Dark Dreams

by Sonja Dechian

  Denada told me about how sad she felt in detention. ‘I pray to Jesus to make me free one day, out of this gaol, because this is not detention, detention is just a name; this is gaol.’

  Denada told me that it was very bad in detention and that she cried everyday. This made me sad, and want to help her even more. Through our letters we became great friends

  The first time I saw Villawood was an aerial shot on the TV news and I had an idea of where my friend was. But the feeling I got the first time we drove into Villawood was sickening. We drove down to see a double layer of wire fencing and razor wire at the top and bottom of the fences. We were escorted into the visiting area by the guards. We were not able to take a camera to have a photo of Denada and me together. We had to sit in the hot visiting area surrounded by razor wire and guards. It’s hard understanding that my friend has spent more than a year of her life in there and that so many others have as well. That night I had nightmares and couldn’t sleep. Often on the news I hear about refugees and detention centres and find it disturbing knowing that there are children behind bars.

  Denada came to Australia for a better life but here she lost everything, she tells me. She lost her freedom, her identity, her family and friends, her birthplace and home. After being in detention for ten months Denada was starting to feel the strain. Her health was getting bad and she was losing weight, she even started taking depression tablets.

  Denada told me that during the night guards would come into their rooms at random. Even after Denada left a sign on the door asking the guards to knock, they continued to enter without permission. There were musters at very early times of the morning where the detainees would have to get up for a head count.

  When Denada was only ten, there were a lot of demonstrations against the communist regime in Albania. Denada’s family felt the strain. Every day her parents would remind her and her brother and sister not to tell anyone that they prayed or made the sign of the cross. Her parents said that if they did this they would be in a lot of trouble and could be put in gaol for twenty-five years. They felt they were isolated from the world. During the upheavals against the communist regime there was a lot of disruption and often the schools were closed.

  When she was about sixteen, war hit Albania. There were a lot of troubles and the government gave orders for people to stay inside. Bullets were fired into their apartment on the third floor, and they would lie on the floor twenty-four hours a day. So Denada went to Kosova for a safer life, but two years later war broke out again when Serbia began ethnic cleansing against the Albanian Kosovars.

  Denada is an intelligent, enthusiastic, kind person, even while she was in detention. She organised the children in there to play games such as hide and seek. When she spoke to them after she left, they told her that they were too sad to play hide and seek any more because she was gone. She won the women’s pool competition and is good at table tennis. She was school champion at long jump when she was about twelve. She is good at learning languages and can speak fluent Italian, Albanian and English. She taught herself Italian by watching Italian cartoons on TV in Albania. When she was in her teens, she edited the church magazine, and was on the radio once. She won a painting competition for young people called ‘Vincent’s Friend’.

  Denada is now out of detention and doing a TAFE course and has applied for university entrance. She was accepted into university but cannot go because she has to pay overseas fees that she cannot afford. Denada was interviewed by Cosmopolitan magazine and asked about her hopes for the future.

  ‘Before I left Albania, I dreamt of studying, going out with friends and shopping—all the things girls do. But I was denied that freedom when I arrived at Villawood. I am taking one day at a time. Ultimately, I want to become a psychiatrist to help other people.’

  My friendship with Denada has affected me a lot. I am now more interested in human rights and Denada’s experience has made me more aware of how lucky I am. I often think about Denada and refugees, and it makes me angry that there are detention centres in Australia.

  Denada now lives in Adelaide and gave me her permission to tell her story.

  The Story of Jenny K

  by Chloe Costas, aged 17

  In the spring of 1939, the German government gave two demands to the Polish government: firstly, to return the area of Danzig to German control. Secondly, to give Germany a road and rail passage across the Polish Corridor, which had separated Germany from East Prussia since the end of the First World War. In return, the German government would promise to defend Poland against the Soviet Union. The Polish government refused. On the first of September that year, Poland was invaded by the German army. Jenny was eleven years old. Her father had gone to America just before the war started, and she had no brothers or sisters. She lived with her mother, in the small town of Krasnik, near the university city of Lublin where, she proudly tells me, the Pope studied. Jenny didn’t officially become a refugee until the end of World War Two. However, her experiences in the lead-up to 1945 are the basis of her story.

  After the initial fighting, which lasted a mere thirty-two days before the Polish government was forced to surrender, the Germans began to take over all aspects of Polish life. They settled Polish farms; the biggest and nicest houses in town were used to house military personnel. Police curfews were enforced.

  ‘It was very scary, there was no food, because the factories, everything, they rip it, they take all the machines to Germany, because they needed bombs, so the people got no jobs.’

  In addition, in November 1939 it was announced that Polish children were only allowed to attend school up to a grade four level. SS boss, Heinrich Himmler, said: The sole goal of school should be: simple arithmetic up to 500; writing of one’s name; a doctrine that it is a divine law to obey the Germans … I don’t think that reading should be required.

  There is no doubt that the people of Poland understood this. Jenny recalls: ‘We weren’t allowed to go to school because the Germans didn’t want to educate people …’

  The Germans also realised the immense potential of the Polish, in terms of labour: by 1942, more than one million Poles had been deported to Germany to work as slaves, in farms, factories, mines and the like. These deportations were often very violent. For example, the Germans might drive into a community at night, burst into homes with weapons drawn, and order families into trucks to be taken away. While Jenny was not captured in this way, the method that the Germans used to deport her, along with her mother, was equally callous. One morning she and her mother caught the train from Krasnik to Lublin to do some shopping. Jenny had never been to Lublin before, so she was very excited. They got off the train in Lublin, had their tickets checked, and were directed to one side of the platform, while other people were directed to the opposite side. They had no idea what was going on until someone told them they had been caught by the Germans, ‘like dogs in a street.’ Prior to her capture, Jenny had heard stories of how others had been caught: ‘They catch you in a street or in a church, when after the mass you come outside—and they take you.’

  Despite the warnings of a local councillor to all young people to ‘be prepared … to go to Germany,’ Jenny and her mother were completely surprised and unprepared. Along with roughly two hundred others they were packed into trucks and taken to some barracks in Lublin. Jenny was fourteen.

  Conditions in the barracks were terrible. Every day all the prisoners were counted, but no names were taken. It was next to impossible to escape, due to the high fences and guards. There were three basic meals per day. Breakfast consisted of a mug of tea and bread, while lunch and dinner were both soup: ‘We get … soup like the army, barley and big beans and five or six slices of bread, really brown bread.’

  The barracks were quickly overrun with lice. Once a week the prisoners were marched in lines to the public baths where they could wash themselves. One night, after a month of this, everyone who had been captured was marched to the railway station, under guard, and bun
dled onto a train to Germany.

  Once in Germany, the Poles were treated viciously. The German government’s use of propaganda labelled them untermenschen, meaning ‘sub-human.’ They were forced to wear a purple ‘P’ on their clothes, much as Jews were forced to wear a Star of David. Jenny recalls: ‘We got the number P, because we Polish people. Just in case the police catch you they knew it. If we don’t have, we get maybe twenty belts.’

  In the lead-up to the war, Hitler had made claims that the Germans living in Poland had been forced to live under an inferior people. Newspaper articles urged German citizens to treat the Polish as inferior.

  Poles in Germany were segregated from the ‘master race’ of Germans. Jenny was not oblivious to such racism: ‘I remember we walk in the street, and there were two German ladies, young ones, and they’ve got a little boy, two or three, and they walk and say “Heil Hitler,” and then they saw the number, the P, and say “You schweine Pole”—we have to go across the road.’

  The Polish deportees had to endure inhumane living conditions. Jenny, like labourers across Germany, worked a twelve-hour day. She got up at 5am every morning, started work at 6am, then at 6pm was sent back to the barracks where she slept, with twenty other female Polish slaves (including her mother). A further twenty male Polish slaves were housed in a separate barracks. They were all given forty minutes for lunch. During this twelve-hour day, Jenny and her fellow captives were made to help manufacture bombs. Jenny was given the hardest job: a fiddly task which required her to shave minuscule amounts off the parts, measuring each to the millimetre. Her boss, the factory owner, expected her to understand this difficult task straight away. She remembers that, ‘in the beginning they didn’t tell you that the shavings have to be separate … Like aluminium and some different stuff, I put together and the German boss come and hit me in the head. My head was going around. For three days I had headache. But nobody tell you nothing.’

  This was enough to persuade Jenny not to attempt to sabotage the bomb parts: she was fully aware that if she did, she would be sent to a concentration camp. However, because she was so fast at completing her task, she was able to lighten her load some days. The German lady who had made them before the Poles arrived had managed to produce roughly sixty or seventy every day. Jenny found she was able to make from eighty to one hundred in the same amount of time.

  ‘I was so quick, so I hiding some for next day.’

  For this fifty-five hour week, the slaves were paid two marks. This was the price, roughly, of a dozen matches.

  The repetitive nature of the work Jenny was forced to do caused huge blisters on her hands. A kind German lady at the factory spoke to Jenny about them:

  ‘She told me, not only me but another girl, when we were bleeding, but we didn’t have any cream, no fat, nothing, and she say “You know what? When you go to loo, just put the urine on, and they heal.” So we did. It stung like vinegar, but after three days it was working. It was like silk hands.’

  Despite this, physical reminders of the blisters did not disappear completely for ten years.

  Slave labourers were given just enough food to ensure they could keep working. In the factory where she was taken to work, Jenny was given three scant meals per day. Breakfast was a drink, similar to tea, but made from ‘German herbs,’ two slices of bread and half a slice of devon. Lunch consisted of one piece of bread (they were given five slices per day) and a bowl of soup: ‘sweet turnips and cabbage, big pieces, and potatoes.’ Dinner was the same, but with two slices of bread, and the other half of the devon.

  Jenny remained at the factory until the end of the war—three years in total. These three years of captivity ended abruptly upon the defeat of Nazism in Europe. After spending two days and nights hiding in a cellar with nothing to eat but raw beetroot and carrots, the Poles emerged to find the factory compound virtually destroyed by American soldiers. Upon seeing the purple ‘P’, a Polish officer was immediately found to speak to them in their own language. He told them that the war was over, and they were free to go. They remained at some nearby barracks for two weeks, and then had to decide whether to return to Poland or try to make a new life somewhere else. With admirable foresight, Jenny’s mother predicted that Stalin would be as bad as Hitler, and opted to remain in Germany. So, still together, they became refugees and were moved to a camp roughly twelve kilometres away. At the camp, a doctor told Jenny she would have lived only another six months had the war not ended. She was eighteen.

  At the camp, she also met a 26-year-old pharmacist, who could speak English. Jenny’s mum kept saying, ‘You’d better get married, and be family, they is treated different, you know.’ So Jenny got married.

  Two years later she had her first son, and in 1949 the family of four (including Jenny’s mother) moved to Australia. In 1953 they moved to a small town adjacent to the still developing national capital—Jenny’s mum saying that Canberra’s climate was similar to that of Poland. She has lived there ever since. She has worked in places like the Members’ dining room at Parliament House (before new Parliament House was built), and has served many now famous politicians. Gough Whitlam apparently once told her she looked like the Queen. When Harold Holt was Prime Minister she would take him his breakfast in his office, and once, she tells me with a cheeky smile, she sat down in his chair.

  After her first husband died, Jenny remarried, and had a second son. He and his brother both live nearby, and she now has two primary-school aged grandsons, on whom she dotes. For a woman who underwent such a traumatic experience, Jenny is remarkably cheerful and optimistic. She has returned to Poland three times since being forcibly removed in 1942, and hopes to go again soon. Jenny has been a captive, a slave and a refugee; a wife, a mother and a grandmother; a housekeeper, a waitress and, above all, a survivor.

  For the Love of a Child: Mai’s Story

  by Khazmira Florentyna Bashah, aged 12

  It was 14th February 1982, our aeroplane touched down at Perth Airport. Everyone was handing out roses and hugging us. It felt wonderful. It seemed like the whole of Perth had come out with flowers just for us. Many years later I was to learn that it was Valentine’s Day.

  Now, on 14th June 2002, here I was, waiting for a twelve-year-old girl to come and interview me about being a refugee. I was filled with so many emotions, as I had never in all these years been asked my story. I wondered what she would ask me and if I would remember how things really were in the Saigon we had fled. As I sat waiting for her to arrive, my mind drifted back to those years and many painful memories came back to me. My own memories and those through the eyes of my mother …

  It was 1975 and the streets of Saigon were filled with beggars, food stalls, cyclos (motor bikes) and the usual throng of people. There were many smells of food and the heat made everything feel so very steamy. Rumours abounded about Vietnam going to war, about the Americans taking over the cities, and the threat of Communism was hanging over everyone.

  My father was an army captain, my mother a nurse and they enjoyed a pleasant middle class way of life until 30th April 1975 when their whole world changed. War came with a sudden awakening for my parents; the Communist party came into power. My father was immediately put in prison. My mother, who was pregnant with me, was taken in the middle of the night every night to be questioned about my father’s activities, but she was kept alive because she was a nurse and they needed her skills to repair the many wounded flooding into the city.

  Many people were re-zoned into the hills away from their families. They were sent away with nothing. Many people took their own lives.

  When my mother gave birth to me, she named me Mai. Before she had time to recover from the birth, she was told she would be going to Cambodia to nurse the soldiers. This was not a choice.

  Mother was alone and knew she would have to go but if she took me I would surely die. She had befriended the nuns at a convent and as she handed me over to them she made a promise to herself that no matter what she would survive an
d come back for me. She was determined that we would be reunited as a family one day. She was determined to live.

  My mother’s days and nights in Cambodia were filled with terror. Her nursing skills stood aside as she became more like a butcher, sawing arms and legs off the wounded soldiers because there was no other way to treat them. So much pain, so much suffering was endured by so many.

  The torture and cruelty continued every minute of the day. The only thing that kept my mother alive was the promise to come back for me when all this was over.

  My mother was a good woman and the doctors she worked with felt she had much courage and a very strong will. She was determined that she would find me one day. The doctors formed a plan to help my mother leave Cambodia and be reunited with me. They signed papers saying she had gone mad and that she should be released. The Viet Cong almost had a fear of the insane: they were the only people in the country to be left alone. They decided to release my mother.

  The doctors who had made this possible then disclosed to her that throughout the war they had gathered the names and addresses of many of the wounded they had treated. They tucked notes into my mother’s clothing. She was to try to deliver as many notes as she could to the families of the wounded and dying.

  Upon her return to Saigon my mother kept her promise and delivered the messages to the grateful families who for the first time in many months had news of their loved ones.