houses in Budapest he’d managed, packed to the rafters with refugees. How many survived? Once the Germans took over, not many. If only he’d had the documents, he could’ve moved them on faster. Ted thought about those refugees often and, the first time he bought a photocopier for his office, he put his passport in and ran off twenty copies. What he wouldn’t have given for one of these machines in the refugee help centre in Budapest, when they were forging travel papers for hundreds of castaways.

  Ludwig Voyanoff, his solicitor’s cousin in Zagreb, who sent him the food parcels at the soldiers’ internment camp, committed suicide when Yugoslavia joined the Germans and the Jews were rounded up. He could’ve made a mistake. The Jews were put into a concentration camp run by the Italians and most survived. His wife, Stella, could have survived. Ted found no trace of her.

  Ted followed the boat streamer to a used office equipment store and finally located a Remington typewriter similar to the one he had used in the war. Holding it up in the air with two hands, he was swept back to locking up the army’s Miracle Typist Remington when he was discharged. This machine had the same polished brown case with green velvet lining and even the dangling lock and key. He now used it in the office whenever he could and it became his trusted companion. In Leon Uris’s novel Battle Cry the new recruits were taught to compare their rifles with their penis: one was for war and the other for joy. For Tolek in Haifa, it could well have been: ‘This is my typewriter, this is my gun. Both are for life-saving, not for fun.’

  Ted needed to get a life, sever those streamers. And he knew it. Bruna did her best to help, supporting him in every way.

  In April 1965, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the formation of the Polish Independent Carpathian Brigade, General Kopański came to Australia at the invitation of the Polish RSL. Ted and his former CO, dressed in civvies, fell into each other’s arms, much to the delight of the ex-Polish soldiers in the room. Ted and Stanisław sat and drank strong Polish tea with floating lemon slices and ate ciasteczka herbaty, red-centred Polish tea cookies that had been baked for the occasion. They reminisced about the war and the time Kopański flew in to yank them out from under the Germans’ feet. There was so much; they could’ve talked for a week.

  Kopański took part in the Tobruk Sunday observance at the Melbourne Shrine, Ted right behind him. Before he left, Kopański gave Ted Klings a dedication to their war-time together: an officially typed letter to his comrade in arms containing an expression of true friendship.

  General Kopański finished the war with an impressive set of decorations. ‘My general’, Tolek had called him, then and now, and wanted to add a personal decoration – perhaps on behalf of all the Polish Jews who served under him – the honorary title of a ‘mensch’: decent human being. Brave, fair, untouched by the anti-Semitic scourge. Long live his memory. So was Tolek’s direct commanding officer, Captain Kasprowicz, a decent and fair officer, saving his life a couple of times from anti-Semitic harassment, thus reinforcing crazy Eliezer’s wedding blessing. Or maybe Eliezer’s blessing was meant to work through them.

  Even non-war social occasions were wallpapered with war memories. One night Ted, Bruna and some friends were sitting in a fashionable restaurant in Toorak Road, South Yarra, enjoying a sumptuous Sunday lunch. Sitting on the open-air terrace, they were approached by a beggar who stopped at their table and asked Ted for two dollars to buy something to eat. Unkempt as he was, carrying his belongings in two plastic bags. Ted invited him to sit down, and ordered him a three-course meal. The man ate in silence, wolfing down the food.

  Ted told whoever was listening about the Polish soldiers released from Siberia. The way they treasured mouldy bread, clutching it to their chests like precious gold. The wide-eyed man wasn’t very impressed, he gulped down his food and beer, shouldered his belongings, thanked Ted and left.

  * * *

  Visiting the Melbourne Art Centre with his wife and daughter, Ted saw an unsigned old master painting, titled ‘Charlemagne’s Soldiers in Retreat’. Towards the end of King Charlemagne’s reign, his soldiers, a group of bedraggled, tired men and horses, lean forward with the last of their strength, shouldering their way through a mountain pass, escaping bad weather and pursuers. Ted had no doubt that if they could, they would gladly escape over the edge of the heavily carved wooden frame to seek a new life in beautiful Melbourne.

  Having dinner one night in a country pub – steak, chips, salad and a beer – he again heard it – ‘G’day, sport’, loud and clear, and it tumbled Ted back to that African sandstorm in the desert so many years ago. He suddenly realised that it wasn’t the words themselves that had fascinated him, it was the unrestrained openness, the ‘we’re all equal’ manner that had pulled him into this Australian loop.

  Hearing it again now, smiling to himself, Ted brushed off the desert sand and pulled up his British army
shorts. A drinker at the bar looked at him and grinned. Ted waved his hand. Too hard to explain.

  * * *

  Over the years, Tolek and Bruna established a thriving knitwear business. With the skills and knowledge Tolek acquired in Milan, and Bruna’s Italian culture, they built up a large plant of imported knitting machines and employed fifty people.

  They aimed for the top end of the market. Their target was to add a certain Italian ‘bella figura’ to their products. Melbourne became the hub of the thriving Australian textile industry, and in that postwar world of people trying to put the past behind them and customers looking to refurbish themselves into new fashionable identities, the business did very well. The brand name they chose was ‘Sovrano’ – a name picked from the Milan telephone directory that Bruna had brought with them on the boat.

  The family prospered, eventually settling into a large suburban house with a garden of lawns, trees and flowers. They enjoyed their life, going to opera and concerts. Many Sunday afternoon parties for friends were held on their back terrace, where they ate delicious food, drank lots of wine and whisky and celebrated life. A bit of Europe’s life essence in a suburban Melbourne backyard.

  Nonna Bianca, Bruna’s mother, made a vital contribution to the family’s Australian success. Nonna’s dignity and Northern Italian reserve enabled her to embrace the new world and her responsibility of caring for her younger granddaughter. Lauretta grew up in a multicultural home. Italian was the spoken language but the home was frequented by Jewish postwar survivors from various backgrounds and countries speaking many languages. It was a wonderful, rich environment for a young girl to observe and absorb.