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Three days had passed since we had left Marseilles and the ship still echoed with the sound of banging and hammering. Even over breakfast at the long refectory tables in the dining room, as we tapped the shells of eggs so small that they might have come from pigeons, and spread runny marmalade on white bread as tasteless as pulped cardboard, the noise didn’t let up. ‘They must be adding another deck in the hold so they can fit in more bunks,’ someone joked, not realising that this wasn’t far from the truth, because a hundred more passengers were due to board in Port Said.
It was now obvious to even the most optimistic passengers that the ship’s freshly painted exterior, the Nulux mattresses which had been purchased in London for eleven pounds sterling, the white blankets and little privacy curtains in front of the bunks, were mere window dressing. The Derna’s façade resembled the passengers whose lively chatter and brave smiles concealed bitter memories and scarred minds.
Mothers travelling with babies and toddlers were in despair because there was nowhere to wash or dry their soiled clothes. Gitel Frid, whose three-month-old son Jack was so sickly that doctors didn’t expect him to survive the voyage, would furtively wash his nappies in the shower, and smuggle them out sopping wet under her dress so the stewards wouldn’t notice. Gitel was used to hardship: Morrie, her seven year old, had been born in a Siberian labour camp. Her cousin Leah Fein, who had a two year old on board, sometimes sneaked into the kitchen for a bowl of hot water to wash his clothes.
It was a struggle to keep the children clean but some of the mothers were not very fastidious to begin with, Clara Kraus thought. The woman who slept in the bunk below hers used to stuff her baby’s dirty nappy under her mattress until morning. ‘Please don’t leave it in here all night. It’s smelly and unhygienic,’ Clara would plead, but to no avail. By the time she had finished speaking, the exhausted mother was already fast asleep and the stench flooded the cabin.
Not so long ago, Clara herself had been separated from her husband and forced to look after a baby among hostile strangers. Whenever she couldn’t sleep, she would reflect on her life which had begun so pleasantly and predictably in her Jewish home in Budapest, but had taken so many unexpected turns. But it all had to happen that way, she thought serenely, because those paths in the end had led her to Jesus Christ who had helped her and her tiny sons to survive.
One sleepless night in the harsh labour camp near Viehoffen in Austria, when the temperature dropped to twenty-five degrees below zero and she was hungry, desperate and alone, with nothing for the new baby, not even a nappy, she made a covenant with God. She vowed to follow Christ to the end of her days if God guided her and helped her family to survive. She told no one about her decision to convert which left her feeling comforted and secure, but when the war ended, and she was reunited with her husband Jim, she kept her promise. Not just in gratitude, but because she had genuinely come to believe that Christ was her saviour.
She glanced lovingly at Peter and Paul, curled up asleep at the bottom of her bunk. Little Peter, skinny and serious, looking much older than his six years because of his round rimless glasses, had gripped her hand when they came into the cabin, and she knew that he was remembering the bunks in the barracks of the labour camp. The child had been so traumatised by what he had witnessed there that he stopped speaking for months, and it took a long time before she was able to bring a smile to his pale face. As her thoughts turned to the future, the words of the Hungarian poet Miklos Tompa floated into her mind. ‘If you change your homeland you must also change your heart.’ She wondered whether she would ever be able to change her heart and learn to love Australia as she had once loved Hungary.
The baby in the bunk below started screaming again, and despite her resolve to stay calm, Clara felt the anger rising all over again. What a wretched ship this was, carrying so many small children, yet providing no suitable food or washing facilities. She had always hated ships and had never intended to sail to Australia at all. That was why, when she and Jim had gone to the Jewish agency in Munich to organise their journey, they had paid over two thousand dollars for their flights—a fortune, more than most people earned in two years.
Her chest tightened as she replayed the scene in the Paris office when they had arrived to pick up their tickets. After leafing through papers and scrabbling in a drawer, the clerk had said, ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Kraus, but there must be some mistake. We don’t have any plane tickets reserved for your family, and there’s absolutely no record of them in your file.’
Anger choked her. ‘What do you mean?’ she had demanded, her mouth so dry she could hardly get the words out. ‘We paid two thousand dollars so that we could fly to Australia!’
He shook his head and looked away. ‘Unfortunately there’s nothing I can do about the plane tickets,’ he said. ‘But we do have berths on a ship that is due to sail soon from Marseilles.’
Clara exploded. ‘This is outrageous! I paid for flights and that’s what I want. I won’t accept this!’ But in the end she had to accept it because there was nothing to be done. Some cheat in the Munich office had pocketed their money and added their names to the list of passengers whose berths cost a fraction of what they had paid for the flights. ‘If only I could get my hands on that swindler,’ she muttered to herself as she turned carefully in her bunk, trying not to wake her sons.
Gradually the monotonous routine of shipboard life imposed itself on the passengers. To escape from the suffocating cabins, they spent most of the day on deck, chatting, playing cards, reading or just staring at the sky and the sea until it was time for lunch or dinner. Little boys chased each other around the deck while little girls played with their dolls. My father, a reserved man with greying hair, a moustache and a stiff leg that made him limp, was content because he had found bridge partners. But my mother, who had pinned her blonde hair on top of her head to keep cool, felt sea-sick, miserable and neglected.
Weighed down from infancy by secrets on which our lives depended when we were forced to live as Catholics in a Polish village during the Holocaust, I had become a shy, solitary child with a tendency to sadness, and felt more comfortable observing than talking. I had already begun unravelling the first skein of wool. Without a design to guide my handiwork, I started knitting in the hope that my imagination would transcend my limited skills and shape the yarn into something I could be proud of.
After the spartan conditions of the DP camps, the privations of post-war Germany, and the shortages and rations that prevailed over most of Europe, the prospect of being served three meals every day comforted most of the passengers, even though some of the food was unpalatable and strange. Helle’s cabin-mate, seventeen-year-old Lea Ohtra, who was travelling with her parents and little sister Tiia, didn’t know what to make of the three lone sardines that arrived on her plate. In Estonia they had eaten sprats on bread, never by themselves. And she had no idea how to eat those peculiar little black things which they served with every meal. ‘Wait and see what the others do,’ her mother had whispered. But at their table, no one seemed to know how to eat the olives, and invariably sent them back untouched, to the obvious disapproval of their elderly waiter who shook his grizzled head as he took the plates away.
By the third afternoon, time was dragging so badly that people kept checking their watches to make sure that they hadn’t stopped. There wasn’t much to see along the southern coast of Italy and the conversation was lagging when suddenly a siren pierced the air and the captain ordered all passengers on deck. A fire had broken out. All over the ship, passengers were shouting and pushing, clamouring to get out of the narrow passageways and onto the decks. ‘Help! Fire!’ some shouted, while others lamented, ‘What shall we do? Where can we go?’ At the same time, some people stayed put, convinced that this was merely a fire drill. As no such drill had yet been held, neither the passengers nor the crew knew where to assemble or where the life-belts were, and everyone ran back and forth in utter confusion.
Some sa
id the fire had broken out in the galley, while others argued that it must have started in the overheated engine room. In fact, it had started with the banging and hammering heard earlier that day. The plumber had been welding a broken bedstead in one of the cabins with an oxyacetylene torch when a defective safety valve on one of the bottles caused an explosion. As he hadn’t bothered to remove the bedding, the mattress had caught fire.
Soon flames were leaping out of the cabin and smoke poured onto the deck. After the alarm was raised, the inexperienced and poorly trained crew panicked. No one even knew where to find the key to unlock the fire extinguisher, and when one of the seamen finally found it, he tried to open it too quickly and it jammed.
In the meantime, there was pandemonium in the cabins, the companionways and on the decks, as terrified passengers tied their life-belts on with trembling fingers and looked for guidance that failed to appear. ‘Look! We’re turning in towards the shore!’ someone exclaimed. This provoked new laments. If we made a detour to Italy, how long would we have to wait for another ship to Australia? In an attempt to restore calm, the captain relayed a message which Dorothea, who had already commenced her secretarial duties, proceeded to broadcast in German. ‘You have nothing to worry about. The fire will soon be extinguished,’ she translated. ‘I will bring you safely to Australia.’
The officers also did their best to reassure the passengers. ‘Since the fire didn’t break out in the engine room, there is no problem,’ they said. But neither the captain nor the crew inspired much confidence.
In the midst of the chaos, a woman raced along the deck screaming to her husband in Yiddish: ‘Moishe! Moishe, happ der valiskes!’ Grab the suitcases! In spite of their anxiety, those who heard her burst out laughing. Where did she think she was going with those cases?
One of the sailors jeered, ‘You’ll be lucky to get into the lifeboat yourself, never mind about the suitcases!’
Sam Fiszman grabbed little Maria and rushed to the ship’s hospital where Esther had been admitted because she hadn’t been able to stop vomiting ever since we had set sail. Not that you could call this box-like cabin a hospital, with its three iron beds, an inexperienced orderly and a doctor who could rarely be found.
While mothers ran to save their children, one childless woman pushed them out of the way, scrabbled through her belongings and rushed out on deck clutching her prize possession, a fox fur stole. ‘Look, she’s rescuing her fur!’ a cabin-mate scoffed.
Husbands, wives and children were gathering on deck. Honeymooners Heniek and Krysia Lipschutz clung to each other. Grabbing a plank of wood he found on the deck, Heniek told his petite bride, ‘If we have to abandon ship, we’ll both hang on to this.’
Watching the couples enviously, the widows felt abandoned. One of them was Sala Sznur, whose husband had been killed during the Holocaust. She was travelling with her six-year-old daughter Anna, whose dimpled cheeks and glossy black sausage curls won the admiration of all the mothers and the envy of all the little girls, including me. Wherever Sala looked, she saw men making sure that their wives and children were safe, but no one was looking out for them. Did we survive the war just to become food for sharks? If the two of us perish in the fire or fall into the ocean, no one will know or care, she thought bitterly, drawing her little daughter closer.
Meanwhile, Dr and Mrs Frant and Topka were running around assembling their charges, counting and recounting to make sure all were on deck. Most of the youngsters dismissed the fire as a mere diversion. Sixteen-year-old Kitty Lebovics, who was appealing in a feline way and much admired by the boys, watched the panic with detachment. After what she’d been through in Auschwitz, nothing worried her. At the age of twelve she had seen her mother taken away, lost everyone she loved, witnessed atrocities that she tried not to think about, and endured such hunger that death would have been a release. Now at least she wasn’t alone. Dr Frant was in charge, and the whole group was together. Whatever happened would happen to them all.
Meanwhile, the fire raged unchecked and orange flames leaped from the cabin. When the crew finally unscrewed the valves of the fire hydrants, they opened them too fast and sprayed in the wrong places. In a scene that could have come from a Charlie Chaplin slapstick comedy, the seamen started running around looking for hoses to attach to the hydrants, but when they found them attached them at the wrong end.
To add to the confusion, they had trouble convincing the engine room that water had to be supplied on deck. That’s when they discovered that some of the fire hoses had holes. Exasperated, Helle turned to her father. ‘This is a madhouse,’ she said. ‘How will we ever make it to Australia with such a hopeless crew?’
Standing out on deck with the others, Vala Seitz clutched her little daughter’s hand but seven-year-old Pauline wasn’t frightened. The febrile patterns of the flames in the air fascinated her. She watched them glowing against the darkening sky when a kitchen hand rushed out on deck, slapping himself on the side of the head like a clown. His hair was on fire and he smelled like a chicken with singed feathers. He kept hitting himself until one of the passengers threw a towel over him and then he started gasping and flailing his arms because underneath the towel he was inhaling smoke and couldn’t breathe.
Above the din, Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody was blaring full blast, in the hope of distracting the passengers as the crew proceeded to souse the deck with water, turning it into a lake where delighted children sloshed around. Someone yelled that the lower deck was flooded. ‘The ship’s going to sink and we’ll all drown!’ Apparently one of the passengers had rushed out of the washroom when the alarm went off and left the water running. The crisis ended when the carpenter broke down the door to the communal bathroom and turned off the taps.
With the panic over, the passengers drifted back to their usual places on deck, no longer bored. There was a lively hum of conversation now that they had a drama to discuss and blame to apportion. When Vala and Pauline returned to their regular spot, they found the archbishop already stretched out in his canvas chair, unruffled by the day’s events as he gazed serenely at the sunset sky. Like many other passengers, he was watching shafts of light pour through the clouds with such intensity that even those who professed not to believe in God felt their lack of faith shaken.
But Theodore Porfirievich Rafalsky had no doubt about the divine origin of the celestial phenomenon. The archbishop was on his way to establish the first Russian Orthodox diocese in Australia and New Zealand. An outstanding secular and spiritual scholar, he had gained degrees in physics and mathematics before embarking on a prominent career in the priesthood, which had culminated in the present appointment. With his long wiry beard, black robe and the heavy silver panagia resting over his heart, he had an aura of spiritual nobility reminiscent of an El Greco painting.
What struck people most forcefully was his penetrating, compassionate gaze which seemed to cut through the physical appearance and see the soul beneath. With the humility characteristic of deep thinkers, he was interested in all ideas and treated everyone with respect. Vala was astonished that this saintly man showed as much interest in little Pauline’s prattling as he did in the opinions of the adults.
Little Pauline, who thought that the fire had been very exciting, became the centre of attention as she chattered about the kitchen hand’s hair and mimicked his jerky movements. An outgoing, confident child who wasn’t afraid of anyone, she clambered onto the archbishop’s lap and, to her mother’s embarrassment, pulled the holy man’s grey beard. ‘I just wanted to see if it comes off!’ the child retorted, and shot her mother a triumphant look when the cleric laughed.
He turned to their companion, Princess Metschersky, who was outraged at the crew’s incompetence during the fire. Vala couldn’t take her eyes off this elderly woman who looked every inch the aristocrat. Nadezhda Alexandrovna Metschersky belonged to the Russian royal family who had been murdered by the godless Bolsheviks. Tall, slim and elegant, the princess always wore simple black dresses w
ith dazzling white collars which by some miracle she managed to keep immaculate despite the gritty soot that coated everything on board. Pauline was fascinated by the way the sunlight shone through the amber necklace that the princess always wore, making the large beads look like liquid honey. But although she longed to touch them, she never dared to ask.
Vala loved to listen to the princess’s stories about the enchanted life she had led in the glorious days when the Romanovs ruled Russia. Nadezhda Alexandrovna’s melancholy face lit up whenever she described the glittering balls she had attended in St Petersburg during the carefree days of her youth. In these detailed descriptions, Vala could feel the sensuous swish of silk dresses embroidered with seed pearls, see the crystal chandeliers reflected on the gilded wallpaper and hear the orchestra strike up the polonaise and the waltz.
She could imagine the princess, young and graceful, twirling across the dance floor in her silk slippers, waltzing with gloved archdukes, consuls and ambassadors who bowed so gallantly and kissed the tips of her tapered white fingers. She saw her swathed in furs as she sped in troikas through snowy forests of birch and spruce, with bells tinkling in the frosty air. More fortunate than many of her doomed relatives, the princess had managed to escape from the Bolsheviks, but was destined to eat the bitter bread of exile, first in Germany and now in Australia. She was travelling to Sydney to join her daughter who had married a French diplomat and had two children, so at least she would be with her family.
Like the princess, Vala was also travelling to Australia for family reasons. A lively woman who never ran out of conversation, she entertained her companions with stories and anecdotes. Beneath the merry exterior, however, she felt anxious. She was about to join a husband she hadn’t seen for seven years. Ever since the war had separated her from Viktor in 1941, she’d had to fend for herself and was no longer the dependent girl he used to know. Their daughter Pauline, who was only ten days old when he was arrested, didn’t know him at all, and Vala wondered how this headstrong child would react to having a father for the first time in her life.
The Voyage of Their Life Page 4