The Voyage of Their Life

by Diane Armstrong

  Evening in Port Said dropped suddenly out of the sky, without the gentle intervention of a European twilight. The muezzin’s guttural chant floated above the palm trees, and after spreading their prayer mats on the deck, the Egyptians policing the ship dropped to their knees and prostrated themselves in prayer. Alina’s father, whom the Polish women described as a real gentleman, was talking to his cabin-mate Emanuel Darin who pointed to a group of Egyptian officials standing around on the wharf. The Derna was due to sail that night, but from their raised voices and the way they repeatedly turned to look at the ship, it looked as though there was a problem.

  Over dinner, there was more noisy gossip than usual, and above the clattering of knives and forks, the passengers speculated and complained about the newcomers who had recently boarded. That glamorous couple—were they were film stars travelling incognito, high-ranking diplomats or charmers with a shady past? Everyone had seen Colonel Hershaw and the German girl go ashore together. ‘What has that guy got that we haven’t got?’ one of the young men sighed, to which another retorted, ‘A big cabin!’ There was a rumour that one of the officers had been discharged for having an affair with a passenger, but others scoffed, saying that if they started putting officers off the Derna for sexual peccadillos, there’d be no one left to sail the ship.

  At the captain’s table, the conversation was less lively that night. Captain Papalas was preoccupied, the Egyptian purser addressed himself mainly to his wife, and the ship’s doctor stared into his wine glass as usual and said very little. The captain’s fat, slow-moving son Kosmos kept up an amiable flow of small talk, while Dorothea chatted to the first officer about her impressions of Port Said.

  The captain was mulling over a problem that had arisen because the assistant purser had unexpectedly left the ship, creating a vacancy that would be difficult to fill. Someone was needed to act in a public relations capacity and help resolve the passengers’ endless complaints. The mothers in particular needed help, as no suitable food had been provided for the babies and toddlers. With meals to prepare for 545 passengers and 137 crew members, the temperamental chef had his hands full as it was. The ideal person would need to know several languages and have an understanding disposition. Not like the chief purser, an Egyptian Turk whose attitude left a lot to be desired. Some of the passengers had already complained about his arrogant, abrasive manner.

  But the issue that lay heaviest on the captain’s mind had nothing to do with pursers or baby food. The Derna, which was scheduled to sail through the Suez Canal that night, had not received a clearance from the port authorities. He looked at the clock. Soon the ships would be marshalled in a convoy. He had argued with the officials and contacted the owner about the delay. He could do no more.

  Late at night, the sound of Czech folk songs, the strumming of guitars and an occasional burst of ribald laughter at the risqué lyrics resounded in the bar area at the stern. People strolling around on deck noticed unusual activity on the wharf. A big car pulled up, and when the chauffeur opened the door, a lively young blonde swung her long slim legs out of the back seat and was met by port officials who addressed her in a deferential manner.

  As the sound of their voices floated across the water, one of the officers standing on deck beside Emanuel Darin gave a knowing smile. ‘Our ship left Marseilles without proper documents from Lloyds relating to our registration or cargo. The port authorities are saying that we’re not seaworthy. They don’t want to let us sail through the canal,’ he explained. ‘See that blonde down on the wharf? That’s the owner’s daughter. She’s come to convince them that the Derna is seaworthy after all!’ He chuckled, rubbing his thumb and forefinger together in a gesture implying that money was about to change hands. Tina Livanos Onassis, the nineteen-year-old daughter of Stavros Livanos, who had married the much older Onassis against her father’s will, had arrived in Port Said to enable us to continue our voyage.

  Several hours later, at four in the morning of 10 September 1948, the Derna was marshalled into sixth place in the convoy of nine ships ready to sail through the Suez Canal.

  8

  The hundred-mile-long Suez Canal that separated Europe from Africa was so narrow that the ships ahead of us seemed to be gliding on land. ‘Leave your knitting for a minute and come and have a look,’ my father called to me. ‘This is one of the wonders of the world.’ He explained that before its construction about 120 years earlier, ships had to sail all the way around the Cape of Good Hope. ‘Imagine having to sail on the Derna for months instead of weeks,’ he chuckled.

  My mother, whose creamy complexion had acquired a greenish hue ever since we boarded, groaned at the thought. The ship which she had described as ‘big and comfortable’ in the postcard to her sister-in-law, had become a rocking prison cell. Usually cheerful and energetic, she felt bilious from the constant motion and dreaded spending the next five weeks in our hot, overcrowded cabin.

  Sailing through the canal and watching everyday life along the banks, we seemed to have stepped back into Biblical times. My father pointed to the sad donkeys trotting patiently around the mill-wheels, the goats grazing outside mud huts, and the veiled women shrouded in black who drew water from the well, just as they’d done in the days when Rameses’ daughter had found Moses among the bulrushes. My father loved facts and relished the power of knowledge, perhaps because it made him feel secure in a life that had been filled with uncertainty and trauma.

  The fierce sun was blazing down on our heads when the Derna reached the point where the canal widened into the Great Bitter Lake and had to wait for the northbound convoy to pass. A small motor launch that had steadily been gaining on us caught up and drew alongside to allow someone to board, and a few moments later one of the officers came up to Dorothea. ‘John Brown is looking for you,’ he said. She could hardly believe her eyes. The exciting man she had met in Port Said was standing in front of her, smiling. This was like a scene from the movies; things like this just didn’t happen in real life. As he held out a bottle of French cognac, he murmured, ‘I had to find out if you liked the mango!’ She burst out laughing at the absurdity of it. Quietly he said, ‘I had to see you again.’ Before clambering down to his launch, he turned back. ‘I’ll never forget you,’ he said.

  Staring at the wake of the departing motor boat, from which John Brown was still waving, Dorothea felt dazed. The idea that after such a brief encounter this gorgeous man had followed her along the Suez Canal to Aden seemed so improbable that she was tempted to think she had imagined it. A shadow fell across the deck and she looked up to see Colonel Hershaw. With a bemused smile, he said, ‘That John Brown you took such a liking to. They’re saying he’s the owner’s son.’ Dorothea was intrigued by this exciting development, but as it later turned out the rumour was false. Stavros Livanos’s only son was a fourteen-year-old schoolboy at the time, not a debonair shipping agent sweeping young women off their feet.

  Dorothea didn’t have much time to ponder the identity of the mysterious John Brown because it was time to join the other officers in the captain’s cabin for a glass of champagne on the occasion of his name-day. As they raised their glasses to toast Stavros Papalas’s health, Dorothea looked around and caught the first officer’s appreciative glance. It added to her enjoyment of the occasion to see that she was the only woman who had been invited to the party.

  As we sailed through the canal, parallel with the railway line and oil pipeline, we passed small administrative offices in between dun-coloured Arab villages with their incongruous Coca-Cola ads. Occasionally we caught a glimpse of white villas behind tall palms. From regular checkpoints, British soldiers riding jeeps waved and tooted to salute the passing ships. Sometimes, however, the gestures were less friendly. Bruno Tohver’s sense of propriety was offended to see some of the locals turning their backs to us, raising their robes and showing their bare buttocks.

  The following morning, as we sailed through the Gulf of Suez, a slight breeze gave a little relief from the heat
. As we rounded the Sinai Peninsula, the landscape became more mountainous. Everyone was out on deck, shading their eyes and craning their necks to catch sight of Mt Sinai in the distance. Elmars Kuplis, a devout Christian, felt tears spring to his eyes when he saw the land where Jesus had once trod. It had suddenly been transported out of the realm of stories and scriptures to become solid reality.

  For many Jews it was a heartache to come so close to the Promised Land, yet be unable to reach it. A reflective silence fell over the usually ebullient orphans in Dr Frant’s group. Some of them would have migrated to the new land of Eretz Israel if it hadn’t been for the embargo placed on Jewish migration by the British before independence, and the war that had been waged there ever since. Now they felt like traitors for placing their security above solidarity with the pioneers who were building up the Jewish nation.

  Sam and Esther Fiszman felt sad when they watched the Promised Land receding from view, perhaps forever. After the war ended, Sam had thrown himself into the struggle for a Jewish homeland. It was while he was recruiting and training young Jews in the Polish town of Sosnowiec to fight in Palestine that the most haunting face he’d ever seen appeared in front of him.

  Esther was sixteen when they met, with clouds of auburn hair to her shoulders and dreamy eyes that shone like starlight. Unlike some of the brazen young women who threw themselves at him, she was modest and principled, but she was strong too and not afraid to say what she thought. He couldn’t get her out of his mind.

  At the age of twelve, Esther had been transported to Auschwitz where her parents had been killed. If it hadn’t been for a caring older girl called Magda, who had taken the frail twelve year old under her wing and hidden her in the laundry when she became ill with typhus, Esther would not have survived. She and Magda were separated during those chaotic last months of the war when the Germans had evacuated the death camps and shunted starving, emaciated, disease-ridden prisoners across the frozen countryside on foot, to destroy all evidence of their crimes. Esther often thought about Magda with love and gratitude, and wondered what had happened to her.

  It made Sam fume to think of Esther, after all she’d gone through, lying on a narrow bunk in the pathetic sick bay that was euphemistically called a hospital, with a doctor who had no interest in his patients and a captain who washed his hands of the whole ship. From the moment the Derna had set sail, Esther’s stomach had rolled up into her throat. She couldn’t keep any food down, and had become so thin that her eyes seemed bigger than her face. During the day she kept three-month-old Maria in the sick bay with her, but at night, when Sam strung up a hammock for the baby above his own bunk, her crying often disturbed the other occupants of his cabin who complained bitterly.

  A welcome breeze sprang up off the water, and as Sam drew his Russian army jacket around his shoulders, he felt someone staring at him. He turned around and met the disapproving gaze of a group of men who were muttering to each other. Although Sam did not understand what they were saying, he knew that they came from the Baltic countries. He glared at them. Their countrymen had greeted the occupying Nazis with welcoming smiles and flowers and some had rushed to join the police units which helped the SS round up the Jews. From those ranks some had been recruited into the death squads that gunned down tens of thousands of men, women and children into pits dug in nameless clearings and secret woods.

  Sam knew that wearing his army jacket provoked them, and revelled in the provocation. Nazi-lovers. They’d fought on the wrong side, and now that the Russians had invaded their countries, they had to run for fear of retaliation. It served them right. But the thought that some of them were now migrating to Australia, bringing with them their blood-stained hands, SS tattoos and religious prejudices, made him fume.

  Although the war had ended three years earlier, Sam continued to fight his battles in his head. Those who passed him on deck saw a nuggetty fair-haired young man with one opaque eye and an intense, restless manner reminiscent of Kirk Douglas. Sam was a coiled spring ready to snap. At the age of twenty-three he had already lived through enough to write an action-packed autobiography. At thirteen, when together with his mother and sister he had been immured inside the Warsaw Ghetto, he smuggled arms for the Jewish underground. Crawling through the sewers that ran under the ghetto and drained into the Vistula, he pushed his way for hours through stinking filth, past slimy rats that brushed against his legs and squealed in the dark, while he hung onto the slippery rails. He had to memorise the entire route, especially the positions of the German posts above ground, so that he would know where to emerge into the blinding light when the clock struck the appointed hour.

  He had to hope, while holding his breath for those heart-stopping minutes it took for the manhole cover to open, that the shoes he saw as soon as the lid was raised belonged to the courier and not a Gestapo officer or an extortionist, or he was lost. As soon as the cover was off, they exchanged parcels, and he returned clutching the precious explosives or guns for the ghetto leaders. Making this trip several times a week required a cool nerve, a defiant attitude and, above all, the conviction that he’d get back safely.

  He had just returned to the ghetto after such a mission and was hoisting himself out of the sewer when a boy rushed up and warned him to hide because the Germans were looking for him. He just made it to the recess behind the wall of the room he shared with his family seconds before two soldiers burst in. When his mother said she didn’t know where he was, they grabbed her and his younger sister and pushed them into the yard. Through the window, Sam stopped breathing as one of the soldiers aimed his rifle and fired. Someone pressed their hands over his mouth so that his scream couldn’t be heard as his mother and sister slumped to the ground.

  As Sam walked away from the rail to look in on Esther and the baby, he noticed that the Baltic group was still looking his way, and felt icy shards in their glances. Someone spat the word ‘Communist’ as he passed. If they had had their wish and the Nazis had won the war, he and Esther would both be dead by now. But they had survived, and now there was little Maria to take the place of all the parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins that they’d lost.

  His anger melted for a moment when he thought about the baby and recalled how she had come by her Catholic name. When the nun at the Notre-Dame Hospital in Paris where she was born had asked him what they would call her, he replied ‘Malka’, after his mother. The nun frowned. ‘What sort of name is that, monsieur?’ When he explained that it was the Hebrew word for queen, she beamed and said, ‘Ah, that means Maria!’

  Hunching his shoulders as he strode past the hostile faces, Sam stopped when he came to Archbishop Rafalsky, sitting as usual near the forward deck, surrounded by his Russian entourage. While the Derna chugged towards the Great Bitter Lakes, Sam sat down beside the archbishop who was the most charismatic person he had ever met. It seemed to him that this saintly man could see his soul and knew that he was a good person even though he wasn’t a believer.

  Memories of the Warsaw Ghetto were still roiling in his mind. ‘My biggest enemies are God and Hitler,’ he blurted out. ‘Because if God could allow my innocent sister to be killed, then he was no better than Hitler.’

  To his surprise, the archbishop didn’t look shocked. ‘I understand how you feel, but in time perhaps you’ll realise that it was not God who made these things happen,’ he said in his soothing voice.

  If Sam had not been so angry with the Creator, he may have concluded that God had intervened to save his life on the day he had been buried under a pile of rubble during a battle near the German border. After the disastrous Warsaw Uprising, he had joined the partisans to fight the Germans. His unit had been engaged in hand-to-hand combat when a shell exploded, knocking him unconscious just before a building collapsed on top of him. Some time later, a passing Russian soldier noticed a hand sticking out of the ruins and felt a faint pulse. Three months after being rescued, Sam woke up in a field hospital, shell-shocked and blind in one eye.


  When the archbishop suggested that perhaps God had had a hand in his survival, Sam explained that he believed in the socialist principle of equality, not in religion. ‘The philosophy sounds noble,’ the archbishop agreed, ‘but the reality does not live up to the ideal. That was a terrible thing that Stalin did, destroying the kulaks, persecuting the priests and trying to control people’s minds by banning religion. But the church isn’t blameless either,’ he mused. ‘Too often it has placed dogma above human life.’ Sam felt privileged to know such a wise and tolerant man. For the first time in his life he understood why some religious leaders attract disciples who sit at their feet and follow them all their lives.

  Inside the cabins at night, the heat was suffocating. Desperate for air, the passengers scrambled for a space on deck, dragging their blankets and pillows with them in their search for a hammock, a canvas deckchair or just a level space on the timber floor. The crew disapproved of their nocturnal camping. The blankets were getting filthy and the bodies lying on deck got in their way when they swept up the dirt each morning. The coal burned by the Derna’s engines spewed from the funnel as black smoke and coated everything with soot. Young boys held their sides and laughed when they looked at each other in the morning, not realising that their own faces were also smeared with grime. Little Pauline, who slept on deck beside her mother, would giggle when she woke up and saw the white imprint her head had made in the centre of her blackened pillow.

  An undeclared war broke out between the passengers and the seamen, who became increasingly callous. While sweeping, they would cover everyone with clouds of soot, and continued hosing the deck even if people were lying there. Protests were met with shrugs.