The Voyage of Their Life

by Diane Armstrong

  Within a few days of leaving Marseilles, it was obvious that the combination of Greeks and Italians in the crew was explosive. Hatred between them smouldered and occasionally erupted in violence. It was not unusual for the passengers to step into a passageway and see a Greek seaman chasing an Italian steward, or to come across two combatants with fists raised or flick-knives poised ready to strike.

  There were complaints all round. The crew protested about the unruly behaviour of the passengers who complained to Colonel Hershaw about the heartless attitude of the crew. Not wanting to trouble himself unduly with these counter-accusations, Hershaw delegated his deputy, Uno Mardus, to deal with the passengers. ‘Let them know that they can’t spread themselves out as if they are at a lawn picnic. Rules have to be observed,’ the escort officer said. Since the only alternative to sleeping on deck was suffocating below in the cabins, Uno tackled the unenviable task with his customary good humour. A few conciliatory passengers promised to keep their blankets inside, but most of them shrugged off this unrealistic expectation. Some of the young Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, however, interpreted Uno’s request as an attempt to assert power. ‘Didn’t anyone tell you that the Nazi regime is over?’ some of them would retort.

  With Uno Mardus to liaise between the passengers and Dorothea to type his letters and memos, make announcements in German and distribute the weekly issue of soap and cigarettes, Ogden Hershaw had plenty of time to relax. He chatted up the smashing young girls on board and talked to the Baltic migrants whose company he found very congenial. He particularly liked talking to Verner Puurand. Puurand had been the commander of the Estonian submarine the Kalev before the war but had fled to Germany when the Russians were advancing on Estonia. They conversed like men of the world who understood the political realities behind the façade that fooled many others. A frequent topic was the threat of Communism which they believed would ensnare the whole world if the West didn’t wake up in time.

  It was a topic close to Verner Puurand’s heart. The presence on board the Derna of so many Jews alerted him to trouble. From what Colonel Hershaw had told him, most of them described themselves as Czechs, Poles, Hungarians and so on, but what he wanted to know was how they came to have passports when Christian patriots like himself, and others in the IRO group, did not. He suspected that they were Bolshevik agents issued with passports by post-war Communist governments. He confided in Colonel Hershaw that the obnoxious young fellow who strutted around in his repellent Russian army jacket was undoubtedly a Communist agitator. He didn’t trust some of those Jewish youngsters either, singing propaganda songs, playing Russian music on the gramophone and upsetting everyone.

  Verner Puurand’s authoritative manner and former naval status won the respect of his Estonian companions who were impressed to have a submarine commander in their midst. As a lieutenant just out of naval school, he had been sent for training to England where two submarines were being constructed for Estonia. On his return, he was placed in charge of the Kalev, which had been named after a legendary Baltic hero.

  In 1939, when the Russians took over Estonian naval bases, those connected in any capacity with the previous government were deported and often shot, but Puurand retained his position. This was the period of mass deportations, when terrified Estonians kept their suitcases packed, close to the door, in case men in trenchcoats banged on the door at midnight, pushed them into cattle cars and deported them to Siberia. No one who had worked for the Estonian government was safe, but Puurand explained that he and his family had escaped persecution because he spoke Russian and the Russians needed his naval expertise.

  In 1941, when Hitler broke his pact with Stalin and attacked his former ally, the Germans entered Estonia to be greeted by cheering crowds who believed that they would help Estonia gain its independence from Russia. The prevailing belief was that, while the Russians’ agenda was permanent subjugation, the Germans’ invasion was a temporary wartime strategy. Drawing on latent anti-Semitism, the Nazis recruited Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians into the Einsatzgruppen death squads which turned the Baltic states into a slaughterhouse. Latvia’s Jewish population of about 90,000 was almost completely wiped out by death squads such as the infamous Arajs Militia in Riga. In a triumphant dispatch to Berlin in October 1941, General von dem Bach Zelewski wrote: ‘Today there are no more Jews in Estonia.’ That wasn’t quite accurate: there were still about 400 left, but within a few months they too were rounded up and killed.

  Despite all the help given to the Germans by their Baltic allies, after their devastating defeat in Stalingrad in 1943, the Russian army began to advance as inexorably as the winter frost, driven by their lust for revenge. When they were about to enter Estonia in 1944, those who had any reason to fear retribution fled for their lives. It was then that Verner Puurand and his family moved to Germany. After the war ended, they moved to the American zone where he became the Baltic Liaison Director and supplied the American occupying forces with guards from among his compatriots.

  That was the account that Puurand gave to Colonel Hershaw and some of his Estonian ship-mates. What he omitted to tell them, however, would have made a far more interesting story, one that would have astonished his companions.

  When he wasn’t exchanging political ideas with Colonel Hershaw, Puurand spent some of his time on the Derna teaching himself to play the accordion that he had bought in Germany on his aunt’s advice. Before leaving, he had converted the money he had earned from the Americans into jewellery, but when his aunt in Brisbane wrote to say that accordions were scarce in Australia, he bought one in order to sell it for a profit on his arrival. And in case the customs authorities asked him to prove that it was his own instrument, he taught himself to play. It was a welcome distraction from this appallingly run ship whose antiquated engine room and wheezing machinery gave him very little confidence that the voyage would be completed on time.

  9

  As we approached the Gulf of Aden, the temperature continued to rise until we seemed to be sitting inside a lighted oven. Helle, who had joined the Estonian choir and folk dancing group, was relieved that rehearsals had been scheduled for early morning, but even at dawn there was no relief from the humidity.

  The constant rocking made Halina Kalowski dizzy. Placing a damp cloth on her aching forehead, she wondered how she was going to last the voyage in her condition. She noticed that she was not the only pregnant woman who had remained on board in defiance of the Captain’s order. Another Polish woman, Irka Falek, was also expecting, as was the Romanian Elsie Pataky.

  Only the pleasant company of her cabin-mate Matylda Czalczynski helped to distract her from the spinning sensation. Always quick to help others, Matylda sat beside her, brought glasses of water and soothed her with her cheerful conversation. From the sadness in her eyes, Halina could tell that something was distressing her but she was too tactful to ask. When Matylda was ready, she would tell her.

  The ship moved so slowly through the canal that some of the passengers thought it must be a thousand, rather than a hundred miles long. As everyone’s fascination with this engineering feat began to wane, they drifted back to their usual activities. My father picked up his English grammar book, my mother chatted with Zofia Frant, while I concentrated on my knitting again and tried not to drop too many stitches. Occasionally small children ran past shrieking, while inside the lounge, the older ones like the Frants’ eleven-year-old daughter Christine sat on the floor and played rummy or patience with Topka’s youngest sister Bella.

  In the centre of the middle deck, some of the Jewish orphans clustered around Otto Halm, a Czech boy who improvised his own lyrics to popular songs as he strummed the guitar, while others sneaked off with their sweethearts, away from Dr Frant’s gimlet gaze. The married couples whiled away the hours gossiping and sharing the little they knew about Australia.

  In one such group, the strong voice of Heniek Glassman dominated the conversation. An entertaining raconteur with an anecdote for every occ
asion, he was the centre of attention as he waved his arms around to emphasise his point.

  ‘You wouldn’t believe it,’ he was saying, ‘but I was offered the chance of emigrating to Australia back in 1936. One day this tall guy from overseas turns up in my textile factory in Lodz. It turns out he’s a Jew from Bialystok called Fink who migrated to Australia of all places. I’d just bought some new machines and he wanted to see how they worked. So he asks me to come and talk to him in his hotel. “Leave everything, pack up and come to Australia, you’ll make a lot of money,” he tells me. Well, we used to weave Australian wool but I’d just opened a business and didn’t want to leave. And when I mentioned it to my father, he threw up his arms in horror. “You gone crazy? You know where is Australia? America I understand, but what for you need Australia?”’

  His listeners, Cyla and Max Ferszt, the Faleks and the lovely Tania Poczebucka and her much older husband, laughed appreciatively, but Heniek hadn’t finished. Leaning forward, he stabbed the air with his index finger. ‘Listen, you want to hear something funny? This year, when we get our landing permit, guess who signed it? That same guy! Fink! He did it as a favour for my cousin in Melbourne. Didn’t dream it was for the person he tried to talk into migrating twelve years ago!’

  Listening to his lively stories, it was hard to realise that Heniek had lived through the horror of Birkenau, Flossenburg and the Death March and after returning home had discovered that his first wife had died in the Stutthof death camp. Bronia, as always, listened indulgently. The Glassmans were the kind of couple whose marriage made people wonder what this well-spoken, refined woman with a classical education had seen in this hot-headed opinionated man who spoke with a Yiddish accent. Bronia’s mother, who was travelling with them to Australia, had regarded the marriage as such a misalliance that when Bronia told her she was going to marry Heniek only six weeks after they’d met, she had been appalled. ‘Over my dead body!’ she told her daughter. ‘What do you know about him?’

  Bronia had shrugged. ‘I don’t need to know anything about him. I want him.’

  From the moment they met, she had been attracted to Heniek’s forceful personality and masculine presence. She admired his good taste in clothes, the way his ties matched his well-cut suits, and the way he held her when they danced. ‘You didn’t marry me, you married my clothes!’ he used to joke. And to tease him, she’d agree. In the unconscious way we choose our partners, she had instinctively known that his decisive, ebullient personality would balance her own introverted nature.

  Looking at her friend Irka Falek’s swelling abdomen, Bronia recalled scenes that had been seared into her mind and would never be erased. While she had worked in the hospital inside the Krakow Ghetto, German SS men would sometimes stride across the ward, tear a baby from the arms of its screaming mother and throw it out of the window with as much emotion as if they were tossing away a cigarette butt.

  From the ghetto she had been sent to a labour camp run by the Luftwaffe and worked there for over two years. Although the conditions were tough, the commandant, Captain Fischer, was not a sadist and treated them relatively well. As Bronia spoke both German and Polish, she was put in charge of twenty-five women, but when four of them ran away, she was held responsible. Never would she forget her terror when the SS officers who ran the camp told her to get undressed and start digging. Her body shook so much that she could hardly hold the spade. This was the end. She would never see her parents again, never marry, never have children, never watch the sun rise again or see the Germans defeated. For twenty-four hours they kept her there, naked and terrified, poised on the edge of her life. Then Captain Fischer came out and said something her numbed mind could hardly grasp. ‘Get dressed, Fraulein. They’ve decided not to execute you.’

  While conversations swirled around her, Bronia sighed. The most distressing thing was the way that the camps had changed her. Before the war, she had been kind and caring: sharing her lunch with a poor school friend, and dropping a few zlotys into a beggar’s bowl. But in the camps she became a stranger to herself. When her best friend was taken away, she wasn’t upset. Just numb.

  During the Death March, she had stumbled across the German countryside for miles every day, so frozen that her bones ached, and so exhausted that she was afraid to sit down for fear of never being able to get up again. She woke one morning and saw that the woman lying next to her had died in the snow where she lay, blue and stiff. Bronia had stepped over her and staggered on. And she hadn’t felt a thing. Now, staring at the tankers and freighters moving along the canal without really seeing them, she thought, That was the worst thing the Germans did. They desensitised and dehumanised us. This was the price of survival, but how did one live with the knowledge of what lay just beneath the skin of humanity?

  The sound of singing interrupted her reflection and cut across her friends’ conversation. On the other side of the deck, the Balts were rehearsing, their clear strong voices harmonising in folk songs under the direction of their enthusiastic choir-master. Watching them, she began to speculate whether some of these tenors and baritones who were now singing so beautifully had helped their Nazi allies to persecute the Jews. Some of them probably had the SS tattoo in their left armpit, one of her companions said. Unless they’d had it removed, of course. ‘The Australian government has imposed a quota on Jews. I wonder whether they have a quota on Nazi collaborators as well?’ someone else commented.

  In a quiet voice Bronia said, ‘After the war, I was working in Czechoslovakia as an interpreter. Whenever they caught German women they suspected of being Nazis, they brought them to me for questioning. It wasn’t hard to detect the evasions and lies. I’d ask, “What were you doing in 1942? Did you have enough to eat? Where did you get food?” Most people in Europe were still poor, sick and hungry but these German women looked so well-fed and well-dressed in the clothes, diamonds and furs they’d stolen from Jews. I was very bitter. The Nazis had killed my sister who was five years younger than me, and my father too. One brazen SS woman I was questioning gave me a vindictive look and hissed, “You’re so young but so wicked!” I saw red. “Listen,” I told her, “if our positions were reversed, you would want to get your hands on me, not just ask polite questions.”’

  Her companions were nodding. ‘Did you ever catch anyone well-known?’ one of them asked.

  ‘Himmler’s sister-in-law,’ Bronia said. ‘They had found her in the Sudetenland where many of them hid, hoping to flee to Switzerland. When I said, “You must have had a good position during the war,” she said, “I certainly did, thanks to my brother-in-law.” “And who was that?” I asked. “Himmler,” she replied. She was proud of being related to one of Hitler’s cronies.’

  The oil tankers, cargo ships and merchant marine vessels in the Straits of Aden and the wheeling of gulls overhead added to the excitement of approaching Aden, our next port of call. Catching the elusive whiff of land evoked for Arnold Ohtra the well-loved smell of the fishing ports in Tallinn and Haapsalu. The British Protectorate of Aden stood on a barren peninsula in Yemen near the entrance to the Red Sea. Built in the crater of an extinct volcano, the town was surrounded by a jagged crown of precipitous cliffs. Radio-transmitting towers poked into the cloudless sky, linking this strategic trading port with the rest of the British Empire.

  Shortly after we docked, the loading began, and tanks of drinking water from artesian wells on the mainland were hauled into the holds. Soon a barge loaded with coal moved alongside the Derna, a ladder was swiftly attached to its side and an army of Arabs in white loin cloths climbed up until two of them stood on each swaying coir rung. With the well-rehearsed movements of acrobats who depend on each other’s timing for survival, two men picked up the hessian bags full of coal and placed them on the back of a third man, who threw it to the men on the first rung. They caught and tossed it to the next pair and so it went all the way up the ladder, until it reached the deck and was emptied down the hatch. Each toss was accompanied by yells and chants an
d proceeded at an amazingly brisk pace. Not one movement was wasted. How noisy and primitive this was, all done by manpower without any machines. Watching them, Helle found it hard to believe that this was the twentieth century.

  Petro Fatseas was so fascinated by this spectacle that he craned over the rail at such a precipitous angle that his exasperated older sisters were sure he would fall into the coal barge. As the loaders tossed the bags up the ladder, counting out the tally, two of the Derna’s Greek seamen stood nearby. ‘Let’s start a fight to distract them, so they’ll lose count,’ Petro overheard one of them saying. ‘We’ll get a few more bags out of them that way. God knows we’ll need it if we’re going to get this wreck to Australia.’ To Petro’s amazement, they started throwing mock punches and yelling until the loaders’ attention was diverted and they stopped counting. After a few minutes, the two seamen went off slapping each other’s shoulders and laughing, while the rhythmic loading and counting resumed.

  The passengers could not have been more riveted if they’d been watching a circus performance. Arnold Ohtra marvelled that people could be reduced to virtual slavery in their own country, and recorded in his journal that ‘the coolies were as thin as Mahatma Gandhi after a 100-day fast.’ When some of the passengers gave them food, the officers soon came running and told them to stop.

  ‘Look at them,’ my father pointed, shaking his greying head in distress. ‘Their thighs are no bigger than your arm.’

  While the loading was in progress, the crew dragged out a large tarpaulin, tied its edges to the rail and filled it with water to form a swimming pool. Within minutes it was almost solid with splashing children and teenagers, revelling in the miraculous effect of cold water on overheated skin and ignoring the mildewed, gunky canvas.

  After the new passengers had boarded, the first officer, John Papalas, came over to Dorothea to introduce an Italian girl of seventeen who was travelling on her own to Australia. ‘Her relatives were worried about her so I told them I knew just the person to take care of her,’ he said. The dashing John Brown went out of Dorothea’s mind as she looked up into the handsome face of the first officer whose manners were as attractive as his appearance.