The two elderly women who owned the house in Chatswood were happy to let it to Clara, but advised her to arrive early on the day they vacated it in case a returned soldier happened to get there first. Determined not to lose the house, Clara rose at dawn, dressed the boys and packed a bottle of milk and some bread for the day.
The house in Chatswood was shabby outside and falling apart inside, but in time they painted the walls, mended the plaster, fixed the fence and brightened the rooms with Clara’s embroidered cushions and colourful dolls. The next challenge was to find work. ‘In Budapest I was a corsetière, but when I saw how slim Australian women were, I got worried because they didn’t need corsets,’ she recalls. As time went on, however, her clients recommended her to their friends and she gradually built up a clientele of mainly European women. In the evenings she enrolled at a sewing school in King Street run by a Polish émigré whose haute couture establishment was frequented by Sydney’s society matrons. When Clara’s sister-in-law arrived from Hungary the following year, the two women started up a dressmaking business together.
Clara’s husband Jim, who had been a book-keeper in Hungary, was dejected at becoming a process worker for Berger Paints, while Paul, their younger son, was a sensitive child who suffered from the stigma of being different. One humiliating day he ran all the way home because he didn’t know how to ask where the toilets were. The other children taunted him for not wearing the regulation Stamina brand shorts and carrying a different school bag. Miserable at school, he lagged behind scholastically, but outside the classroom he was an observant child who liked watching the trams glide along the street, the conductor changing the connector arm, and the baker leading his Clydesdale, Clarrie, along the lane to the blacksmith’s to be shod.
Although Peter was outgoing and academically bright, the skinny bespectacled little boy felt the pressure of living in two worlds with two sets of values and expectations. ‘The other boys teased me so much that once I played truant. They thought I was an oddity because I knew nothing about cricket and didn’t have a clue what they meant when they told me to go to the outfield,’ he recalls. ‘They laughed because I couldn’t tell the difference between words like thick and sick. I thought that St George was a street, and couldn’t figure out how come the queen’s page in Alice in Wonderland wasn’t in a book. But there was one boy who hated bullying and prejudice. He was rather good on the piano too. His name was Roger Woodward!’
Jim worked long hours at Berger Paints for seven pounds a week, and came home covered in yellow dust that irritated his eyes, making them red and sore. Realising that with so much salt in the air, Australia was bound to have a huge rust problem, he obtained a Czech patent for a substance to rust-proof metal, rented a cottage in Artarmon and proceeded to experiment with anti-rust primers. Painstakingly he tested anti-corrosion paints until he developed Ferropro, which is on the market to this day. When the neighbours complained about the chemical smell, he moved to premises in Lane Cove. Although he was already over fifty years old by then, Jim spent twelve hours a day lifting drums and crates, loading and unloading chemicals, packing and unpacking boxes and travelling to sell them to stores and factories.
With the factory and Clara’s dressmaking, life became easier. They bought a second-hand Austin 10 with a rear luggage rack from a retired doctor. In 1955 Clara took the boys on their first holiday in Australia. To Peter’s delight, they caught the Central-West Express to Katoomba. Being a train buff, he used up most of the film in his Kodak box brownie taking shots of the locomotive.
Gradually Clara became contented with her new life, but the religious division within the family troubled her. While she and the children attended the nearby Anglican church on Sundays, after which the boys would go to Sunday school, Jim did not join them but continued to pray in synagogue on the major Jewish holy days. ‘I became a follower of Christ during the war,’ Clara tells me. Anxious to convey the profound soul-searching behind her conversion, she adds, ‘That was the hardest decision I have ever made. During the war in Yugoslavia, after the persecution of Jews had begun, I considered converting as a way of saving my son’s life, but I was torn in two and felt very bad about it. When I discussed my conflict with the bishop of Subotica, he said something I’ve never forgotten. “You are not leaving your religion, you are taking it a step further,” he said. That reassured me. Later, when I did change my religion, it was from conviction, not for convenience,’ she says in her heartfelt manner.
Lonely and grief-stricken after her husband died, she described her wartime experiences and the circumstances of her conversion in her book The Colours of War. ‘I will never deny my Jewish origin, but I was born into it and it was not my choice ,’ she wrote. ‘Christianity was and is my choice. I have an ardent wish which may sound naïve or utopian but I hope with all my heart that one day the barriers between Christianity and Judaism will completely fall down.’
As the waitress brings our coffee, Clara discusses the division that arose within the family as a result of her conversion. ‘When the boys would ask why didn’t Daddy come to church with us, I found it hard to explain,’ she says. ‘Eventually Jim did join us, but we never concealed our Jewish origin from the boys. We were in a new country, starting a new life and I was determined that, with God’s help, my children would never go through what I had suffered.’
Several months after our meeting, Clara’s son Paul accompanied her to a talk I gave about the voyage of the Derna at the Museum of Sydney. A high school history teacher turned writer, Paul has described his traumatic childhood in The Not So Fabulous Fifties. His recent books have dealt with healing. It’s a subject close to Paul’s heart because since June 1997 he has suffered from the lung disease mesothelioma. ‘But I’ve confounded the medical fraternity, including my brother, by surviving so long without any conventional treatment!’ he says.
Clara lives alone in a retirement village in Bowral while her sons and grandchildren live in other parts of the country, but she works hard at leading an active, independent life. Jim’s death has been one of the most difficult things she has ever had to deal with. These days, Paul’s illness hangs over her, but she trusts in God and tries not to dwell on sorrow. ‘Great happiness and tragedy cannot last forever,’ she says philosophically. ‘I’m lucky that I’m alert enough to look after my home and business affairs. I don’t play bridge—that’s a waste of time. I’d rather go to classes to learn something and spend time with people who think like me.’ She goes to drawing classes, belongs to an embroidery guild, reads, walks her dog, tends the garden and cooks three-course meals. ‘Thank God for my children and grandchildren who are a living rainbow, linking the generations and bringing hope for a new and better world,’ she says.
28
Now that my mother was off the hated ship with its relentless rolling, the memory of which stopped her from stepping on board any vessel for the next forty years, she soon regained her energy and optimism. While my father weighed up the possibility of studying dentistry again, she became the matron of a hostel in Brisbane run by the Jewish Welfare Society where some of the orphans from the Derna were staying. She threw herself into looking after ‘the boys’, with whom she felt a special affinity. Her only brother had been murdered during the Holocaust, and whenever she came across a high-spirited boy with fair hair and jade-green eyes, she caught her breath.
Unlike ‘the boys’, whose only contacts were strangers who had offered to become their guardians and give them paternal advice, we had family in Brisbane. My mother’s sister Mania, her only surviving relative, had migrated the previous year. The sisters hadn’t seen each other since 1943, shortly before Mania and her husband Misko were caught by the Germans in Warsaw and deported to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. They were among the tottering skeletons whom English soldiers liberated two years later in May 1945. After the war, Misko’s cousin in Brisbane sent them a permit but just as the sun had started to shine on their faces again, Misko developed kidney failure and died.
He had survived the war but not the peace, and my aunt was left alone at the other end of the world.
Their tragedy decided our fate. My parents had resolved to leave Poland with its bitter memories of the Holocaust and travel as far from Europe as possible. My aunt’s plight solved the problem of where to go. From the moment we arrived, we were embraced by a warm-hearted extended family who treated us like close relatives even though we’d never met. Bronek Rappaport, a dentist like my father, had a charismatic personality and generous spirit that enriched everyone fortunate enough to cross his path. His wife’s relatives, the Benjamins, also opened their hearts to us and included us in all their activities and festivities. My first Australian playmate was their daughter Maxine, whose merry giggle and uncomplicated personality helped me to start becoming an Australian child.
At the New Farm Primary School, frustrated at being unable to communicate, I felt as though I had become deaf and mute. At lunchtime, when we sat under the trees in the school yard, the other children would unpack dainty white triangles with lettuce and vegemite or Kraft spread, while I took out hunks of rye bread with tomato and egg which had become cemented into a hot paste inside my leather satchel. Whenever the children giggled, I thought they were laughing at me. It was like listening to a secret code without having the cypher to break it. When we all lined up in the school yard while the headmaster unfurled the Union Jack, I tried to copy what the others were saying. ‘I honour my God, I serve my king, I salute my flag,’ I parroted without having the faintest idea of what it meant.
As the button-making machine had been stolen on the ship, my father accepted that his fate was to remain a dentist, to the vast relief of my mother who had no faith in his commercial ability. He spent most of the day in the offices of the dental faculty at the University of Queensland, discussing the possibility of studying again. With his halting English and reserved personality, he found it difficult to go from one office to another, presenting the diplomas and degrees gained over the past twenty-five years in Poland and Germany and submitting proof of lectures he had given, clinics he had run and dental boards he had chaired.
Despite his qualifications and experience, the faculty insisted that he repeat the entire four-year course, but its counterpart in Sydney agreed to credit him with the first year. Since we had no money, every year saved was precious, but accepting the offer meant leaving our new relatives to travel to a city where we knew no one. Apart from having to decide where to study, would my father be able to understand lectures in a foreign language and cope with becoming a student again among people young enough to be his children? And how would my mother be able to support us when she had no trade or profession and no English?
Three years later, during my father’s final year at the University of Sydney, his fellow student John Arnold, who has a dental practice in Perth, wrote about him in the annual year book: ‘One of the older men in our year, Henry at first had difficulty with our language but has mastered it so quickly that now statements such as “I will borrow you my wax knife” are becoming rare with him. In fact he has been heard to use the expression, “It fits like a bomb”. Henry has a very keen sense of humour and is able to appreciate a joke at his own expense. This, coupled with his ability and philosophical outlook, ensures him of a happy future in the dental profession.’
At the end of that year, my father was asked to give his impressions of studying in Australia for the faculty newsletter. Always a diplomat, he explained that it was difficult to compare the content of the Sydney course with the one he had attended in Poland almost thirty years before, and concentrated instead on the differences in their teaching methods.
‘A point which impresses me very much and which I cannot stress enough, is that the lecturers here are teaching the students ,’ he wrote. ‘Yes, I know this will sound curious to you, and I shall try to explain what I mean. The lecturers in my previous studies were not interested very much in whether the students were following them or not…Many lecturers with whom I was acquainted before coming here would rather give an incorrect answer than admit that they could not answer off hand. Here they say they will look it up or tell the student where to find the answer. The students are not misled by the lecturers here.
‘I might add that I have found it in Australian people generally, the property of being able to admit that they cannot remember perfectly every detail.
‘The students have readily accepted me as one of themselves and I have found many good friends among them. Some of course have been indifferent, but that is to be expected anywhere and is only natural. There has not been a single case of unfriendliness towards me as a student from overseas and that speaks highly for the culture of the students themselves.’ He concluded by saying, ‘I consider it a high honour for a person to bear the degree of this faculty, and that the years I have spent as a student here have been all I could have wished them to be.’
But in those first weeks in Brisbane, uncertain about our future and unable to speak English, my father kept making enquiries about the course, and my mother continued to look after the orphans at the hostel. They too were trying to adjust to their new life. After staying at the hostel for a few weeks, Peter and Henry Rossler’s guardian sent some of the boys to pick strawberries at his brother’s farm. Not used to Queensland’s scorching heat some were sunburned, while others developed an allergy to the berries. Apart from the heat, the conditions at the farm demoralised them. David Kucharski, whose clowning and bugle-playing had made them laugh during the voyage, lost the urge to play and joke. It wasn’t just the oppressive heat, the huge cockroaches and the mosquitoes. At mealtimes, the hungry boys would stare at their lettuce leaves, tomato and cucumber, slices of corned beef and white bread. It was like being back on the Derna , except that instead of spaghetti they were given salad every day. They pushed their plates away, muttering about rabbit food. Some nights when they were too hungry and too hot to sleep, they would raid the fridge and this led to reprimands in the morning. The manager was not sympathetic. ‘This is the right food for a hot climate, so get used to it,’ he said.
David Kucharski lived for Friday nights when the boys were invited to the rabbi’s home for dinner after the service at the synagogue in Margaret Street. Realising how much they missed the food their mothers once cooked in the long-gone days when there were still homes, parents and grandparents, the rabbi’s wife would prepare a feast for them. As they savoured the minced gefillte fish, chicken soup, chopped liver and apple cake, bitter-sweet memories came flooding back. ‘I kept hoping they’d adopt us!’ David tells me when I call him in Melbourne.
David’s first job was making heels at a shoe factory in Stanley Street. When he collected his pay packet one Friday, he noticed that it contained only the basic wage, three pounds ten shillings; nothing for the overtime he had worked. When the same thing happened the following week, he mentioned it to his guardian. Harry Goldman was an influential man who owned a big clothing factory and employed 250 workers.
‘That’s not right,’ Harry said and came to the factory on Monday morning to speak to David’s boss. Shortly afterwards, David was sent upstairs to the book-keeper who counted out the money they owed him. Later that day he overheard the boss grumbling in Yiddish, ‘These foreigners are only here five minutes and already they know the law!’
Before long, David enlisted his guardian’s help again. When he rented a room with full board, his guardian advised him not to tell the landlady how much he was earning so that he would get to save a little. A couple of weeks later, when he came home from work, she met him at the door, yelling that he should pack his bags and get out or she would call the police. David was shaken and bewildered. He had no idea why she was so angry or where he should go. It turned out that the landlady had gone to his factory, marched into the book-keeper’s office and demanded to know how much he was earning. When she discovered that he earned one pound more than he had told her, she was furious. ‘If I’d had the money I would have gone straig
ht back to Paris,’ David recalls. ‘I couldn’t take the way I was treated in Brisbane at the beginning.’
With the end of the strawberry season, Peter Rossler returned to Brisbane. When he told his guardian he would like to study, he was sent to Brisbane Grammar, the best school in town. At eighteen, Peter was a good-looking boy, sensitive and intelligent, but his experiences in the Lodz Ghetto and in Auschwitz had left him shy and insecure. He felt physically and emotionally underdeveloped compared with the brawny, high-spirited and confident boys at school, and disliked the school’s regimented routine. To assert his individuality he would occasionally wear brown shoes instead of black, or refuse to wear the school hat. He missed Prague and wrote homesick letters to his old school friends.
Two years after his arrival in Australia, Peter was awarded a Commonwealth scholarship to university. By this time his aunt and uncle had arrived from Czechoslovakia so he and his brother Henry moved to Sydney to join them. ‘I wasn’t as ambitious and focused as Henry,’ Peter says about his older brother who became a successful architect, but died of cancer in 1991. ‘I was no good at planning the future and took life as it came.’
Despite his laid-back nature, Peter graduated with a science degree in applied chemistry. After working for major pharmaceutical firms including Burroughs Wellcome, he worked at Unilever-Rexona for twenty-three years, developing aerosol fillers. ‘It wasn’t until I married Pauline and our daughter Carolyn was born that I started to feel I belonged here,’ he says.
Before I leave his cottage near Sydney’s Cooper Park, Peter threads an 8mm film through the spool of an antiquated little projector. As he turns the handle, blurred scenes of hawkers and rickshaw drivers flash past, followed by an image of the Derna moored in the harbour. This is the film he took in Colombo during our voyage.
The Voyage of Their Life Page 35