The young girl standing beside him had thick dark hair that waved down to her shoulders and a wide smile. The two young women hit it off from the first moment. A few days later, when Colonel Hershaw mentioned casually that he’d suggested to the Italian girl that she should come and share his cabin as well, Dorothea was enthusiastic. ‘There’s a spare bunk and you’ll be much more comfortable in with us than in that horribly overcrowded cabin,’ she told her protégée. ‘We’ve even got a fan.’ What she didn’t say was that she would be glad to have another woman in there for company. It wasn’t that she felt unsafe with Ogden, but there had been a few occasions when he had been fresh and tried to kiss her. Having another girl in there would ensure that there would be no further unwelcome advances.
While the Derna had been loading up with coal in Aden, the Australian information officer who had escorted the Yugoslav migrants to meet the ship in Port Said sent a memo to the Department of Immigration in Canberra. Concerned by the conditions on board, he took the unusual step of adding an unsolicited comment to his report. ‘Although officially I should not butt in,’ he wrote, ‘I am afraid the Derna may prove a “headache ship” if the Australian press takes it up. She is definitely overcrowded, has been limping along at about nine knots because of boiler trouble, and has far above her twenty-five percent quota of Jews.’
Before long, the headache was to develop into a migraine.
10
The night we sailed from Aden was a restless one. It was impossible to sleep in the cabins, while out on the sooty deck angry voices rang out from the galley, dishes crashed and men chased each other along the companionway. A foul odour pervaded the ship and everyone looked around for its source. At sunset, Arnold Ohtra looked up and saw a disturbing sight. Large black birds with long hooked bills and forked tail feathers were circling the ship. Arnold took them for vultures but they were probably frigate birds. Some landed on the mast and rigging and waited, like polite undertakers marking time until the cadaver appeared.
By morning, the stench was so overpowering that we all pressed handkerchiefs to our noses. The mystery was solved when the crew emerged from the hold, hauling up putrid carcasses of lamb with butchers hooks still attached. They flung the meat, which had a greenish tinge and a slimy opalescent sheen, onto a tarpaulin that they tipped up so that the meat slid into the Indian Ocean. For the next two hours, everyone stood on deck to witness this surreal spectacle. People who had been starved in labour camps and concentration camps, and hadn’t seen meat for years, watched as three tonnes of reeking lamb were jettisoned into the foaming waves.
Those who had cameras, like Bruno Tohver and Abie Goldberg, leaned over the rails, their shutters clicking. Outraged passengers threatened to inform the Australian newspapers about this disgusting incident. Everyone had a theory. Some thought that the lamb which had been loaded in Port Said or Aden must have been rotten, while others believed that the refrigeration had broken down. On such an antiquated ship, in such heat, when ice was the main source of refrigeration, it was a miracle that the meat hadn’t rotted sooner and that an epidemic of food poisoning hadn’t broken out.
Suddenly there was a commotion at the stern. Someone was calling out and pointing at the sea. A fast-moving black fin was slicing through the waves. Was it another dolphin? Everyone surged forward. Over there too! Two more fins emerged. Then a shout aroused excited shudders in the crowd. Sharks! Scenting the carrion, the predators had followed the trail of rotten meat through the waves.
The mood darkened and a sense of claustrophobia began to close in. We had not been allowed off the ship since boarding two and a half weeks earlier, and had not been able to send or receive mail. After the episode with the rotten meat, many passengers felt anxious. Would there be enough food to last until Colombo? What would happen if someone became seriously ill? Not only were the medical facilities non-existent but the ship’s medico, Dr Themelis, kept very brief consulting times and refused to see anyone outside these hours. And even when he was prepared to see patients, his advice was laughable. Aspirin and mercurochrome were the full extent of his pharmacopoeia.
The chef’s decision to serve curried beef that night almost caused a riot. The passengers, who were not familiar with curries, took one look at the yellowish sauce, remembered the putrid carcasses, pushed their plates away and stomped out of the dining room. Shortly afterwards, Colonel Hershaw had to face an angry delegation who accused the chef of poisoning them with rotting meat and demanded that he convey their protest to the captain. ‘In their ignorance, they thought that the curry was rotten lamb,’ the colonel sneered at the captain’s table that evening.
As escort officer for the migrants sponsored by the IRO, his job was to liaise between the passengers and the captain, but he hadn’t expected to be harangued by so many passengers or to find himself in such a difficult situation. The curry was just the latest in a never-ending litany of complaints he’d received. Obviously he couldn’t do anything to improve the appalling congestion in the primitive washrooms where mothers had to do their children’s washing in the small basins or in the shower recesses. The soap that the efficient Dorothea distributed every week was of that pungent carbolic type, better suited to treating sufferers of infectious diseases than to normal bathing. What was worse, there wasn’t enough of it, so that he’d had to reduce the rations, just as in wartime.
Colonel Hershaw had found out that there were sixteen babies under a year old on board, but the ship had made no provision for feeding them. Surely they didn’t expect babies to eat olives, pickled vegetables and lamb? Fortunately one of the mothers in his group was a young German doctor, Irene Abrahamsohn, who was travelling to New Zealand with her mother and baby daughter. He was relieved to hear that Dr Abrahamsohn had undertaken to supervise the cooking of semolina for the babies, and was on hand to advise mothers with feeding problems. And that striking Estonian blonde with the two children had started organising a duty roster for the mothers to help prepare the babies’ food.
The Estonian woman, Silva Rae, was appointed assistant to the purser shortly after we left Aden. While the captain and the purser had been wondering how to find a replacement for the assistant purser who had left the ship in Port Said, the answer to their problem had come from an unexpected source. The officers had taken a fancy to four-year-old Tarno Rae, a blond cherub who loved parading around in their caps. When the little boy heard them say that they were looking for a woman who spoke several languages, he suddenly piped up. ‘My mummy can speak five languages,’ he said. They burst out laughing but when he insisted that it was true, they asked him where she was.
A few minutes later, Tarno was pulling his mother by the hand to meet the purser. Thirty-three-year-old George Pathenopoulas saw a young woman with soft fair hair down to her shoulders, a slim figure and shapely legs accentuated by high-heeled ankle-strap shoes. As soon as they started talking, he noted that she had the calm, patient manner needed to deal with the passengers, some of whom were rather excitable. And little Tarno had been right. She did speak five languages.
Silva Rae was travelling to Australia with Tarno, her ten-month-old daughter Anneke and her parents. Before leaving Germany she had divorced the man she had married before the war. Like most Estonians of military age, he had joined the German army as part of the auxiliary SS but when the war ended and he returned, he became violent towards her and Tarno. Her parents had supported her decision to leave him and decided to migrate to Australia with her. They took care of the children while she worked in the purser’s office.
Several passengers recognised Silva from the time she had worked for the IRO in Germany, processing applications for displaced people who wanted to migrate. They were grateful because she had been compassionate when helping them fill out their applications. Occasionally distressed young men stood before her and admitted to having the tell-tale SS tattoo in their armpits, but insisted that they had been forced to enlist and had done nothing wrong. Feeling sorry for them, she had
recommended their applications.
She had completed a library course after the war and had worked in the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) library in Munich, so she was not worried about earning a living in Sydney. Her aunt in Waitara, who had sponsored them, had made inquiries at the Mitchell Library in Sydney and had been told that there would be a job waiting for her. Silva couldn’t wait to start working in the grand colonnaded building her aunt had described so enthusiastically.
Meanwhile she enjoyed her new status on the Derna in what was basically a public relations job. Sitting at a desk outside the purser’s office, she spent most of the time trying to help people sort out their problems. Whether they complained about conditions on the ship or their inconsiderate cabin-mates, she found that if she listened sympathetically and let them talk, they usually calmed down and provided their own solutions. And it was pleasant to work with the purser, who was attentive and appreciative.
The most common complaints that she referred to Colonel Hershaw were about leaking cabin roofs. Some passengers also protested about moisture seeping into the hold and damaging their luggage. But although he took this matter up with the captain, who promised to have the leaks repaired, the problem persisted. To add to the colonel’s frustration, there was the vexing issue of the dirt that blew into the cabins. You couldn’t expect people to live in rabbit warrens that were cramped, unventilated and constantly fouled by filth and rubbish.
Colonel Hershaw was disgusted to find that food scraps, wrappings, vegetable peelings, eggshells and other refuse from the galley were tossed overboard every day as though the ocean was a garbage dump. Ashes were also disposed of the same way and often blew into the cabins through the portholes.
After persistent agitation, he succeeded in getting the carpenter to nail together a wooden chute so that all the rubbish would be directed into the sea, but his victory was short-lived. They hadn’t done the job properly. The chute was too short and the ashes and garbage continued to blow back into the cabins. By now most passengers had given up asking for fans. Preferring to take their chances with the belligerent chief purser, they slept out on deck.
Although Colonel Hershaw had managed to obtain one precious fan for the cabin he now shared with the Italian girl as well as Dorothea, it failed to make the temperature tolerable and every night the three of them would drag their mattresses out onto the bridge. One morning, the first officer, John Papalas, called Dorothea aside and from his unusually grave expression it was clear that he had something on his mind. ‘I thought you should know that I saw Colonel Hershaw making love to your cabin-mate last night on the bridge,’ he said. ‘One of the other officers saw it too. She’s very young, isn’t she?’
Dorothea was so shocked that she could hardly speak. How could that have happened without her knowing? Thinking back to their sleeping arrangements on deck, she recalled that Ogden lay between her and the Italian girl so that if she had turned away and slept on her side, it was possible that she hadn’t heard anything. She knew that he had approached other young women. One of them was Gilda. He had told her that he fancied her and wanted to sleep with her, but Dorothea had never suspected that he would stoop so low as to try and seduce such a vulnerable young girl. And to make it even worse, she had been asked to look after this girl to make sure she arrived safely in Australia.
With her usual directness, Dorothea wasted no time in confronting her young cabin-mate. ‘What’s going on?’ she asked.
The girl blushed and looked down. ‘The Colonel is so nice, a real gentleman,’ she said.
‘But he’s old enough to be your father!’ Dorothea exploded.
‘I love him and he loves me,’ the girl replied, her dark eyes shining.
Dorothea was indignant. ‘Did you know that this gentleman of yours has tried to seduce almost every woman on the ship?’
Stunned, the girl stared disbelievingly at Dorothea, her romantic dreams evaporating around her. ‘Is that true?’ she whispered. Dorothea put her arm around her protégée’s slumped shoulders. ‘I did not know, I believed what he said,’ the girl sobbed, humiliated at having been deceived and used. ‘Why didn’t you warn me about him?’
Stung by the reproach, Dorothea retorted, ‘I had no idea that he would do anything like this.’ But he certainly wasn’t going to continue, she decided.
Indignant that he had taken advantage of his position on the ship to seduce this innocent girl, Dorothea mulled the situation over. Holding on to the rails because the sea had grown rougher and the waves slapped more forcefully against the ship, she wandered down to the lower deck where the Jewish youngsters usually spread themselves out. Surrounded by a group of admirers, David Kucharski was clowning around and blowing his bugle. Deep in conversation with Magda Reich, Fred Silberstein looked up and saw Dorothea who greeted him briefly but walked on.
From the moment they’d met on that American army transport plane that had taken them out of Berlin, Fred had liked Dorothea’s bright, friendly personality. He was delighted to hear that they were both sailing on the Derna, although she was bound for Sydney and he for New Zealand. He was disappointed that she spent so much of her time with that arrogant colonel and so little with him and his friends.
Dr Frant was patrolling the deck, his eagle eye searching out his young charges to make sure that they weren’t annoying the other passengers. Some of the boys were high-spirited and he’d already had complaints from Colonel Hershaw about them vandalising the settees in the mid-deck lounge. Why, out of over 500 passengers, his boys were blamed for the damage he could only guess, but he was determined not to give anyone cause for criticism. As for the girls in his charge, they were a bigger headache than the boys, disappearing at nights and getting up to God knew what trouble. He had a responsibility to protect these girls from predatory males who might take advantage of them, although he had to admit that some of them looked as though they would be quite happy to take part in amorous activities.
Dorothea, who happened to be walking past, stopped when she saw him. Dr Frant was just the person to discuss her problem with. He listened with a sombre expression as she related the story about Colonel Hershaw and the Italian girl.
‘That’s disgraceful! She can’t stay in that cabin any longer and neither should you,’ he barked. ‘The sooner you both move out, the better.’ This Colonel Hershaw was obviously an unsavoury character. Apart from the disgusting story about him and the Italian girl, he knew that the Colonel spent most of his time hobnobbing with the Baltic group and stirring them up. Some of the Jewish passengers had overheard him making anti-Semitic remarks.
Later that day, when Dorothea discussed the situation with the first officer, he also urged her to move out of the colonel’s cabin as soon as possible.
‘Why don’t you use mine?’ he suggested. ‘I’m mostly on night shifts, so you’ll have it to yourself.’ Grateful to have found a solution, she stretched out on a deck chair and started recording the day’s events in her journal. John Papalas reached over, took the book out of her hands and made a swift sketch. When he handed it back to her, she was amused to see that he’d drawn the Derna and written underneath, ‘A big heart in a small ship’.
11
The little girl with the big bow on top of her short fair hair ran up to the lifeboat and, with a flip of her small hands, lifted one corner of the tarpaulin stretched across it. Standing on tiptoes she peered inside. Lying there were a boy and a girl with their arms entwined and their lips pressed together as though glued to each other. Suddenly aware of the chink of sunlight, two pairs of startled eyes clicked open and stared back at her. Shock at being discovered and anger at being spied on gave way to relief when they saw that it was not their suspicious chaperone but a tiny girl gazing down at them with an expression of intense yearning.
Lifting up the lifeboat covers to look for lovers inside was one of Ginette Wajs’s favourite pastimes. It was as though seeing signs of affection in others somehow compensated fo
r the lack of it in her own life. It helped to distract her from the sense of abandonment that engulfed her whenever she thought of the horrible aunt who had dragged her away from foster-parents she adored, just like the wicked witch in a fairy tale.
But Ginette did find a fairy godmother on the Derna. Topka opened her big heart to the unhappy little orphan in her cabin. Every day she helped her dress and took her to the washroom, despite her protests. Ginette hated those ugly cubicles with doors hanging off or missing, where you stood on rough wooden planks that smelled musty and sour from the constant humidity and no ventilation. She closed her eyes so she wouldn’t see all those naked women, their breasts flopping all over the place, lathering themselves with unpleasant-smelling soap and splashing the floor with suds and scummy water.
Ginette would watch the mothers soaping their children, administering an occasional sharp slap on wet bottoms, or enfolding them in a loving hug. She couldn’t remember her mother who had placed her in a convent in Paris to keep her safe, and was taken away to a concentration camp soon afterwards. She remembered the crunchy gravel path leading to heavy wooden doors, and the nuns who wore strange bird-like wimples. Best of all she remembered her foster-parents, the Roddiers, who took her out of the convent to live in their château, gave her a pony to ride and treated her like a princess. She went to church with the family and believed that she was Catholic like them.
Her perfect life ended suddenly, as perfect things always do, on the day when a stranger’s shadow fell across the Roddiers’ sunny doorstep. While Topka washed her hair in the noisy washroom, Ginette blinked away the tears as she remembered being dragged away from the family she loved and taken to an apartment in Paris where a cold-eyed woman awaited her.
The Voyage of Their Life Page 12