The Voyage of Their Life

by Diane Armstrong

  As we talk, he rifles through his papers until he finds the letter he received recently to confirm the extension of his tenure as chairman of Tourism New South Wales until the year 2003. ‘The usual retirement age is sixty-five, but a motion was moved in parliament, which I’m proud to say was seconded by the Opposition spokesman for tourism, to extend the age limit for my benefit, because I am seventy-four!’

  An even greater honour was still to come. In the Queen’s Birthday Honours of the year 2000, Sam Fiszman became an Officer of the Order of Australia for his services to the Australian tourism industry. After hearing his account of those initial unhappy years in Sydney, it seems amazing that the young hot-head who arrived with three pounds in his pocket and anger in his heart, who hated this place so much that he longed to go back to Europe, has received one of Australia’s highest honours for promoting it as a tourist destination.

  Several months later, on a warm November evening, over 600 formally attired guests, many of them luminaries of both the state and federal Labor Party, gathered at the Sydney Convention Centre. As they entered the cavernous Tumbalong Ballroom, Sam’s photograph loomed from a huge video screen above the sign ‘ALP dinner in honour of Sam Fiszman’. While Bob Hawke hugged him, Kim Beazley pumped his hand and Neville Wran whispered a joke in his ear, Sam looked dazed. ‘This sort of thing doesn’t usually happen until you’re dead!’ he said.

  Esther, however, wasn’t fazed. ‘He deserves it,’ she commented.

  The aim of the dinner was to raise money for St Vincent’s Hospital Blood and Cancer Research, the Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute and Jewish Care—all causes close to Sam’s heart. As the evening progressed, a succession of past and present leaders of the ALP stepped onto the dais. One by one they expressed their political gratitude and personal affection for the man to whom Bob Hawke said, ‘more than most Australians, you embody the Australian tradition of mateship. I’ll never forget the comfort and friendship you gave me. I respect your remarkable courage. I salute you and I love you and extend that to your wife and family, who have been a rock of support in your work.’

  Michael Knight, the then Minister of Sport and Tourism, recalled the day he asked Premier Bob Carr for money to transform Darling Harbour into an Olympic venue. As his request had already been turned down several times, he wasn’t very optimistic, but this time he brought Sam, as director of the Darling Harbour Authority, for moral support. To his astonishment, the Premier approved his request immediately. Recalling the occasion, Bob Carr later explained, ‘As soon as I saw you come in with Sam Fiszman, I gave up!’

  Neville Wran said that there were no halfway measures with Sam, no ifs or buts. ‘His glass is never half empty, always half full,’ he said. After paying tribute to his dedication as a fundraiser, he praised Sam’s intuitive understanding of what ordinary people think and want. ‘And he’s never frightened to tell you,’ he rasped in the voice damaged during surgery some years before. ‘In fact, once he starts, it’s impossible to shut him up! Sam, I’m privileged to call you my mate.’

  Kim Beazley, who called it an evening of thanksgiving, expressed better than anyone else what Sam was feeling on this extraordinary occasion. After describing him with a smile as ‘a one-man walking charitable institution with a very persuasive manner’, he became more sombre. ‘Sam is a man of politics because he understands the consequences of not being so,’ he said. ‘Through his own experiences during the Holocaust, he knows the consequences of intolerance and the evil in politics of lies given bayonets. He resisted it in his youth when he fought in the Warsaw Ghetto and later joined the Russian army to fight the Germans, and he has tried to resist it here.’

  Finally it was Sam’s turn to speak. He had been desperately ill in the past few months, having undergone four by-passes only two weeks earlier, but looking at him up on the podium that night, ruddy and glowing with happiness, you’d never have suspected it. ‘I won’t rest until Kim Beazley is installed as PM of Australia!’ he announced. When the thunderous applause died down, he continued. ‘I’ve received more from the Labor Party than I have given them. I’ve seen the wrong side of politics. I joined the Russian army to take revenge for my family and kill the Nazis, but discovered that the extreme left was no good, just as the extreme right was no good. You need a buffer, and that buffer is the Labor Party. So you could say that for me it’s been a labour of love!’

  Then he said something that plunged the entire ballroom into stunned silence. ‘Some of you have been asking me for years about that incident on the Derna. I can tell you now that it’s true.’ And he proceeded to give an account of the circumstances in which he fought with an anti-Semitic passenger whom he described as Estonian, and threw him overboard.

  Although Sam had previously told me about this incident, I was astonished that what had been a private revelation had now become a public confession. In the weeks that followed, several newspapers reported it, provoking outrage, amazement and incredulity. According to Helle, some of her countrymen were furious because they felt that by identifying his opponent as an anti-Semitic Estonian, Sam had slandered their entire nation. As speculation continued, others questioned various aspects of the incident. They wondered whether a passenger could vanish without a trace, how it was that no one seemed to know the missing man, and why the disappearance of a passenger had not been recorded or reported to the authorities.

  Without seeing the ship’s log, it’s impossible to know whether the incident was ever recorded or not, but all efforts to locate that log have failed. The Derna was an unseaworthy, overcrowded vessel which did not adhere to the standards set by international shipping regulators, and one can only surmise that keeping accurate records, especially about events that cast a poor light on its procedures, was not one of its priorities. Major Weale, the Aliens Registration Officer who boarded the Derna in Fremantle, reported that Sam Fiszman had been involved in some disturbances during the voyage, but did not mention that he had thrown anyone overboard.

  It’s not often that the guest of honour at an official function confesses to manslaughter, and many of the guests wondered what had induced Sam to drop his bombshell that night. Was he proud that he had vanquished a bully, or did he have a guilty conscience and want to unburden himself? Some even suggested that Sam was a Walter Mitty character who had exaggerated or fantasised about an event that had occurred only in his imagination.

  While the controversy continued to rage, I questioned Sam again about the incident, but he repeated the account he had given earlier. ‘When that bully smeared the marmalade in the Jewish passenger’s face and made anti-Semitic comments, I got mad. It was a fair fight, man to man, but I was fighting the war all over again. I saw SS men coming at me, like the ones who had shot my mother and sister. We threw a few punches, and then I was on my back with my feet on his stomach, and threw him with my legs. He went over the rail but whether he fell overboard or onto the deck below, I couldn’t tell. All I know is, I never saw him again.’

  Sam himself cannot explain why he made this confession at the dinner given in his honour, in front of 600 people. ‘I was very emotional that night, partly because of all the tributes, and partly because I’d just come out of hospital after having by-pass surgery. I got carried away and said it on the spur of the moment.’

  It’s not surprising that he was overwhelmed by the occasion. He had just seen his whole life scroll in front of him, from the moment he arrived in Australia and was prohibited from landing, until that moment, fifty-two years later, when he was being honoured by the ALP.

  His life story had come full circle. His confession made the Derna the subject of speculation, gossip and controversy just as it had been fifty-two years ago when we arrived, and once again Sam was at the centre of the storm.

  24

  Verner Puurand would have been appalled to know that the man he had denounced as a Communist agitator in 1948 was being regaled as a hero by the Australian Labor Party five decades later. Although he didn�
�t live long enough to witness this event, with the help of the Estonian Club in Brisbane, I located his son Hans.

  As I wait for him in a hotel foyer, I expect to see an austere man with military bearing, so when the man in a check shirt and jeans comes towards me with a shy smile and introduces himself as Hans Puurand, he takes me by surprise. His voice is quiet, his manner unassuming and his long greying hair is tied back in a ponytail, hippy-style. It hadn’t occurred to me that he could turn out to be the antithesis of his father, the forceful submarine commander.

  At sixty-eight, Hans has a retiring nature, much like the self-conscious boy he was when he arrived in Australia at the age of sixteen. ‘It was humiliating to be put back to primary school at that age, but the headmaster said I had to stay in sixth class until I could speak English,’ he says. ‘I’d learnt English at high school in Germany but they spoke with a different accent here. But I did understand when the other boys called me a bloody Balt!’

  When they arrived, Hans, his parents and younger brother Mart lived with their sponsors, the Kondrashoffs, in the working class suburb of Woolloongabba, in a wooden house on stilts which they thought very peculiar. The Kondrashoffs were Mrs Puurand’s relatives who had migrated to Australia before the war. As Hans remembers it, there was only one source of discord between the two families. ‘The Kondrashoffs’ son George was a bit pink in those days, so he and my dad were always arguing about politics,’ he recalls.

  The Puurands found it difficult to adjust to life in this somnolent city where people lived at a much slower, quieter pace than in Europe. On Sundays life seemed to stop altogether. ‘You could have shot a cannon up Queen Street and not hit a soul!’ Hans smiles. What made it worse was that Christmas was approaching, but instead of snow there was sultry heat, beach picnics and the perfumed smell of tropical flowers. Like most of the Christian migrants, they missed the festive atmosphere and spiritual feeling that used to make December special.

  Unhappy memories leave far deeper imprints than happy ones, and when Hans thinks back to that first Christmas, he recalls the day his mother gave him some money to buy presents for the family. Clutching the pound note, he rushed to Woolworths. As soon as he walked into the store, a display of sweets in shiny wrappers caught his eye. He decided to buy some for his grandmother who felt even more dislocated than the rest of the family because she spoke no English and couldn’t listen to the radio or read the newspapers. When he handed over the money, the salesgirl rang it up on the big brass register and handed him the change, but when he counted it out, he was shocked to find that she had only given him change from ten shillings. But no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t seem to make her understand. He trudged home with the bag of sweets, wondering how he was going to explain the loss of so much money.

  Hans’s parents had troubles of their own. His mother was unhappy working in a clothing factory where she felt slighted by the owner, while his father was disappointed because his chief mate’s certificate was not recognised here. At forty-four, Verner Puurand swallowed his pride and started working as an ordinary seaman on river vessels.

  For most of 1949, he worked on the SS Alagna. Although the owners appreciated his expertise and dilgence, his workmates disliked him because of his dogmatic nature and hatred of Communism. On one occasion, when the crew decided to strike over their conditions, Puurand did not endear himself by telling them that they didn’t know how well off they were. Whenever they criticised the newly elected Menzies government and praised the Soviet Union, he would harangue them about the evils of Communism.

  ‘At one stage they got so fed up with him, they threatened to throw him overboard,’ Hans recalls, and adds with a short laugh, ‘Dad could come over very strong. He was used to giving orders. At home when he said “Jump!” you didn’t ask why, you said, “How high?”’

  When the waitress arrives to take our order, Hans orders tonic water. ‘That’s the strongest drink I have these days,’ he says. ‘I joined AA thirty years ago and haven’t had a drink since. I don’t have a problem saying that I’m an alcoholic. I’m not proud of it, but I’m not ashamed either. I’m very shy and drinking made me feel more confident. A few drinks and I could talk or dance with anyone, but nowadays it takes a lot to open me up. Dad disowned me when I was drinking, but eventually he understood that alcoholism is a disease.’

  When he returns to the story, Hans says something that makes me sit forward. ‘Dad told me that not long after we arrived, Australian Intelligence wanted him to work for them.’ The idea that Verner Puurand had been sought out by ASIO was intriguing. Why did they approach him? What did they want? Hans looks troubled. ‘I’ve gone through my father’s papers but there are some things I can’t figure out. Sometimes I wonder if I’m putting the correct interpretation on what he told me.’

  Hoping that there would be a file on Verner Puurand, I applied for it under the federal government’s Freedom of Information legislation. Several weeks later, a package arrived from the National Archives in Canberra, and to my delight the dossier was as thick as a telephone directory. As I pored over these documents, so excited that I could hardly sit still, I entered the arcane, secretive world of spies, moles, informers and double agents. Like a conspirator from a John le Carré novel, I read through memos, letters and reports thrillingly stamped SECRET, addressed to people whose identity was confined to initials, and signed by names that have been blacked-out to protect ASIO operatives. My heart raced as I came across one revelation after another about the man whose espionage activities could have furnished a writer of spy thrillers with a plot too convoluted to follow and too incredible to believe.

  From the earliest memo, which was dated 1950, I could see that it was actually Verner Puurand himself who had taken the initiative and offered his services to naval intelligence while he was working on a vessel called the Cementco. Because of his offer, he became the subject of an investigation by Australia’s newly formed security intelligence organisation, which came to be known by its acronym ASIO.

  Puurand’s offer created a dilemma, because he was living with a Russian whom they suspected of being a Communist. Although they were never able to produce a shred of evidence against Kondrashoff, the suspicion clung to him and, by association, to Puurand himself. It’s ironic that a man who probably loathed Communism more than anyone in ASIO was suspected of being a Communist, but a nation’s secret service acts out the fears and fantasies of its government, and the hunt for Communists was their top priority.

  ASIO’s obsession with Communists can be understood in the context of the world situation and the anti-Communist paranoia prevalent at the time. The Soviet Union, which only five years earlier had been regarded as the saviour of Western democracy, was now viewed as its greatest enemy. Since the end of World War II, the Russians had most of eastern Europe in their grip, and bellicose anti-Western rhetoric issued daily from the Kremlin. The Prime Minister, Mr Menzies, who regarded Communists as part of an insidious international conspiracy organised by Moscow to destroy democracy, attempted to have the Communist Party banned in Australia.

  There was widespread pessimism about the future. Communist North Korea invaded the south in 1949, causing the Korean War. Many regarded this as the flashpoint for another global conflict, this time between the Soviet Union and the Western nations. The following year, Russia plunged the West into gloom by testing its first nuclear device, and when Menzies returned from Britain and the United States in September 1950, he warned Australians to be prepared for the possibility of World War III.

  In this climate of suspicion and hostility, memos about Puurand and his supposedly Communist sponsor bounced back and forth between ASIO and the Immigration Department, who couldn’t decide whether to use his services or deport him. After vacillating for eighteen months, the director-general of ASIO decided that it was time to interview Puurand and clarify the situation.

  In April 1951, an ASIO field officer called Andersen knocked on the door of the small weatherboard c
ottage which the Puurands had bought from their sponsor in a quiet street in Woolloongabba. Verner Puurand opened a desk drawer to show Andersen fifteen neatly-stacked manilla folders, which he claimed contained information of interest to Australian intelligence. Giving a chronological account of his career, he mentioned that he had been sent to England for submarine training in 1935, appointed to command the Kalev submarine in 1939, and that he had continued this command during the Russian occupation of Estonia. He omitted any mention of his activities between 1941 and 1945.

  Although the shifting allegiances and desperate struggles of tiny European states caught between the sickle and the swastika were confusing for most Australians, the regional director detected enough discrepancies in Verner Puurand’s story to arouse his suspicions and to recommend an overseas check. When at the end of 1951, Puurand applied for permanent residence, ASIO refused to clear him until these checks were completed.

  The report from Germany was startling. Its author, Captain Keith Turbayne, an ASIO security officer attached to the Australian Military Mission in Cologne, had actually written it two years earlier. He had hoped to alert Australian authorities to Verner Puurand’s wartime and post-war activities before they approved his application to migrate, but by the time ASIO obtained the letter, he had already been living here for three years.

  Captain Turbayne’s report contained information he had obtained from US army files. Some of it had been given by a trusted informant, while the rest was based on interviews conducted with Puurand himself in the American zone in Germany in 1946 and 1947. After telling his American interviewer that back in 1938 he had changed his surname from the German-sounding Puurman to the Estonian-sounding Puurand, he told a story of espionage, deception and changing loyalties.