The Voyage of Their Life

by Diane Armstrong

  They moved to Vienna and married in April 1948: he in a heavy coat and white hose under knickerbockers, a flower in his button hole and a soft wide-brimmed hat pulled down over his narrow face; Elsie wearing a picture hat over her thick dark hair, a bouquet of spring flowers and a happy smile. The following day a landing permit arrived from her aunt and uncle in Brisbane.

  Not long before leaving Vienna, they saw a movie called ‘Bush Christmas’ with Chips Rafferty, which formed their image of Australia. Wide open spaces, children riding horses ten miles to the nearest school, boiling the billy and making damper at bush picnics—that’s what they expected to find. From her aunt’s letters they already knew that Ignac would be earning eight pounds a week, and tried to figure out how long it would take them to save up for a horse and buggy.

  Elsie’s uncle, who had been the financial adviser to a maharaja, paid 500 pounds for their passage to Australia. When Elsie and Ignac were notified that they should leave at once, she had just done the washing. There was no alternative but to stuff all the wet clothes in a suitcase and travel to Innsbruck on the first leg of their journey. They were so destitute that when Ignac found a piece of mouldy bread on the street, he swooped on it and brought it home. They washed it carefully and shared it, relishing every mouthful. While waiting for the ship, they met Kurt Herzog and two other young men who were waiting too. When Kurt realised that Elsie and Ignac didn’t have the money for a hotel room, he bullied the others into donating a few marks so that the newlyweds could have a room to themselves.

  Next day Elsie went to the Jewish welfare office in town and pushed her belly out to emphasise her pregnancy. She returned to the hotel jubilant, loaded up with food for them all.

  The Australian immigration officer warned them not to let their travel documents out of their sight on the way to Marseilles, no matter what happened. ‘When you go through the checkposts, the Russians might ask for them, but don’t let them take your papers or you won’t get them back,’ he stressed. On the train, a menacing Russian soldier with a pistol in his belt demanded their documents and they had to obey. As he strode away with them, Elsie became hysterical. ‘We’ll never get to Australia now. They’ll send us to Siberia,’ she kept saying while Ignac and Kurt tried to calm her down. After what seemed like hours, the Russian guard finally returned and handed back their papers without a word.

  In the twenty-four-bunk cabin she shared with Elfriede and Ilse Hof, Vala Seitz and her daughter Pauline, and Gilda, Elsie slept in a bunk on the bottom tier, just above the engine room. The intense heat rose through the floor and caused her to break out in an itchy rash that tormented her every night. As her bitten nails were too short to give any relief, she kept a comb under her pillow for scratching. When she wasn’t getting up to go to the toilet in the washroom, she was scouring her skin with the comb, and in the morning she was so sore and exhausted that she could hardly move.

  In that cramped cabin, the frequent arguments between Mrs Seitz and her small daughter broke the tension. The temperamental mother would shout at her daughter in rapid, voluble Russian, while little Pauline would answer back in equally voluble German which made them all laugh.

  Elsie’s stories about her encounters with love-making couples in the washroom provided another source of merriment. But those who continued their nocturnal trysts on deck risked becoming the object of the chief purser’s punitive attitude. Like the self-appointed abbot of a monastic order, Adnan Molvan took it upon himself to enforce the separation of the sexes. Couples in the throes of passion would suddenly find their blanket pulled off and see a stocky little man looking down at them. When Cyla Ferszt and her husband Max escaped to the relative seclusion of the upper deck one night, a light suddenly shone in their faces. Staring down at them, the chief purser grabbed hold of their blanket and tried to yank it off, hissing, ‘Not allowed! Go back to your cabin! You’re not allowed here!’

  Cyla was a sensual woman who adored her handsome husband. She had fallen in love with him at first sight when she was a schoolgirl and he was a debonair, successful society photographer in Warsaw, but the thought of being discovered by the insolent chief purser on his nightly crusades made her anxious. Besides, the last thing she wanted was another pregnancy. As it was, Slawa, their three year old, was a handful on the boat, fretful and miserable, and it took a long time to settle her down at night so that they could slip away.

  Adnan Molvan was probably the most hated officer on board. And his wife, whom he had brought on the voyage ostensibly as a nurse, was equally unpopular. Passengers often complained to Colonel Hershaw that these two sneaked around the decks at night, spying on the passengers and waking them up to check whether they’d paid for their hammocks or deck chairs, because the chief purser augmented his income by charging passengers three pounds per deck chair. They reported that some nights Mrs Molvan’s speech was slurred and raucous, her gait unsteady and her breath reeked of alcohol. Uncouth and arrogant, the pair behaved like prison guards, which only reinforced the impression many passengers had already formed, that they were interned on a floating prison run by disorderly and incompetent jailers.

  Things came to a head when one of the pregnant women confronted Colonel Hershaw and insisted that something had to be done about this outrageous pair. She complained that the previous night they had woken her up in the early hours of the morning, pulled the mattress out from under her, and kicked until she let go of it.

  Although the colonel didn’t have much faith in the captain’s ability to deal with the Molvans, he marched the chief purser and his wife up to the captain’s cabin. He asked the captain to reprimand them severely and to order them to apologise to the pregnant woman. ‘If I hear another complaint about their behaviour, I want them locked up and put off the ship at the next port, so they can’t upset any more passengers,’ Colonel Hershaw stormed. Captain Papalas agreed with everything the escort officer said, and surprised him by giving them an unusually sharp rebuke. ‘The old boy gave them a thorough overhauling,’ the colonel rejoiced later. ‘I only hope he does something about that hopeless doctor.’

  Dr George Themelis was Colonel Hershaw’s other bête noire on board. None of the passengers had any confidence in this medico who tried to remain invisible apart from occasional appearances on deck near the bar to worship the setting sun, as the colonel used to put it. Apart from the two hours a day that he consented to see patients, the sick bay was closed. On one occasion, when a passenger became seriously ill, Colonel Hershaw had to threaten him before he would unlock the sick bay and see the patient.

  Rumours about him proliferated. Some of the crew members referred to him as ‘Madame Kornelia,’ implying that he was homosexual, while others whispered that he didn’t have time to see patients because he was dallying with a Latvian passenger who did not allow her husband’s presence on board to deter her from having a fling. This led others to speculate, somewhat maliciously, about what would happen if the chief purser found the doctor in flagrante delicto on deck during his nightly rounds.

  Captain Papalas was well aware of the incompetence of the doctor who was in charge of the health and well-being of almost seven hundred people. God only knew what would happen if someone became seriously ill, or if an epidemic broke out. He was grateful that Dr Frant was always willing to lance a boil, check someone’s pulse and look after sick children. Then there was that German woman doctor Abrahamsohn whom the mothers used to consult about feeding problems. Fortunately Ceylon was only a few days away, and he assured Colonel Hershaw that as soon as they reached Colombo, he would discharge Dr Themelis.

  12

  Life on board consisted of loneliness and despair patched with a thin veneer of bonhomie and the numbing repetition of daily routine. Between the traumas of the past and the uncertainties of the future, anxieties fed on themselves and multiplied. What work would the passengers find when their only school had been a village pasture or walled-in ghetto, and their university a concentration lager or DP camp? Wher
e would they live when they arrived? How would they manage in a country where they would not understand what people said?

  Three weeks had passed since we’d left Marseilles and the general morale matched the sullen colour of the sea and sky. As though she had absorbed the anxieties of the passengers, the Derna limped along more slowly than ever in the torpid air. In the cabins, the temperature at night soared to thirty degrees. Pools of sweat formed beneath the passengers as they sat on deck, fanning themselves with pieces of paper folded into pleats. When it rained, water leaked into the cabins, formed puddles on the floor and damaged their few belongings. Without meat, the food had become more starchy and monotonous than ever. My mother, along with other Polish passengers, had bought tins of sardines from the hawkers in Aden and supplemented our stodgy diet with sandwiches she made in the cabin, chopping up the onions she obtained from the kitchen.

  Drinking water became a major problem. After Aden, it had a brackish taste. Some passengers wondered whether the Egyptians had sabotaged our water supply, but others reasoned that it was probably because it came from artesian wells. Although we were always thirsty, the water tasted so musty that it was an effort to get it down. But the quantity soon became a bigger problem than the quality. Whether it was because they had miscalculated the amount of water required or because of the unexpected length of the voyage, water became rationed, so that it became increasingly difficult to get any for washing. Desperate for water to wash the baby, Sam Fiszman resorted to breaking the padlock on the kitchen door one night to take a jugful. When a crew member caught him, the captain recorded the incident in the log book and warned him not to damage the ship again or he would be locked up.

  Early each morning, before the heat made every movement an effort, some of the Estonians gathered on deck for folk dancing and choir practice. Helle, who knew all the dance steps, demonstrated the jooksupolka with Uno Mardus. She was supple and light on her feet, and her long fair hair swung in time to the music as her feet trod the intricate steps of their traditional dances. The much-loved tunes from their youth brought memories of their native land flooding back and, with them, the hope of returning home one day. Under the direction of Pastor Stockholm’s son, their voices joined together and brought the spirit of Estonia comfortingly close.

  The Jewish youngsters sang too. Sometimes they sang the stirring songs of the pioneers who cleared the swamps of Palestine to transform the Promised Land into reality. They would join hands and dance while they sang ‘Hava Nagila’ and ‘Avenu Shalom Aleichem’. Sometimes they sang spirited Polish, Russian and Czech folk songs from their childhood, about village lovers, the vastness of the steppes or the whispering splendour of birch forests. Drawn to their singing, I would sometimes stand at the edge of their group and listen. Their songs reminded me of the deep, resonant voices of the Russian soldiers who sang around the camp fire and carried us children around on their shoulders after they liberated my Polish village from the Nazis. I knew that throughout the war our lives had hung by a thread because the villagers threatened to turn us over to the Gestapo. My mother told me that if the Russians hadn’t arrived when they did, we probably wouldn’t have survived.

  Every night the teenagers met at the bar. The few who had money would occasionally buy a cassis and soda or a lemonade from the broad-shouldered young French barman Jean-Pierre, whose physique the young girls admired. In this area, which they nicknamed Pigalle, they played the same few records over and over again, held each other tightly and closed their eyes while they danced. On those magical nights, when the salty sea breeze ruffled the girls’ hair and tickled the hairs on the boys’ arms, they forgot the hideous blue numbers tattooed on their forearms. Life beckoned like a moonlit road and everything was possible.

  Fred Silberstein danced with Magda Reich who seemed to have everything: intellect, personality and looks. As they moved slowly around the deck, he tried to blot out the fact that after the voyage they would probably never see each other again. Magda and her brother, who were in Dr Frant’s group, were going to Melbourne while he was heading for New Zealand. She was determined to study, and from the long, earnest discussions they often had about philosophy, literature and history, he had no doubt that she would do well in any field she chose. Fred had a dream too: to become a chef, but how he would achieve that he had no idea.

  The desire to become a chef had originated in the strangest of circumstances. In the summer of 1942 in Berlin, just as he was coming out of school one afternoon, a man in a long coat and hat had suddenly blocked his way. Without saying a word, he grabbed Fred’s left shoulder and pushed him into a car that sped through the city until they reached Gross Am Wannsee, a lake he had often visited in summer with his parents. But this was no holiday treat. That afternoon his life changed forever. He was no longer a schoolboy with caring parents and a comfortable home, but a slave labourer among strangers.

  Thrown out of his sheltered, loving home and into this brutal environment at the age of fourteen, Fred was shocked by the torrent of abuse screamed by the SS guards who called him a filthy stinking Jew or Schweinhund. He staggered under back-breaking blocks of stone he hauled in the grounds of the colonnaded villa that was the headquarters of the Nazi elite.

  Occasionally a slim Nazi with a narrow face and prominent nose would stop in the grounds and crack jokes with the guards about how good it was to see the Jews working. From photographs he had seen in the newspapers, Fred recognised him as Adolf Eichmann and was amazed to hear him addressing the prisoners in Yiddish from time to time. Eichmann had been sent to Palestine in order to become better acquainted with the culture and character of the people whose genocide he was about to organise. What Fred didn’t know was that five months earlier, in this very place, the architects of the Holocaust had drafted their blueprint for the Final Solution. Its implementation was to become Eichmann’s achievement and ultimately his death warrant.

  On New Year’s Eve 1942, hundreds of high-ranking Nazis were invited to a party. After a day spent lugging rocks in the grounds, Fred was ordered to help in the kitchen. The chef was a terrifying drunken Nazi who made Fred’s hands shake. Holding up a razor-sharp knife, he would stand so close that his alcoholic breath made the boy’s eyes smart. ‘If a Pole or a Jew ever answers me back, want to know what I do?’ He made a swift slicing motion with his knife. ‘I cut their tongue out. So watch it!’ Washing the dishes that rattled in his hands, Fred hoped he wouldn’t drop anything, while the chef ranted and threatened in his slurred voice as he lurched around the cavernous kitchen.

  They were still preparing for the reception when two men strode into the kitchen, took the chef by the arms and dragged him outside. Then they turned to Fred, who had flattened himself against the cupboard to avoid being noticed. ‘Come here!’ one of them roared. ‘You finish the cooking, quick!’ Spurred on by terror, Fred summoned up whatever he could recall and, using his imagination and culinary instincts, proceeded to bake dozens of German doughnuts filled with cheese, knowing that his life was over if his memory failed him. It was only after he had finished, long past midnight, and was rewarded by a rare treat, a big enamel mug of black coffee and one of his doughnuts, that the irony of the situation struck him. They had relied on a Jewish boy to come to the rescue by cooking for the Nazi elite.

  Despite living in constant fear, Fred made one personal statement of resistance at Wannsee. While planting iris bulbs in the garden beds under the nose of the brutal guard, he wondered what the Nazis would do next spring when they looked out of the window and saw that the flowers outside their headquarters formed the six-pointed Star of David.

  But he never found out because in February 1943 he was deported to Auschwitz. With his fair hair, regular features and bright blue eyes, Fred fitted the image of the idealised Aryan far better than most of the SS officers who gathered there to discuss how to rid the world of the Jews. As he was being pushed into a truck destined for the death camp, one of the guards whispered, ‘This is your last chance. Stop b
eing Jewish. You could easily pass as an Aryan. Run away and join the Hitler Jugend and save yourself.’

  Without hesitating even for an instant, Fred shook his head. He wasn’t going to pretend he was one of them. A Buddhist sage once said that when faced with a difficult decision, one should always choose the harder path. But split-second decisions are not made by conscious thought processes and in the nightmarish years that followed, Fred sometimes wondered why his unconscious had opted for the difficult path instead of the easier one he’d been offered.

  At the railway station they were packed into cattle trucks, jammed so tightly together that there was only room to stand. Doors clanged and were bolted behind them and the train moved off. Fred had no idea where they were being taken, but looking around at the others who were with their families, he ached with loneliness. When he heard some people talking about resettlement, he felt a surge of hope. Perhaps he would be reunited with his parents. For three days they travelled, locked in without food or water, tormented by hunger, exhaustion and thirst. But for Fred, who was painfully modest and fastidious, the most excruciating aspect of the journey was the degradation of having no toilet and no privacy.

  It was early on a frosty winter’s morning when the train finally stopped and shards of ice fell off the door as it was unhasped from the outside. They had arrived at Auschwitz. The glaring searchlights were diffused with yellowish fog. On the platform German guards were screaming, lashing people with whips and truncheons and yelling abuse, which Fred found more lacerating than the physical brutality. Straining at the leash, German shepherd dogs snarled as they bared their razor-sharp teeth. ‘Los! Schnell! Hurry up!’ the guards yelled, whipping and beating them as they tried to get out of the waggons. In all the noise and confusion, he heard them shouting, ‘Women, children and old people to the left; men to the right!’ He watched families hugging and kissing as they were parted, the women carrying their children.