The Voyage of Their Life

by Diane Armstrong

  Taking the blanket off her shoulders, she folded it and left her greatest treasure in front of the icon in thanksgiving. Mattie noticed that when the other worshippers turned and saw what her mother had done, they whispered to each other, raised their arms and slapped their thighs in the typical Kytherian gesture that denotes wonder and approval.

  From his letter and the ones that followed, it was clear that George was still planning to return to Kythera as soon as he had earned enough money. Koula was horrified. That meant that she would have to continue living alone, tending the chickens and goats, digging the dried-out, depleted soil to plant the spindly tomatoes, marrows and eggplants, and being on her guard every day to ensure that she wasn’t the subject of speculation and rumour.

  As time went on, this modern-day Penelope grew impatient with spinning and weaving and waiting for her man to return while her youth ebbed away. Now that she knew he was alive, each year dragged more than the one before. It was true that he posted them parcels of clothes, tea, cocoa, chocolate, milk powder and sweets that sent the girls into raptures, but the message Koula was waiting for still didn’t come. Other women from the village were leaving to join their husbands, but George kept insisting that he would return. Brought up to defer to her husband, Koula had to restrain herself from making the sharp replies that his letters provoked.

  From those letters, it was obvious that he didn’t realise that the country he had left ten years earlier had drastically changed. Although one war had ended, another conflict was raging throughout Greece. The Communist and right-wing resistance groups turned the country into a battlefield as they fought for supremacy. Travasarianka was no longer a peaceful haven, but a battleground where Communist guerrillas hid in the mountains, kidnapping, killing and terrorising the villagers. All over Greece their self-appointed tribunals dispensed summary injustice, brutal torture and cruel deaths. They wrenched young children from their mothers and sent them to Communist training camps in Albania, Bulgaria and the Soviet bloc. Many teenagers, including girls, were forced to join them as guerrilla fighters. Although the guerrillas’ campaign in Kythera was not as savage as on the mainland, some homes were set on fire and men fled into the hills to escape capture. ‘This is not the right time to return to Kythera. It’s far too dangerous here,’ Koula wrote to her husband, exasperated with his stubborn attitude. Finally in 1948 she made a decision.

  ‘I can’t wait any longer,’ she wrote. ‘Please send the money for our passage because we’re coming to join you in Australia.’

  When he gave in, they began their journey. Apart from her daughters, Koula was taking her teenage nephews, John Comino and Stan Travasaros, to Australia. Athens awed them with its wide paved streets, motor cars, indoor toilets, tall buildings, and sales assistants who placed your purchases into paper bags. They pressed their noses against the shop windows and marvelled at the abundance they saw.

  Every day they would pass a man pushing a square trolley yelling ‘Kasata pagotaaa! Kasata pagotaaa!’ Curious to see what he was selling, Mattie and Katina peered shyly into the trolley. Quick to take advantage of their interest, the man urged their mother to buy a treat for the children. Too proud to reveal her ignorance, Koula bought two little packages and placed them in her handwoven village bag without asking what they were. ‘You can have them after dinner,’ she said. Before long, Koula felt something wet and sticky leaking out of the bag. The ice creams had melted. The pagota must have gone off, she said, her face flaming with embarrassment.

  From Athens they had flown on to Alexandria, then by train to Port Said. On the banks of the Nile, Mattie watched astonished as women washed themselves in the river. Changing trains in Cairo had been nerve-wracking for Koula. Unable to ask anyone for directions, she was terrified that one of the youngsters would be left behind, especially her nephews who were always running ahead. The tumult at the station was confusing, so many people surging forward with frightening dark faces they had never seen before. Realising that she would never manage to push the four of them and their baggage past the people crowded around the door of the compartment, she grabbed her charges and, with superhuman strength, pushed them in through the window and climbed in after them. Although the compartment was so jammed that they had to stand in one spot for the entire seven-hour journey, at least they were on their way to Port Said.

  Finally Mattie climbed the gangplank of the huge ship which would take them to Australia and to her father. As the officers in their white uniforms and stiff caps checked their papers and directed them to their cabins, she wondered whether her father looked like any of them, and whether he would like her when they met.

  7

  A middle-aged man in a navy beret, with a jacket thrown over his shoulders, stood leaning over the rail, talking quietly to a young woman who averted her sullen face as he spoke. Alina Potok was angry with her father because she had fallen in love in Germany and had longed to go to Israel with her boyfriend, but her father had forbidden it and forced her to go to Australia instead.

  What right did he have to tell her what to do at eighteen, she fumed, when at the age of thirteen she had managed to escape from the Nazis and had fended for herself for three years during the war. She had never told him what she’d gone through in that terrible time in Poland, Germany and Austria, but looking back she could hardly believe it herself.

  Even though what happened wasn’t his fault, she was angry in a way she couldn’t explain. They were strangers. Brought up by a nanny in the Polish city of Bedzin where they had lived an affluent life, she hardly knew her father before he was deported to Siberia at the beginning of the war. And he hadn’t told her about his wartime experiences either. Perhaps he didn’t want to distress her, although she no longer became distressed very easily. Salezy Potok believed in getting on with life, not dwelling on the past, and that suited her too.

  When he had last seen her, she was a child of ten, and now she was a woman. But after all these years, just because they had found each other again, he couldn’t expect to treat her as a child and run her life. And here he was asking her to be more ladylike and behave more discreetly, because some of his busybody companions were gossiping that she was spending too much time with one of the Greek officers.

  In front of them, a pall of fine coal dust shimmered in the air as men with mahogany skin and thighs as thin as chicken bones tossed sacks of coal to each other on a makeshift rope ladder. The coal loading had been in progress for the entire day and the passengers were riveted by the ceaseless activity of these agile men whose eyes glowed in their dark faces.

  Occasionally one of the passengers would hold out a slice of bread, and several labourers would pounce on it and place their blackened hands together in a gesture of thanks.

  A young man walked over towards them. It was Salezy Potok’s cabin-mate Morris Skorupa whose throat knotted as he looked at the men devouring the bread. This sight took Morris back to a time he wanted to forget, when he had been imprisoned at the Posen labour camp during the war. They had been so hungry that they sprinkled sand into the meagre portions of watery food, so that the newcomers would gag and leave their rations to the older inmates who were so starved that they waited like vultures for the extra food. It made Morris shake his head when he heard his companions at the dinner table complaining about the food on board. How quickly people forgot.

  In the Nazi gulag, few people ever mentioned Posen, perhaps because so few survived it. Just reaching the end of the day there was a triumph. Although Morris tried not to think about it, scenes that were seared into his mind would often slide back. Again he would see that fourteen-year-old boy’s skinny body swinging limply from the gallows, between the bodies of two older men hanged because they had stolen a rotting potato from a frozen field. If he allowed himself to remember, he could still feel the agony of his joints and bleeding hands as he levelled a hilly potato field with a spade that could hardly break the frozen ground. Standing nearby, the guards watched for him to stop or falter,
their hands twitching on their cudgels, whips or pistols. Only two years earlier, he used to play in the local Maccabi soccer team against young men like these who would cross the border from Germany every Sunday for a keen but friendly game.

  For months, along with the other prisoners, he laboured with picks and spades to construct a railway junction so that thirty locomotives would move on turntables to enable German units to travel to the Russian front. Thousands of prisoners died of exhaustion, starvation, beatings or gunshot wounds because every foreman had the power of life and death over them. Fewer than one in ten made it to Auschwitz, the next stop on this highway to hell.

  Like these coolies loading coal, they had worked from dawn until dark, but sometimes when they staggered back to camp, one of the bastards would order them to unload bricks for another four hours. By the time they were dismissed, the disgusting slop made from rotting vegetables was all gone. Yet despite all the hardship, something in Morris’s stubborn nature refused to give up.

  He had a strong will, a talent for getting on with people and a shrewd wheeler-dealer mentality which helped him to find ways of improving his situation, even in the toughest conditions. Thinking back, he suspected that his ability to stay neat and clean had made guards and camp officials well-disposed towards him.

  He turned and waved to a woman sauntering past with her little daughter whose fez had fallen into the harbour the previous day. With an appreciative eye for good-looking women, he had noticed the tall, willowy Tania Poczebucka with her radiant smile. Women liked Morris, and two had placed themselves in great danger to help him during the war. The gentle German wife of the brutal chef at Posen surreptitiously filled up a red enamel bucket with food that he shared with his starving friends. And Stefcia, the Polish girl who worked at the camp, risked her life to smuggle bread for him. Even when she was caught and interrogated by the Gestapo, she didn’t give him away.

  A breeze ruffled Morris’s wavy brown hair and as he smoothed it down, he felt the cicatrice. He’d got the scar the day he and another prisoner had found a trench full of potatoes in a frozen field outside the camp. No bounty-hunter in search of buried treasure ever gazed at a chest full of gold with such joy. Their frozen fingers shook as they lit a fire to cook the potatoes, but before they could bite into the hot, floury flesh the farmer galloped towards them. They jumped to their feet and bolted, but Morris slipped and fell while running across the railway line. Above him, on the horse, the farmer lashed out with his whip, again and again, until his head was split open like a melon and blood poured down his face and back. Several days later, when two other prisoners were discovered cooking potatoes in the same field, they were dragged back to the camp and hanged. If the farmer had brought him back instead of whipping him, he would have been hanged too.

  In the spring of 1943, when the camp in Posen was liquidated, Morris was one of the few left alive. The prize for survival was transportation to Auschwitz. The name meant nothing to him. But when they unhasped the waggons and he saw the SS in their jackboots, the snarling dogs, the guards cracking their whips, yelling ‘Raus! Raus! Schnell! Schnell!’ and looked up to see machine guns trained on them from the towers and the yellow searchlights sweeping over them, he knew he’d arrived in hell.

  Morris turned away from the rail. He said nothing about these experiences to Salezy Potok or his daughter, and they, like him, never spoke about theirs. It was a time they all wanted to forget, hoping that silence would eventually bring oblivion. Noticing Alina’s unhappy face as she stared into the distance, he tried to distract her with the prospect of seeing the Suez Canal, but she continued to gaze moodily out to sea.

  The coal loading had brought back distressing memories for Alina too. The dry smell of the black dust reminded her of the day when, at the age of thirteen, she had crawled into the coal recess behind the cellar with her mother and other relatives in Bedzin to hide from the Germans, whom they could hear stomping on the other side of the wall. The sputtering retort of gunshots had made her jump in terror. The next sound she heard was harsh voices yelling at them to come out and stand against the wall with their arms up.

  Her father had already been deported to Siberia, and now she and her mother were about to be deported to Auschwitz. When they were at the railway station with all the other Jews who had been rounded up that day, her mother slipped the gold chain from her neck and passed it to Alina, together with a photograph of a German in Wehrmacht uniform. ‘Run away as soon as you can,’ she whispered. ‘It’s your only chance.’ Pointing to the photograph, she said, ‘Tell them it’s your father.’ Alina knew that it was the German aristocrat her aunt had married, who lived in Berlin with their daughter. As soon as the guards looked the other way, Alina ran behind a building and kept going. She never saw her mother again.

  The dangerous time of curfew was approaching. Panic-stricken, she rushed to her nanny’s house but was told that she’d have to leave in the morning. The Germans searched houses close to the station and if they found a Jewish girl hiding there, they would shoot them both. The following day Alina tried her parents’ former chauffeur, who advised her to travel to Berlin in search of her aunt and German uncle. Unclasping her mother’s gold chain, she handed it to him in return for money that would buy a rail ticket.

  Alone and without any identity papers or documents at a time when the might of the Third Reich was focused on killing every Jewish man, woman and child, Alina travelled on trains around the country until she crossed the border into Germany. Whenever inspectors demanded to see her papers, she pretended to be part of some peasant family in the compartment or showed them her uncle’s photograph, insisting that she was travelling to join him. Through sheer force of will, she got through every passport control.

  She arrived in Berlin not knowing where to go, but instinct led her to her cousin’s apartment. Not long after she arrived, the air raids began and German women and children were evacuated from the capital. When her cousin and her family joined the exodus, they left Alina behind because, having no documents, she put them in danger. Alone in the apartment while phosphorus bombs fell on Berlin and flames leapt up towards the sky, Alina cowered in a corner and jumped with each explosion, expecting the building to collapse on top of her at any moment. Even now, five years later, just thinking about it made her tremble, and the sound of fireworks made her hysterical.

  When her relatives returned to Berlin, they decided that they couldn’t risk their lives by keeping Alina any longer. The girl set off on her wanderings again, back to Poland where she hoped to find someone who would take her in. In the dead of winter, she searched for a family friend, an ethnic German whom she found employed at the IG Farben factory at Auschwitz. Without realising where she was, or that her mother was interned there at the time, Alina spent the frosty night in a hut on its outskirts.

  The man she had come to see arranged for her to become a farmhand in the Tatra Mountains, and told the farmer that she was the daughter of a Polish officer. For the next few months Alina tended the cows, although they frightened her. She helped in the fields, walked for miles to church on Sundays, and ate from the same bowl of baked potatoes and buttermilk as the peasants.

  But when the money ran out, they told her to go. Once again she travelled all over the country until she reached Warsaw where some Polish people agreed to hide her in their cupboard so no one would find out she was there. She felt safe with them until a visitor to the house warned her that her benefactor planned to turn her in. ‘You’re tall, you could easily pass for fifteen. Why don’t you volunteer to work in the Reich? You’d be safer there than in Poland,’ he advised.

  With the false documents he obtained for her, Alina travelled to Austria with a group of Polish volunteer workers, but had trouble finding work because she looked so weak and ill. The only person willing to employ her as a maid was the doctor in the labour camp whose crazy, sadistic mother beat and starved her. In despair, Alina volunteered for factory work, but as she wasn’t strong enough to p
roduce the required quota, she was sent to the Hungarian border to dig trenches. Exhausted and ill, she was eventually sent to another factory where a Viennese workmate called Greta took pity on her. Greta did most of her work, brought her food, and treated her as a daughter. When the war ended, Greta took her home and together they hid from the Russians who rewarded themselves for liberating Europe by raping every woman they could find.

  At the recollection of the wonderful woman who had loved her like a mother, tears welled in Alina’s eyes. She had never told Greta that she was Jewish but when the war was over, Greta had said, ‘You can stay with me as long as you like. I’ll look after you and educate you, but first go back to Poland to see if some of your relatives have survived.’

  The sound of a Polish couple speaking Yiddish on the deck chairs behind her reminded her of the emotional moment she experienced the day she returned to her home town, Bedzin. By the time the war ended, Alina was convinced that she was the only Jew left alive, but on the tram in Bedzin she overheard two women cheerfully speaking Yiddish. Her mind turned somersaults. Yiddish! So she wasn’t the only one after all! That’s when she knew that the war was really over.

  Shortly afterwards, Alina discovered that her father had returned from Siberia and was looking for her. The past five years and all her sufferings had created a chasm between them that felt unbridgeable. And now, miserable at having had to part with her sweetheart in Germany and travel to the other side of the world, she felt more distant from her father than ever.