The Voyage of Their Life

by Diane Armstrong

  On the starched white tablecloth, fruit they had never seen or tasted before was arranged in gilded bowls: pineapples, mangoes, passionfruit and the translucent segments of tangy mangosteens. No one knew how to eat the passionfruit, and some spat out the gritty seeds. Mangoes had a strange odour that some found delectable, others nauseating. And behind every high-backed chair stood a waiter in white livery, waiting to pass a finger bowl or whisk away a plate. Beside Topka sat Ginette, a big bow tied on top of her head, picking at the food. ‘Those men with the brown faces keep staring at me,’ she whispered, not realising that they were admiring her delicate little face and fair hair.

  Like a swarm of maddened bees in pursuit of nectar, everyone from the ship rushed to the restaurants. After four weeks of a monotonous diet light on meat but heavy on starch, tomato sauce and pickled vegetables, we couldn’t wait to have a proper meal. The passengers who dined at the Galle Face Hotel that evening were astonished when the head waiter handed the men false shirt fronts and black ties so that they wouldn’t lower the tone of the establishment. As they entered the ornate dining room, Bronia Glassman and her ship-mate Cyla Ferszt noticed that some of the English ladies looked in their direction and pointedly began spraying themselves with eau de cologne. ‘You’d think we had the plague,’ Bronia whispered in Cyla’s ear. The musicians who entertained the diners that night had a familiar accent and when Bronia went over to talk to them, she discovered that the group were from Warsaw and were also on their way to Australia.

  In the more modest establishment where my parents and I were dining, the food kept coming: strange, exotic and flavoured with tantalising spices. Tiny fish fried in batter, crab in spicy sauce, curried vegetables, and chicken roasted to perfection. Unfamiliar with Ceylonese food, we bit enthusiastically into the mouth-watering chicken. Almost immediately our throats started to close up. We coughed and choked, our faces red and eyes streaming as we tried in vain to cool our burning mouths with glasses of iced water. ‘So much for normal food!’ my mother gasped.

  Probably the only passenger who relished Colombo’s hot curries was Elsie Pataky. She had grown up in India and felt nostalgic in Colombo for the family and the way of life she had left behind. Because of her pregnancy she had stopped smoking during the voyage, but collected the cigarettes that Dorothea distributed every week. By selling them, she and Ignac could afford to eat on shore. Communicating was no problem for her either, because she spoke English. While strolling around the city, she stopped to gaze at a jeweller’s window and soon became engrossed in a conversation with the owner, who invited her inside. She laughed heartily when he placed several unset rubies and sapphires in her palm and explained that she had no money. To her astonishment, he presented them to her as a gift.

  The profusion and low price of precious stones in Colombo’s shops made them irresistible. The few passengers who possessed a little cash bought several stones, while the rest could only stare and dream. Wandering around the streets, Fred Silberstein and his friend Fred Weile saw some of the officers going into one of the jewellery shops. ‘That shop must have the best prices, because those guys would know where to go,’ Fred Weile reasoned. He seemed to have a good business sense and convinced his companion that it was worth buying some stones to sell in New Zealand at a big profit. After the owner had sworn to the high quality of the stones, they left with their little pouch, slapping each other on the back at the terrific deal they’d made, not suspecting that they were destined to be bitterly disappointed.

  Nearby at the crowded bazaar, they were sucked into the kaleidoscope of noise, colour and movement. Fred Silberstein bought a pair of shorts from a jovial hawker, but when he returned the following day to exchange them because they were too tight, the atmosphere changed. The stall holder yelled at him and an angry crowd gathered. Sticks were brandished and violence hovered in the sultry air, so Fred put the shorts down and left the market in a hurry.

  Helle went ashore together with the Puurands and some of their friends, pleased that she’d thought of having her Girl Guide card stamped as a memento of her visit to Ceylon. She was astounded to see so many of the locals walking barefoot on asphalt that scorched her feet, even through the sandals. Parched in the enervating weather, they entered the cool lounge of the Metropol Hotel and ordered drinks, hoping that they’d be able to afford the prices. The women were sipping iced orangeade and their companions were drinking Dutch beer when the Singhalese man at the next table leaned forward and struck up a conversation with Verner Puurand. After paying for their drinks, he called for two taxis and showed them around the town. Their benefactor owned a tea plantation where they watched women sitting cross-legged on the factory floor, sorting, sifting and packing tea leaves. After presenting each of them with a pound packet of the best Ceylon tea, the man asked Verner to deliver a letter to his brother in Australia.

  Helle couldn’t wait to get back to the Derna to tell Rita about her excursion, but a flurry of gossip greeted her as soon as she boarded. Karl Kassmann, a former Estonian wrestler who had been living in Colombo for the past twenty years, was coming to the ship with his Dutch wife the following day. The big news was that he’d arranged for the choir to give a concert on Radio Colombo.

  Next morning, they tried to calm their nerves as they gathered round the microphone in the recording studio and sang the songs they’d rehearsed on board. First the men sang ‘Mu Esstimaa ja Kuldrannake’ (My Estonia and Golden Shore). This was followed by the whole choir singing ‘Lahkumislaul’ and ‘Nooruslaul’ (Farewell Song and Song of Youth), and they concluded the concert with a nostalgic rendition of ‘Koduotus’ (Home) which brought tears to their eyes.

  Although Helle didn’t think their voices had harmonised as well during the performance as they had during rehearsals, the radio audience was so delighted that they phoned in requests, and the station manager ran into the studio to ask them to keep singing. They didn’t know any other songs, so after a hurried consultation they gave a repeat performance. When a journalist from the Colombo News arrived to interview them and take their photograph, they felt like celebrities. To cap it all, the station gave each member of the choir four rupees. Helle bought thirty-three lemons and fifty bananas with hers: for the first time in her life she was able to eat her fill of bananas.

  Passengers who had no money traded their belongings with the locals. By selling his American army jacket to one of the hawkers, Bruno Tohver was able to go ashore, but some passengers remained on board for the entire four days we were in port. They included Mattie and Katina Travasaros and their cousins John and Stan. After her ordeal at the railway station in Cairo, when she had almost lost the boys in the crowd, Mattie’s mother was adamant that she would not risk that happening again in a foreign country. No matter how fervently they argued and pleaded, she refused to give in. They were staying put and that was the end of it. While most of the passengers spent the day ashore, the four youngsters watched local boys diving for the coins that some passengers tossed into the sea. When they disappeared from view, Mattie held her breath until they emerged from the depths, sleek as young seals, the coins clamped between their strong white teeth.

  Many youngsters found the water of Colombo Harbour irresistible. Some of the orphans dived in, but when they tried to swim back they found that the current was so powerful they could hardly make any headway. When twelve-year-old Nick Matussevich and one of his brothers dived in, they looked up into the stern face of the first officer who signalled them to come out immediately. Swimming in the harbour was dangerous, not only on account of the current, but also because of the sharks. As they clambered on board, the boys hoped that their father wouldn’t hear about their escapade.

  Meanwhile some of their sisters had almost been caught by the treacherous tide while ashore. Their parents chatted with a Russian artist they had met, while the girls strolled along a palm-fringed beach that seemed to stretch forever. As they paddled in the water, stooping occasionally to pick up shells, they heard shouts a
nd turned to see a gang of local boys running towards them, waving their arms and shouting. Unable to understand what they were saying, the girls became frightened until they realised that the boys were pointing to the waves which were crashing onto the shore. The tide was rushing in and if they didn’t run they would be cut off.

  Lars Meder’s experience was far more enjoyable. When the Estonian engineer of the Swedish tanker moored in the harbour boarded the Derna to scrutinise the passenger list, he found the Meders whom he knew from Estonia, and invited them on board his vessel. Excited, Lars poked around the freighter which, unlike the Derna, was clean and cool. He noted its diesel engine and air-conditioning, and wolfed down the best meal he’d had in the past four weeks.

  Two of the Jewish orphans, Peter Rossler and Joe Neustatl, decided to make the most of their opportunity to explore Colombo. Peter was thrilled to be able to capture the bustle of the port, the city streets and the rickshaw drivers with his movie camera. Among a group of locals he noticed an old man with a finely moulded face and a carved walking stick.

  ‘Take a photo, sahib!’ the man’s companions urged him, but as soon as the camera stopped whirring, he was surrounded by insistent men holding out their hands and demanding payment. As Peter and Joe backed away, the mob came after them, shouting and gesticulating. They raced along a narrow alley, darted behind some stalls and managed to escape.

  On the last day in Colombo, Peter and Joe decided to catch a local bus to Kandy and visit the famous Buddhist temple. But after the bus had trundled along the pot-holed, congested road for over an hour, they discovered that Kandy was still a long way off. They jumped out at the next stop and caught the bus back to the harbour, worried in case the Derna left without them.

  Dr and Mrs Frant, with their daughter Christine and one of their young charges Alice Zalcberg, enjoyed a welcome break from shipboard life when a French doctor and his English wife invited them to their luxurious villa. The wife was charmed by Alice and astonished the Frants by offering to adopt her. At fifteen, Alice was a sparky girl with a dimpled left cheek and a wide mouth that was never still. Her exuberant personality constantly got her into trouble, especially with the older passengers who accused her of being rowdy. The other orphans often played pranks on her by short-sheeting her bunk or hiding her towel, but she got her revenge by rigging a bucket of water over the door to drench one of the culprits when he came back to the cabin.

  After years of deception and fear, at fifteen Alice was learning to be herself. As a spoilt, sickly seven year old, she had been smuggled out of the Czestochowa Ghetto where her parents and older sister remained. For the next five years she was shunted from one reluctant stranger to another, from one town to another, in search of a sanctuary. In each new home, she had to learn another name and memorise a different life story so that no one would discover she wasn’t Catholic. Alice lived on a knife edge of fear and tension, as one family after another abandoned her. Those experiences left such a deep imprint on her that even after the war ended, she was too frightened to admit that she was Jewish.

  But now that she was among other young Jews and had a good-looking boyfriend in Abie Goldberg, her fun-loving personality began to assert itself and she felt happy for the first time in years. It was this exuberance that had appealed to the couple in Colombo, but the Frants explained that their assignment was to bring all the orphans to Australia and, in any case, Alice was travelling to join some relatives in Sydney.

  We had now been in Colombo for several days and the novelty was wearing off. Rumours began to proliferate. Perhaps they had been unable to fix the broken engine. And where was the captain? As he hadn’t been seen for some time, people speculated that he had jumped ship. Others said that he was drunk but Uno Mardus, who had seen him lying white-faced in his cabin several times, thought he might be ill. Four weeks of our five-week voyage had already passed. How could we possibly make it to Melbourne by 12 October?

  Every day in port the loading continued. The Derna took on 1200 tonnes of coal in Colombo, as well as other cargo including rice, lentils and onions, and now sat much lower in the water than she had at the beginning of the voyage.

  Finally on 1 October, our fifth day in port, we were notified that we would be sailing early next morning and had to return to the ship by midnight. Some of Dr Frant’s charges decided to have one last slap-up dinner ashore. When Bob Grunschlag, André Wayne, Harry Braun, David Weiss, as well as Abie Goldberg, ordered chicken, the waiter asked, ‘Hot chicken, sir?’ They looked at him in surprise and laughed. Of course. Who’d want to eat cold chicken? But when they took a mouthful of the curry and proceeded to gasp and splutter, they understood the significance of the question. Taking pity on them, the waiter brought a milder dish and they paid the bill with the last of their rupees, saving the exact amount needed for the tender back to the ship.

  But this time the boatmen demanded a much higher fee than usual due to the late hour, and for once they refused to negotiate. Finally, close to midnight, the boys realised that they had no choice but to pay the exorbitant fee. As they didn’t have enough money, Abie Goldberg, the only one with sufficient cash, took the tender back to the ship alone and returned soon afterwards with money to pay their fares.

  Dawn was breaking when Helle awoke to hear her admirer Luciano shouting from the doorway, ‘Sopra! Sopra!’ Go up on deck! Along with the other yawning passengers, she made her way up to the front deck where crowds had already assembled. We were about to leave port and Adnan Molvan, the chief purser, was sitting at a table ticking off names to check that everyone was on board and there weren’t any more stowaways. The line stretched up and down the wide internal stairs between the foredecks to the cabins, right up to the landing where he sat with his back to the wall.

  The process took so long that the sun was already beating down on our heads while we waited. The boys who had returned to the ship late at night were still half asleep and became increasingly rebellious at having to get up so early just to wait in an endless queue. It reminded many of them of the pointless roll-calls in the concentration camps. Bob Grunschlag was furious that the chief purser was throwing his weight around as usual and treating them like dirt. A few days earlier, when Bob had complained that the food was inedible, Molvan had sneered and said, ‘People who don’t pay for their passage should be grateful for anything they get.’

  When it was finally Bob’s turn to stand in front of the purser and be checked off the list, instead of giving his name, he glared in menacing silence, as did the youths behind him. Without saying a word, they inched forward, coming closer and closer, until the purser looked uneasy. When it looked as though they would push his table and ram it into him until he was jammed against the wall, he leapt off his chair, sprang aside and abandoned any further formalities.

  As the Derna sailed away, the Estonian passengers were in turmoil about an article they’d read in the Colombo News. According to the report, their benefactor who had shown them around town and organised the radio concert was the secretary of the local Communist Party. Everyone was reeling with shock. They had allowed themselves to be entertained by a Communist! They had entrusted their letters to him! Someone even whispered that Mr Kassmann had made his money trafficking in women. ‘Jealousy is speaking, and sour grapes,’ Arnold Ohtra noted dryly in his diary as the ship left a slowly widening wake in the dull green water.

  Relieved that the engine had been fixed and that the next port of call was Fremantle, we all settled down for the last two weeks of the voyage. At last we were on the home stretch.

  16

  The day after we set sail from Colombo, some of the passengers were intrigued by the goings-on in the library. The Jews had congregated there, men and women in separate groups. The men, their shoulders draped in fringed shawls, were swaying backward and forward, murmuring chants in a strange tongue. They wore skull caps: small ones perched on the back of the head, or larger ones planted square on top. Although some of the women were murmuring ferventl
y over their prayer books, others whispered to their neighbours or looked around for their children.

  It was Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, which ushers in the ten most solemn days in the religious calendar, culminating in Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. On this occasion, however, there was no ram’s horn to herald the holy day and remind the worshippers of their covenant with God and their obligation to man. No one missed the shrill, fractured sound made by blowing the shofar more than fourteen-year-old Leon Wise. As he prayed with the other orphans, his thoughts returned to his mother and father.

  He’d last seen them at the Gare de Lyon in Paris where, together with hundreds of other heartbroken parents, they had said goodbye and sent him with his brother and sister to the safety of a Jewish children’s home in France’s unoccupied Vichy zone. Leon’s most precious possession on the ship was a scrap of paper torn out of an exercise book. It was the letter his father had written in the concentration camp at Pithiviers, where he was interned.

  Several years later, in 1943, when Leon and the 120 other children staying at the home were in danger of being caught and deported, they escaped. They tried to cross into Switzerland but had to turn back because the Germans were stationed near the border. That evening they slept at the railway station in Limoges, where Leon heard the sound of marching boots and looked out of the window to see Germans rounding up the town’s Jews. Next day they travelled to the border again and clambered onto the trucks that were waiting to transport them to safety. But when they reached a forest, they were told to scatter quickly to avoid a German patrol that was scouring the area with dogs.