The boys on the Derna gazed longingly at Ella,* a spirited girl with a mass of strawberry blonde hair and a slim figure. No one knew that behind her carefree manner lay a snake-pit of memories she wanted to forget. At thirteen she’d been ordered to stand on a platform in the yard of the Gestapo headquarters in Slovakia while German guards pointed rifles at her. A prisoner had escaped and she was to be shot in reprisal. In front of her stood her father, his eyes a terrifying red, being held back by his companions from rushing towards her and sharing her fate. And while she was thinking, with a surprising lack of emotion, that this was the end, the execution order was rescinded and she was sent back to the cell.
A young man started singing and some of the orphans joined in. As a Russian folk song sounded all over the deck, Verner Puurand bristled. This singer had to be a Communist, sent to spread Bolshevik propaganda overseas. Harold Kapp, who had served with the auxiliary SS corps in the Wehrmacht, glanced over at the Jewish youngsters. Many of them had numbers tattooed on their arms, but he was sceptical about them. They had probably done it themselves, to make people think they’d been in a concentration camp.
13
Like a cripple hobbling along an endless road, the Derna dragged itself through the waves. Captain Papalas dismissed complaints about the state of the engine and blamed our slow pace on the poor coal taken on in Aden. But when Verner Puurand looked around the engine room and saw the sluggish pistons and the amount of coal being shovelled by the sweating stokers, he didn’t agree. ‘It’s the boiler,’ he told his sons. ‘They say the engineer is trying to fix it, but he hasn’t got a hope. They’ll have to wait until we get to Colombo.’
The children were bored with cards, bakelite dolls, Bibi books and the few games they’d brought with them. Vassiliki Fatseas and her brother Petro found a child’s pram and wheeled each other around the deck at breakneck speed. This kept them amused until Vassiliki strained a muscle and doubled up in so much pain that her sister Mary was alarmed. While they waited for the doctor to appear, someone suggested that a light broth would help. Hours later Doctor Themelis put his head around the door of the cabin. Seeing that the patient was sitting up eating soup, he shot Mary a scathing look. ‘I see you’re all doctors now, so you won’t be needing me!’ And with that he turned and strode away.
While Vassiliki was recovering, Petro agreed to play hangman and noughts and crosses, even though he felt humiliated because she always won even though she was two years younger. To make the games more interesting, Vassiliki suggested playing forfeits with a naughty twist. Each time one of them lost a game, they had to take off an item of clothing she said, her dark eyes sparkling with mischief. Before long, Petro’s shorts, shoes, shirt and underpants lay in a pile in front of his sister. ‘Give them back!’ he shouted and crawled into his bunk in embarrassment because she had hidden them all and wouldn’t return them. Petro was forced to stay in bed with the sheet pulled up to his chin until one of their sisters rescued him.
With so little to distract them, even the slightest incident varied the monotony. Sometimes small silvery fish leapt out of the sea and landed on the worn timber deck at Peter Kraus’s feet. The skinny six year old with his round glasses watched fascinated as they tried to lift themselves up, occasionally managing a low jump until they lay exhausted on the timber, their sheen fading as he watched. The ship’s baker Michael, who liked Peter and his little brother Paul, often brought them freshly baked rolls because they hated the meals in the dining room. He even managed to produce a birthday cake for Paul when he turned four. Sometimes Michael twisted bits of bread on the end of fishing lines and the boys sat patiently at the stern, hoping to catch a fish.
Their mother Clara tried to keep them out on deck as much as possible. The child in the cabin was coughing more than ever and she was worried that her sons would become infected. ‘You really must take him to a doctor as soon as we get to Colombo,’ she told the mother, but the neglectful woman only shrugged and yawned.
‘It’s just a cough,’ she said.
In between games of bridge that absorbed him for most of the day, my father would pore over an English textbook, trying to teach himself the tenses of verbs. Catch, caught. Bring, brought. Teach, taught. Make, made. Do, did. How could anyone remember a language that had more irregularities than rules?
Although he had never been in business and didn’t know how to go about manufacturing buttons, he wasn’t worried. Having survived the Holocaust in Poland against seemingly hopeless odds, he was confident that we would manage in Australia. He often bolstered up his bridge partner Leon Ament, who didn’t know anyone in Australia and felt apprehensive about arriving alone in a strange country. Dr Ament had a rare combination of attributes—a spectacularly handsome appearance and an unassuming nature. With his fiery dark eyes and a small cleft in his chin, he bore a striking resemblance to the film star Tyrone Power, although according to my mother, that was a compliment to Tyrone Power.
Everyone talked about the future, but those who were skilled in a trade, like Harry Braun, felt more secure than the rest. Harry, who was one of the orphans, felt confident about earning a living as a dental mechanic.
‘Everyone knows that the streets in Australia are paved with gold,’ he used to joke with his friends André Wayne and David Weiss.
‘But if this ship doesn’t pick up speed, someone else will get to the gold before us!’ one of them retorted. Many thought they were coming to a backward place where European skills and ideas would guarantee success, especially as they had heard that Australians didn’t like to work hard and preferred to take things easy. Trying to outdo each other, they would boast, ‘We’ll teach those Australians a thing or two!’
‘I don’t care about making money,’ Bill Marr would say. ‘You know why I’m coming to Australia? Because it doesn’t have any borders!’
The older Polish crowd thought that Max Ferszt had an enviable career because a photographer could always make a living. Max had been a society photographer in Warsaw, and Cyla had fallen in love with him at first sight while she was on holidays.
‘He looked like a film star when we met,’ she recalled. ‘I was seventeen at the time and I couldn’t stop looking at him. I’d never seen anyone so dashing in all my life. Luckily for me, there weren’t any other girls staying at the hotel at the time, so he asked me to come for a sleigh ride in the woods. I don’t know what got into me, but I started reciting love poems! After we parted, I wrote him silly schoolgirl letters but never expected him to reciprocate.’
Cyla always had a group around her, eager to hear her stories. She was a sensual young woman of ample proportions who attracted people with her zest for life and ringing laugh. She was an excellent raconteur, and her slow, lilting voice kept them fascinated as she described their courtship. On the day her hero stepped out of her dreams and appeared in Lodz, her home town, to visit her, she wore her best coat with a fur collar and waited at the station surrounded by her girlfriends who couldn’t wait to see the paragon they had been hearing about for the past year. Two years later, when he proposed, Cyla was ecstatic.
But their married idyll was shattered soon afterwards, when war broke out. Shortly after invading Poland, the Germans had signed a mutual non-aggression pact with the Russians, dividing the country between them. Along with many other Jews in Warsaw, Max had been press-ganged to sweep roads, and after being savagely beaten up by the guards, he decided to flee from Nazi rule.
The western region remained part of the Reich while eastern Poland was occupied by the Russians. This pact was Hitler’s masterstroke. It ensured that Russia would not declare war on him while German boots trampled over Europe. Meanwhile in Poland, where the Nazi persecution of the Jews had already begun, there was a mass exodus eastwards towards the Russian zone which offered some hope of survival.
At first, life for Cyla and Max under Russian occupation in Bialystok was relatively uneventful, but everything changed when they refused to accept Russian citizenship
. Shortly afterwards, two agents from Russia’s dreaded secret police, the NKVD, banged on their door at midnight and told them to pack a small case because they were to be sent back to Warsaw. Assuming that they would only be travelling for a few hours, Cyla brought a bag of sweets for the journey. But the following day, the crowded train was still lumbering through an unfamiliar landscape that didn’t look anything like the Polish countryside. There were no sanitary facilities in their crowded waggon, no food, and only boiled water called kipiatok to drink while they sucked the sweets.
Three weeks later, the train ground to a halt. Standing bewildered at a desolate station surrounded by miles of wasteland, Cyla blinked in the unaccustomed sunlight and tried to get her bearings. They had come to a remote province of Siberia not far from Archangelsk where her ship-mate Anna Szput had been deported. But the journey was not over. For hours they sailed in a raft along the Wologda River until they arrived at a wilderness called Poldarsa. There was no sign of human habitation, only dense forests of birch, pine and alder stretching in every direction. ‘This is where you will live and work from now on,’ the camp commander announced. ‘You will never see your beloved Warsaw again.’
Cyla and Max became slave workers at a labour camp. ‘They handed us axes and told us to go into the forest and chop trees. If you didn’t work, you didn’t eat, that was the rule. None of us had ever held an axe or saw, and the ones they gave us were blunt so we all got terrible blisters,’ Cyla recalled, stroking her hands as she talked. ‘Every evening an overseer checked to see how many trees each working group had cut, and if you met your quota you were entitled to a plate of herring soup.’
Suddenly she laughed. ‘Some of the prisoners became very crafty. The overseers put a notch on the bottom of each log they counted, but the following morning some of the inmates would saw off the part with the notch and pass those same logs off as the next day’s work!’
After the men had sawn the logs, Cyla and the other women had to chop up the branches. As the forest gradually receded under their saws and axes, they had to trudge further and further to reach the trees and eventually she had to walk for eighteen kilometres to reach the birches and pines. The words that try to convey past sufferings are always inadequate. As she sat on the deck of the Derna near the equator, wiping the perspiration from her neck and dreaming of cool breezes and iced drinks, it was hard to recapture the torture of hands chapped and frozen, and bodies shivering under their padded cotton jackets in the merciless Siberian winter, as they wondered whether they would ever see their home again.
But although her eyelashes sometimes frosted over as she sawed, her feet felt numb and her bones ached with cold, Cyla’s soul responded to the grandeur of that white landscape when snowdrifts covered the forest floor and plump pillows of snow glittered on the birch boughs. In summer, after the ice had melted, the forest bloomed and they picked blueberries and mushrooms from the soft loam.
Like Cyla and Max, and Anna Szput and her husband, many other Polish Jews on board the Derna had been deported to Siberia to become forced labourers in a harsh environment where medical aid was non-existent and no one cared if they lived or died. They struggled in freezing cold with hunger and disease, but the Russian guards were apathetic rather than cruel. Despising all the prisoners as either bourgeois exploiters or Nazis, they meted out the same punishment to everyone, not singling Jews out for annihilation as the Nazis did. The Baltic passengers who accused the Jews of being Communists did not realise that many of their Jewish ship-mates had been deported to Siberia for opposing Communism and had suffered the fate that they themselves had fled to avoid.
By the time Cyla and Max had built their barracks at Poldarsa, Hitler had crushed most of Europe and no longer needed Stalin’s neutrality. Eager to begin his conquest of the hated Bolsheviks, he broke their non-aggression pact and invaded Russia in 1941.
Now that they found themselves fighting on the same side as the Allies, the Russians released the Polish prisoners. Although they were free to leave the labour camp, they received no food or money, only rough mahorka tobacco, and were ordered to remain in the Soviet Union as the war was still raging. Cyla and Max had no idea where to go. Everyone spoke of travelling south where the climate was more clement, but getting on a train was almost impossible. After walking for three days, they reached a station where thousands of people were crowded on the small platform, desperate to board the train. Although it was already jammed with people hanging out of the doors and windows as it pulled into the station, somehow Cyla and Max managed to push in. On the long journey, the train pulled into equally crowded stations where they traded their mahorka for bread.
Central Asia was splitting at the seams with refugees and each place they came to seemed more hopeless than the last. In Tashkent, Cyla was horrified by the mass of wounded, homeless people begging for a crust of bread, so on they went to Bukhara. Once a wealthy trading post for caravans laden with silks, spices and precious jewels on the ancient Silk Road, Bukhara had become a chaotic slum of desperate people as tens of thousands converged there from Siberian camps. With no means of supporting themselves, they slept in alleys, begged for food and when all else failed, they stole and cheated.
Like the other refugees, Cyla and Max had been forced to live by their wits to scrounge enough food to survive. When berries were plentiful, Cyla squeezed them, diluted the juice and sold glasses of cordial at the market. Another time, she made a few cucumber sandwiches to sell. ‘I was always hungry and longed to bite into a piece of meat!’ she recalled.
‘Sounds just like the Derna!’ quipped one of her ship-mates. A faraway look came into Cyla’s eyes and she drew little Slawa closer. Three-year-old Slawa had been born in Bukhara with a twin brother who only lived for twelve days. When the war was over, and they were finally able to return to Poland, it hurt to leave the tiny grave so far away in Central Asia.
While Cyla talked, Max pointed his Leica at Slawa sitting on a deck chair with a pair of sunglasses perched on her little nose. Cyla was smiling again. ‘That’s the camera he bought in Bukhara,’ she said. The Leica had rescued them from poverty and hunger, as soldiers would queue up to be photographed. Snub-nosed boys called Ivan and Boris would pose self-consciously in their shabby uniforms and later marvel at their own image on the paper. They all wanted their photos taken.
Another Polish passenger confident about the future was Hanka Pilichowski. Her eyes, Scarlett O’Hara green, were accentuated by titian hair twisted into a French roll and by an eau-de-nil scarf knotted at the throat. She was a couturière whose deft fingers were never still. She spent most of her time on board sewing stylish dresses by hand and embroidering silk lingerie. Her suitcases bulged with exquisite Parisian laces, buttons and fashionable accessories she had bought, knowing that these luxury items would be in demand in Australia. While chatting with her Polish companions, she made a pair of shorts for her ship companion Bronia Glassman, who didn’t have anything cool to wear. Everyone said that Hanka would do well in Melbourne because its fashion-conscious women were said to be crying out for a high-class dressmaker.
Hanka and her husband were a striking couple who looked as though they’d been born to enjoy a privileged life. But only a few years before, Hanka had discovered a steel core inside herself that kept her alive. When she thought about it later, she realised that she had done some crazy things and taken enormous risks, but anger had given her courage. In the first few months of the war, she’d watched a German soldier beating up an old Jewish man in a Warsaw street. That’s when she had resolved to fight the oppressors and never give up.
When her Catholic friend Jasiek, a resistance fighter, was wounded during the Warsaw Uprising in 1943, she put him on a barrow and pushed him through the ruins. They wandered from one town to another, right under the nose of the Germans who were searching for anyone who had fought in that doomed rebellion. Through the terrifying bombardment, she continued to wheel her friend around and managed to protect him from the Germans
, even though she was on false papers and risked being caught herself.
During their wanderings through the devastated countryside, her skill with the needle helped them survive several times. By transforming Jasiek’s white shirt into a nurse’s uniform, she was able to obtain work at a hospital, which provided a roof over their heads and a little food, mainly carrots. Another time, she kept them alive by selling blouses and nightdresses she made out of tablecloths she found in a village church.
After the war, while working as a dressmaker in the Polish city of Lodz, she met the debonair Henryk Pilichowski and fell in love. Although their shipboard companions assumed from the gold band on her finger that they were married, they had never gone through a formal ceremony. She couldn’t see the point. If two people loved each other, they didn’t need a piece of paper to prove it. But she didn’t disclose that to her friends on the Derna as she held up the white shorts she had just finished. They elicited a chorus of admiration for her talent, and assurances that she would be the most sought-after couturière in Melbourne.
Sitting a small distance away, Matylda Czalczynski was also optimistic about her employment prospects because she had completed a beautician’s course in Paris. While her nine-year-old daughter Karmela played with Haneczka and some of the other children, Matylda tried to comfort her cabin-mate Halina Kalowski who was worried about the Derna’s slackening speed. She felt nauseated by the rocking, weary from the heat and anxious about her pregnancy, but Matylda’s pleasant conversation helped to pass the time. Now she was chatting about that nice old Mrs Weile who was distraught because she had lost her wedding ring. Rousing herself from the deck chair, Halina joined in the search and, to the owner’s relief, spotted the well-worn gold band in the washroom.
The Voyage of Their Life Page 16