The Voyage of Their Life

by Diane Armstrong

  Verner Puurand explained that in 1940, while he commanded the Kalev, Russia seized Estonian naval bases and ordered him to teach Soviet crews to operate submarines. He was approached by a Russian naval officer, Lt Commander Donat Ferdinandovich Bock, who questioned him in detail about the technical and strategic capabilities of the British navy which had trained him. Several months later, he was approached by a Russian secret police commissar from the NKVD (National Commissariat for Internal Affairs) who wanted a list of his naval associates in England. After more questioning, he suggested that Captain Puurand should work for them, implying that refusal would not be wise. When signing an agreement to act as an NKVD agent, Puurand had chosen the code name JAVIN, which is an abbreviation of a Russian phrase meaning I am guilty. He agreed to collect information about the British navy but denied ever passing any information to the Russians.

  One can imagine the shock of the ASIO operatives as they read that the man whose services they had considered using had once been in the employ of the NKVD, and possibly still was for all they knew. But Captain Turbayne’s report contained other damning information. After the German occupation of Estonia, Puurand had been arrested, sent to a POW camp in Viljandi and threatened with execution because of his connection with the NKVD. He explained that to save his life, he had agreed to give the Germans information about coastal mine fields and Estonian naval operations. From August until December 1941, he advised German staff about matters relating to naval operations on the Estonian coast, which was then in Soviet hands.

  And there were more revelations to come. While serving as an adviser to the German staff in the fall of 1941, he had apparently been persuaded to work for the Abwehr, the German military intelligence, whose director was Admiral Canaris. Puurand’s task was to establish an espionage centre in Estonia to train wireless technicians and operators. In March 1942 he rented a forty-five hectare farm in Leetze, where he prepared false documents for German agents who were dropped behind Russian lines across the Finnish border.

  Mulling over these disclosures, I recalled that Hans had told me about his father’s espionage activities for the Nazis. ‘Once he wore an army uniform, another time a navy uniform, but mostly he wore plainclothes,’ he had said. ‘I think he worked undercover and had carte blanche to wear whatever he needed. And he was armed. He kept a pistol in his coat pocket.’

  Verner Puurand’s activities did not end with the war. In his capacity as the Baltic Liaison Officer to the US army in Germany immediately after the war, he supplied the Americans with Baltic guards who had served in SS units of the German army. He issued them with certificates stating that they had been coerced into German service and advised them to surgically remove their SS blood group tattoos, to conceal their past from the Americans and from immigration authorities.

  After reading Captain Turbayne’s report, the director-general of ASIO, Colonel Spry, noted in a terse memo: ‘Had I known about Puurand’s espionage activities for the NKVD and the Abwehr, and about his deception of the Americans after the war, I would not have allowed him to enter Australia.’

  Turbayne has now retired from the service. When I spoke to him in Canberra recently, I asked how it happened that an Australian selection officer had approved Verner Puurand’s application. ‘If the selection officer had known about the US army file, he wouldn’t have accepted him,’ he said. ‘No one who had worked for the Abwehr, let alone NKVD, would have been accepted. But the officer probably knew nothing about this file and the machinery wasn’t yet properly in place to investigate these people.’

  Yet as we now know, largely as a result of the investigative work of Sydney author Mark Aarons, former Nazis were admitted to Australia in this period, sometimes with the knowledge of the government. Early in 1948, shortly before the formation of ASIO, the Commonwealth Intelligence Service protested at being unable to run security checks on 127 German scientists who were recruited by the Australian government. As the release of those documents has recently revealed, the protests were ignored. Information about the Nazi affiliation of the scientists, thirty-one of whom had been members of the Nazi party, while twelve had belonged to the SS and SA, was concealed because the government was eager to take advantage of their expertise.

  Oblivious to all the departmental time and paper that had been devoted to assessing his career and espionage potential, in 1952 Verner Puurand offered his services to ASIO once again. By then, however, they had read Captain Turbayne’s report and had decided that he was a ‘power-seeking opportunist who couldn’t be trusted…a person who has no national loyalty and who would work for or against the USSR or Australia as convenience dictated’. They were still considering deporting him, and might have done so if not for the probability that if sent back to Estonia, he would have been executed by the Communist government for his collaboration with the Nazis.

  Although they stopped short of deporting him, they decided to withhold his application for permanent residence but to reconsider it in two years time. As Colonel Spry put it, ‘I am of the opinion that Puurand’s loyalty has not been established beyond a reasonable doubt and whilst not, at present, constituting a security risk, he is of security interest.’

  The following year, while working on the SS Moorah in South Brisbane, Verner Puurand applied for a commercial wireless operator’s certificate. Hans remembers testing his father while he was studying to gain this qualification. ‘He studied so hard that I couldn’t understand why he didn’t get it,’ he tells me. ‘Whenever I went over the Morse code with him, he seemed to know it pretty well.’ What neither Hans nor his father knew, however, was that the director-general of ASIO had intervened. Since Puurand’s permanent residency had been deferred, he recommended that a wireless operator’s licence should not be issued.

  As Hans and I talk about the past in the Brisbane hotel, I reflect how unpredictable life is. If our parents had passed each other on board the Derna , my mother might have muttered something about Estonians collaborating with the Nazis, and his father might have said something about Jews siding with the Bolsheviks. And here we are, fifty-two years later, chatting amicably in a hotel in Brisbane, both Australians now, our parents no longer alive, our origins no longer relevant: just two people reminiscing about the past and a shared journey.

  ‘Estonians didn’t fight with the Germans,’ Hans is saying. ‘They were fighting the Russians in German uniforms.’ He is not the first Estonian who has given me this interpretation of events. I can understand that being the enemy of their enemy, the Germans became their logical allies, but knowing how enthusiastically the Baltic nations welcomed the Germans, how eagerly many young men joined the brutal police militia and the SS, and how savagely some of them fulfilled their duties, I feel that this explanation is an attempt to shift the goal posts of history and avoid responsibility. The memory of those brutal events has been stirred up during recent attempts by the Australian government to arrange the extradition of Konrad Kalejs, a member of the savage Arajs Death Squad, to face charges of committing war crimes in his native Latvia.

  But that was then. Now, as I listen to Estonian and Latvian passengers telling their stories, instead of seeing them as Nazi collaborators and German allies, I try to see them as individuals caught up in a life and death struggle for national freedom.

  It’s confronting to hear them talk about their terror of the Russian advance, and their hope that the Germans would win, knowing that if they had got their wish, I would not be alive today. It’s difficult for me to sympathise with their nationalistic aspirations when a Nazi victory would have meant the total annihilation of the Jewish race, including me. Yet I can see that for them, with their terror of Russian occupation, this alliance offered the only solution. And when the so-called ‘liberators’ channelled the residents’ deep-seated anti-Semitism and terror of the Bolsheviks, they unleashed the slaughter that ensued.

  Like many of their countrymen, especially those who had cooperated with the Germans, the Puurand family moved from E
stonia to Germany in 1944 to avoid reprisals from the advancing Russians. Recalling their life in Germany, Hans says, ‘The Jews who had been to concentration camps got better treatment in Germany after the war, so some of them had their arms tattooed to make it look as if they’d been in the camps.’

  For a moment, I’m too shocked to speak. When I ask what gave him that idea, he gives a dismissive shrug. ‘People said so.’

  I had hoped that we had left the prejudices of the previous generation behind, but hearing Hans repeating the racist distortions of the past, it seems that we are doomed to carry the burden of history on our shoulders.

  When we move on, Hans tells me that after obtaining his trade certificates and engineering diploma in Brisbane, he chose a career at sea. ‘A chip off the old block you could say, but that’s what I always wanted to do.’ He rolls up his sleeve and shows me an anchor tattooed on his forearm. ‘Dad had one exactly like it except that his was at the base of the thumb, and that’s where I wanted mine. But the tattooist said it was safer to do it higher up.’

  Like his father, Hans was drawn to the sea and became an engineer on passenger and cargo ships. For a painfully shy young man, life at sea was liberating. ‘The women just threw themselves at me. It must have been the gold braid and buttons on the uniform,’ he smiles.

  By that time, his father had given up working on the ships and had become a salesman for Electrolux. In 1954, while the Petrov affair rocked Australia, Verner Puurand surprised ASIO by asking to be interviewed. In view of his former association with the NKVD, and the fact that a former ship-mate had alleged that he was being watched by the Australian Communist Party, he decided to make a clean breast of his past activities.

  The Petrov affair pushed anti-Communist paranoia to greater heights. It began with the defection of Vladimir Petrov, who posed as a secretary at the Russian embassy but was actually a high-ranking officer in the KGB. Day after day, sensational stories of spies, counter-spies, scandals and international intrigues were splashed across the front pages of Australian daily newspapers, confirming fears that Communism was about to undermine the Australian way of life. Everyone was shocked by the photograph of Petrov’s distraught wife Evdokia being dragged by grim-faced Russian minders along the tarmac and hustled aboard a BOAC plane. Everyone had an opinion about the motives of the protoganists whose shady characters and hedonistic lifestyle surpassed any spy stories concocted by novelists.

  The Petrov affair caused me personal embarrassment in an unexpected way. The ASIO agent who had befriended Petrov and had allegedly acted as go-between in his defection was Michael Bialoguski, whose svengali-like face with its intense gaze and triangular black beard was often reproduced in the newspapers. As it happened, our surname, Boguslawski, was sufficiently similar to confuse most Australians at a time when Polish surnames were still comparatively rare. In my third year at Sydney Girls’ High School, I grew increasingly exasperated as I kept explaining to neighbours, schoolfriends and everyone who asked the same question, that my father was not the notorious character embroiled with the Petrovs, but a scholarly grey-haired dentist with no taste for intrigue.

  For Verner Puurand, however, the Petrov affair was a threat. He knew that if his NKVD past was exposed at such a sensitive time he could be deported, so to forestall any unwelcome revelations he decided to speak out. This time when the ASIO officer called at his home, he filled in details omitted in his earlier interview. He not only confirmed the contents of Captain Turbayne’s report, but substantiated it with ministerial passes, temporary passports, names and dates. He assured his ASIO interviewer that, like the majority of Estonians, he had always held strong anti-Russian and anti-Communist views. ‘That’s why I felt no moral objection to working with Germans,’ he explained. ‘I felt I was serving my country by doing so.’ He admitted that he had urged the Baltic POWs to remove their SS tattoos and had lied to the American authorities about his own past to avoid being indicted as a war criminal.

  Taking into account his unblemished record in Australia, the authorities decided in June 1955 to approve Verner Puurand’s application for naturalisation. But ASIO hadn’t forgotten his offer to spy for them, and three years later they considered this possibility once again. From their point of view, his submarine training, expertise in radio reception and transmission during the war, training of agents and saboteurs for service behind Russian lines and his excellent Russian made him a potential counter-intelligence agent.

  In July 1958, another ASIO field officer arrived to interview him. He asked whether Puurand was familiar with present-day wireless telegraphy, whether he had any reason to think that the Communist Party of Australia was still interested in his activities and whether Russian intelligence had made any attempt to contact him. Puurand replied that he had abandoned his effort to gain his wireless operator’s licence, and that the Russians had not been in touch.

  In the course of the interview, Puurand volunteered his views about Communism. ‘Communism will eventually engulf the world and there is nothing that the Western powers can do to prevent it,’ he predicted. ‘You will probably see it in your day, but I will never see it again. I have seen it in action once and that is enough for me. I have a rope and a tree selected, and I will never see Communism take over this country.’

  By this time, Puurand had started building houses. ‘That’s what he’d always wanted to do,’ Hans tells me, ‘but he wasn’t very successful. He was a good builder, but not a good manager.’ When I ask about his mother, he falls silent. Like many women married to dominating husbands, Friida Puurand left a much fainter imprint on her son than the father whose voice resounds so powerfully in his life even now. ‘Mother worked very hard,’ he says. After a pause he adds, ‘She was quiet.’

  Hans’s own seagoing career ended in 1963. After leaving the merchant marine, he studied draughting and design and became a design project engineer, specialising in control circuits for mine smelters. When his marriage to an Australian ended, he married an Estonian woman. ‘People should marry within their own cultures,’ he says. ‘You understand each other better.’ Hans and Kulla live with her father who is ninety years old. ‘We’ve built a house with a granny flat so that her dad can live with us. If anything happens to Kulla, I’ll look after him. It’s not like that in Australian families, but that’s the way it should be.’ He’s sad that the divorce has affected his relationship with his daughter, who works for the police force. ‘We used to be very close, but the divorce hit her very hard. She didn’t come to my wedding.’

  Several months after our conversation, Hans returns from his first trip to Estonia. ‘The whole place is dilapidated,’ he tells me over the phone. ‘The Russians ruined it. Their buildings are shoddy. Food costs about the same but they earn much less. The weather was good: it only rained once.’

  When I ask how it felt to be back in Estonia, he says, ‘To tell you the truth, I didn’t feel I’d come home. The house we lived in was run down, like everything else. Drab. I managed to find where Dad’s farm had been at Tamsalu but there was no house any more. It stood empty for years and just rotted away. The land is still in Dad’s name so my brother Mart and I could claim it, but what for? Mart is ill with emphysema, he can’t travel. Anyway, it’s a small block without a house on it, so we couldn’t sell it and we wouldn’t want it for ourselves.’

  While in Tallinn, Hans went to see the Lempit, one of the two submarines built in Britain for Estonia before the war. ‘It was identical to my father’s submarine, the Kalev, which sank during World War II after it ran into a Finnish mine. It’s lying at the bottom of the Baltic Sea,’ he explains. ‘The Lempit looked exactly as it used to, except that the table and curtains were gone. When the caretaker asked me what colour they were, I still remembered. They were maroon. It was quite interesting to see our old home. Not overly exciting,’ he hastens to add. ‘I have no desire to go back to Estonia in a hurry. I didn’t have much of a feeling for it. You could say I was quite detached.’


  Wherever he went in Estonia, Hans searched for the traditional Estonian food that his mother and grandmother used to cook. ‘We asked everyone, but nobody knew which restaurants served it. People there think we’re all millionaires, so they kept sending us to posh hotels which served Western meals. Then on our last day someone mentioned a place called the Estonian House. They had the lot! Genuine food, reasonable prices and friendly people. That food brought back so many memories, just the taste of it. It took me back to my childhood. I cried all through that meal.’

  25

  The night sky hadn’t begun to lighten over the canyon of city office blocks when Guta’s footsteps echoed on Collins Street at four o’clock in the morning. She liked this metropolis of Victorian buildings and tree-lined streets where trams rattled past and the cheery conductors waved the passengers aboard. Melbourne’s department stores amazed her with all their floors of merchandise. Myer, with its large windows and brightly lit showrooms was the modern one, while the dimly lit Buckley & Nunn’s was popular with older matrons in flowered hats and wrist-length gloves.

  Squinting at the address on her scrap of paper, Guta peered at the name of each cross street, until with a sigh of relief she turned into Little Collins Street. There it was: Henty House, one of the most important-looking buildings in the block. Taking a deep breath, she swung open the heavy doors of the Civil Aviation Department. The young woman who had been accused by Verner Puurand of being a Communist because she had spent her time on board talking to two sailors was about to start work.

  This job, like everything since their arrival, had been arranged by Tosia Goleb. Although Guta’s husband Dick had only met Tosia once shortly before she left Poland for Australia, she had met them at the wharf and taken them home. A survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto, Tosia had arrived in Melbourne two years earlier, and included Guta and Dick in the warm extended family that she had created for herself here.