When questioned by the press, the beleaguered captain made some counter-claims of his own, accusing some of the passengers of damaging fittings and furniture and throwing food overboard. ‘It is true that we had to ration water once, but food was plentiful and the ship’s doctor inspected the cabins every day,’ Captain Papalas said, and added defiantly, ‘If you can find a migrant ship as good as the Derna, I will pay 2000 pounds!’
Despite all the efforts by the Department of Immigration to keep the topic of Communist agitators and the excessive number of Jews away from the press, this was the subject that the reporters were most eager to explore. They found a rich vein of indignation in Mrs Lidija Maulics, a university lecturer from Latvia who was heading for Auckland. Surrounded by reporters who scribbled down every word she said, Mrs Maulics accused young Jews of organising political meetings during the voyage. ‘At least seventy-five percent of the passengers were Jews,’ she declared, and repeated Verner Puurand’s allegations about them singing Soviet songs, playing Communist phonograph records and coming to spread Communist propaganda in Australia. ‘They told the passengers that life in Russia today was fine, criticised everything non-Russian and even spread propaganda among the crew,’ she complained.
Within a few hours, the reporters and most of the passengers had dispersed, either by car or bus, but some of us were still waiting around for our luggage. The November light was as thin as a miser’s smile. Buoyed by the expectation of Australia’s sunny weather, we felt cheated by the rain that dribbled out of a low grey sky, as though our new country was greeting us with a scowl.
Elmars Kuplis and his family were impatient because their friends were already waiting to drive them to the coast, but the cases were still in the hold. Puzzled by the delay, Elmars went back on board to ask the captain about it.
‘We’re in Australia now!’ Captain Papalas chuckled. ‘It’s up to the stevedores to unload. You can’t hurry them.’ Elmars walked into the shed where suitcases were heaped all over the floor, went up to a wharfie whose belly hung over his low-slung belt like a lop-sided balloon and asked about his cases.
Hands on hips, the man swung around slowly. ‘Mate, are you blind?’ he jeered. ‘Can’t you see it’s raining?’ In desperation, Elmars and his friend went into the hold and unloaded the cases themselves.
Melbourne marked the end of the journey for most of the passengers, but some of us had to travel to other Australian cities or to New Zealand. My parents and I were bound for Brisbane, where my mother would be reunited with her only surviving relative, her sister Mania. We stood on the bustling wharf, impatient for our luggage to be unloaded: two trunks and my father’s button-making machine. Undisturbed by the huge pile of luggage or the anxious passengers waiting to leave the wharf, the wharfies unloaded suitcases, boxes, chests and crates with exasperating slowness, as though they were being paid by the hour.
Our bulky grey trunks, reinforced with wide wooden bands, finally appeared on the wharf. Everything we owned was inside them. My father’s books, our few clothes and the eiderdowns. The bed linen that had been part of my mother’s trousseau, monogrammed and embroidered with pre-war patience into curlicues, arabesques and flourishes, was especially precious because it had been a gift from her parents and was all that she had left from them. Clutching the knitting that had occupied me for the past ten weeks, I could hardly wait to hold my doll again to see if her new wardrobe fitted.
As he bent down to lift one of the cases, my father was puzzled by its lightness. He unlocked it to check the contents, and stood there staring as though his mind had trouble interpreting what his eyes were looking at. Hastily scrunched newspapers filled the case. Someone had removed our clothes, my father’s books and my mother’s monogrammed tablecloths, eiderdown covers and sheets. The button-making machine had also been stolen. Having lost most of the people she loved, my mother was not overly attached to possessions. After recovering from her initial dismay at the loss, she predicted with her usual perspicacity that one day my father would thank the thief who had stolen the button-making machine, and with it his plans to engage in business.
As for me, I was inconsolable because my doll was gone. I had spent the entire voyage unravelling the yarn and knitting it into ever more intricate designs, and was finally satisfied with the finished result. The dropped stitches were hardly noticeable and the sewing was almost seamless. Dolls represent a nostalgia for childhood, but I had virtually had no childhood and now I had no doll. Had all my work been a waste of time?
But despair was anathema to my parents. ‘Nothing is ever wasted,’ my father said. My mother, ever practical, said that I would undoubtedly find some good use for all the knitting.
While my parents and I were boarding the Trans Australia Airways plane for Brisbane, Fred Silberstein was checking in at the Melbourne YMCA, where he was spending the night before travelling on to Auckland the following day. The sputtering sound of gunfire woke him up. Panic-stricken, he sprang out of bed to see the sky lit up by flares as the shelling continued. Rockets hissed in the sky and people were shouting. World War III must have broken out. A moment later he looked down and saw children huddled around a bonfire, drawing glittering arcs in the air with their sparklers and jumping as firecrackers crackled, sizzled and exploded into the night. Fred laughed aloud. The period of gunpowder, treason and plot had ended and the good guys had won after all.
After most of the passengers had dispersed, 115 IRO passengers were left in the Customs Hall without any money or the means to reach their destinations, which included farms in Queensland, country towns in Victoria and South Australia, and cities in New Zealand. They hadn’t eaten since breakfast, couldn’t buy themselves a cup of coffee or a sandwich, had nowhere to sleep and no money for their train fares. Helle and her parents, brother Rein and little sister Maret, who were bound for Sydney, were among them, as were Rita and her family, who had to travel to the Queensland town of Monto. The Puurands, who were heading for Brisbane, were stranded too. Although before leaving Germany Verner Puurand had bought some diamond rings to sell in Australia, he had no cash. As for his son Hans, he felt cheated because despite all his hard work in the galley, he hadn’t been paid a cent.
Having been informed about the passengers’ plight, Miss Kidd of the Victorian Red Cross came to their rescue. Although Captain Papalas agreed to let them spend the night on the Derna, he refused to feed them, but the Department of Immigration agreed to pay their expenses in the hope of recouping the money from the IRO. Assisted by Major Weale, the indefatigable Miss Kidd chartered three buses to transport them to the Victoria Coffee Palace and organised a frugal meal for 2/6 each. The following day, after the women and children had eaten lunch at Travellers Aid and the men at the People’s Palace, they were all transported to the railway station where Miss Kidd paid for their tickets.
Filing a report about this incident, Major Weale was scathing about Colonel Hershaw’s incompetence. ‘At no time was he able to give me figures as to the number of people wishing sleeping accommodation, meals, transport etc. I consider that during the 68 days spent on the voyage, this officer should have had every conceivable detail concerning these passengers and should have been in a position to give me any information I required in connection with the rushed arrangements I was forced to make late at night and during a weekend.’
But the headaches caused by the Derna still hadn’t ended. While Major Weale and Miss Kidd were organising food and fares for the stranded passengers, a self-assured young man boarded the ship, identified himself as Captain Merritt, a federal security officer, and said that he had come to see the purser about a missing stowaway. Armed with a torch, he proceeded to search the cabins and spent the night on board. When Major Weale arrived next morning to discuss the issue of the stranded passengers with Colonel Hershaw, he found Captain Merritt in the lounge, interrogating one of the passengers.
His suspicions aroused, the major asked him to step into the customs office. This time when question
ed ‘Captain Merritt’ changed his story. He admitted that he was not a federal security officer at all but a builder’s labourer with a compulsion to impersonate people. While wandering around the wharf the previous day, he had overheard customs officers discussing some missing stowaways and had embarked on his masquerade.
The Derna continued to make news. First there was the issue of eleven crewmen—eight Italians, two Greeks and one Syrian—who had deserted. The ship’s agents, the Melbourne Steamship Company, who were liable to be fined 100 pounds for each deserter, offered a reward of ten pounds for information leading to their apprehension, while the Department of Immigration organised raiding parties to capture them. Only two were ever found and deported. Rita’s boyfriend Philippe was not one of them.
And to add to the captain’s woes, while the ship was loading wheat for Europe over forty crew members went on strike to protest against low wages and bad conditions. They handed him a log of claims, demanding that he improve their food and the primitive quarters in which they were forced to live like animals. When he refused, the winches fell silent and all activity on the wharf ceased. Mr W Bird, the secretary of the Seamen’s Union who inspected the ship and met the strikers, stated that their conditions on the Derna were among the worst he’d ever seen.
The news that a ship full of ‘reds’ had arrived in Australia with the express purpose of disseminating Communist propaganda and destroying the fabric of Australian society continued to create a furore. At a time when many in America and Australia believed that they were engaged in a deadly ideological war which threatened to obliterate democracy, reports about a ship bringing Communists into the country alarmed those who shared that belief. The notion that Jewish Communist agents had been admitted to Australia fell on fertile ground, despite the fact that many of the Jews aboard the Derna had been deported by the Russians to Siberia during the war, and most had left Europe to escape Communist regimes.
Australia in 1948 was ethnically homogeneous, politically conservative and racially xenophobic. Ninety-seven percent of the population was Anglo-Celtic in origin, and the majority was Protestant. Many of them regarded Catholics with mistrust bordering on animosity. Both groups agreed, however, that the creeping Communist menace was the greatest threat to society and religion since the barbarian hordes had invaded Europe. The Communist takeover of Eastern European countries in 1945 and the savage anti-West rhetoric issuing from the Kremlin justified their suspicions. From pulpits, podiums and platforms, priests, prelates, teachers and politicians thundered that eternal vigilance was the only way to combat the red menace, and the newspapers hammered home this view in articles and editorials. One enemy had been conquered, but a far more insidious menace now threatened the free world, ready to destroy those who were not on their guard.
On 10 November, five days after the Derna had docked in Melbourne, the controversy about its Communist passengers reached federal parliament when Mr Gullett, the Liberal member for Henty, stood up and asked the Minister for Immigration whether he had read the article in the Argus about the Derna. Had he investigated the claims made by Mrs Maulics about the Jewish passengers who had spread Communist propaganda? And were those Communists to be allowed to stay in Australia?
Mr Arthur Calwell, the Minister for Immigration and architect of Australia’s post-war immigration policy, said that he hadn’t seen the article but went on to say: ‘One of the persons who inspired the criticism was a Lt-Col Hershaw who is an International Refugee Organisation escort officer. Persons with whom he is associated made charges that certain people had indulged in Communist propaganda. Hershaw has an unsavoury reputation. Had he done in Australia some of the things which he tried to do on the ship he would have been sent to gaol for a long term. He was one of the first people who started the story about Communist activities aboard the Derna.’
At this point Mr Gullett began to interject and had to be called to order so that Mr Calwell could continue. ‘Lt-Col Hershaw seems to be of the fascist type, and there are far too many people of that kind around today,’ the Minister told the House. ‘I asked my officers to make a complete check and I received a report from Major Weale who is the Aliens Registration Officer of the Department of Immigration in Melbourne. He conducted the fullest possible investigation into the allegation of Communist activities aboard the Derna.’
In a subtle attack on the agenda of those who had made the allegations, Mr Calwell said, ‘There is no truth in the allegations of Communist activities on the part of some of the passengers but it is obvious that once these passengers were free from European police supervision, they naturally discussed among themselves various topics including European politics which, to a person looking for trouble, could easily be interpreted as propaganda.’
He concluded by saying, ‘If I have to decide between accepting the report of some lady professor from Riga and the report of a responsible officer of my own department, I shall back Major Weale’s opinion at any time.’
When he saw the reports about conditions on the Derna, Tasman Heyes, the Secretary of the Department of Immigration, was sufficiently disturbed to write to the Department of Shipping and Fuel, asking what action the government could take to improve conditions on foreign-owned ships bringing migrants to Australia. Several months later, Mr Heyes wrote to Major General C Lloyd of the IRO: ‘The view held by the Department is that the Derna is not a suitable ship for the carriage of displaced persons.’
The IRO did not renew Lt-Colonel Ogden Hershaw’s employment. He returned to Canada and never escorted migrants again.
On her return to Europe the following year, the Derna was renamed for the fourth time. She made one voyage to Australia under her new name, the SS Assimina. Afterwards, she was sold for scrap metal and broken up in the Scottish shipyards of Blyth.
PART II
THEIR LIFE
PROLOGUE
A LETTER FROM BRISBANE
In the summer of 1995, I travelled to Poland with my daughter Justine. It must have been fate that led me, on the very last day of our trip, to Father Roman Soszynski, the priest to whom I owe my life. It was his steadfast support that had made it possible for my parents and me to survive in a Polish village during the Holocaust. After the tears had stopped flowing during our miraculous reunion, Father Soszynski rummaged through a drawer and handed me an old air letter stamped with the bust of King George VI. It was the letter my father had sent him almost fifty years before, shortly after our arrival in Australia.
‘The voyage was long and arduous,’ my father wrote. ‘It lasted for ten weeks during which we passed Port Said, Aden and Colombo. Then we flew from Melbourne to Brisbane, a distance seven times greater than between Krakow and Warsaw. We were in the air for over seven hours. During that time a stewardess catered to all our needs and served elaborate hot and cold meals including meat dishes, fruit and dessert. Aeroplanes are comfortably equipped but very expensive. The flight cost thirty pounds.* The same distance by rail takes three days, and in all that time the train makes only three stops. Towns here are few and far between. The country is as big as Europe and Russia put together but has only seven million inhabitants.
The standard of living here is good, although there are not many wealthy people. The government ensures that all workers receive a basic wage on which they can live quite well. Food is reasonable even for the lowest income earners and pineapples and oranges are dirt-cheap. Meat, milk and bread are delivered to homes every day.
The cities are divided into business and residential areas. The centre of town, or the ‘city’, consists only of shops, offices, factories, workshops etc, while the suburbs, which are further away, have open space and greenery. Most families have a house and garden. Apartment blocks are rare. It’s easy to buy or build a home. All they have to put down is one third, and the banks lend the rest which can be repaid over many years. The repayments cost no more than rent. Wages, rents and all bills are paid weekly.
People here are calm, courteous and industrious. A
lmost everyone works until five o’clock, even women, and after coming home from work, they prepare the evening meal. There is a five-day week. Saturdays and Sundays are devoted to household chores such as laundry, irrespective of religion, of which there are many. Various religions compete with each other and advertise in the newspapers.
Schools and hospitals are free, irrespective of income. Danusia* attended school for five weeks and received a good report. She is already communicating quite well in English. Schools are on holidays at the moment. The school year starts in the second half of January and ends at Christmas. In Poland at the moment you are probably having severe frosts but here it is summer and Danusia has gone to the seaside with our friends.
The climate varies in different parts of Australia. In Brisbane, the temperature often exceeds 35 degrees in the shade. It’s extremely hot for two to three months of the year but they say that winter here is as mild as on the Riviera. Our flora and fauna are unique, and there is a profusion of fruit some of which I have never heard of.
I’ve written in great detail about what I’ve observed during our brief stay, and would be very happy to have news about you and Piszczac.’
My father never received a reply to this or any of his subsequent letters. The priest’s silence, which puzzled my parents all their lives, was finally clarified during our reunion. Father Soszynski told me that the persecution of priests by the Communist government in Poland had made it dangerous to correspond with anyone in the West. But he had kept the letter in a drawer with other treasured possessions for almost fifty years.
My father had also kept a memento of Father Soszynski. After my parents died, my son Jonathan found a small framed picture of Christ among their belongings. On the back was a faded Polish dedication, dated 1944. Its origin remained a mystery until Father Soszynski explained that he had presented it to my father at a time when our life in Piszczac hung by a thread, because the villagers had threatened to denounce us to the Gestapo as Jews. The priest had given him the holy picture in the hope that Christ would watch over us, and my father had accepted it in the spirit of compassion with which it had been given.
The Voyage of Their Life Page 26