The Voyage of Their Life

by Diane Armstrong

  Silva’s leather designs were so popular that they sold all over Australia, while their kangaroo-skin goods were exported to the US. With the hens gone, Ilo and Silva turned the brooder house into a workshop and employed four full-time workers and some out-workers as well. During the Vietnam War they supplied the army with soldiers wallets and unit badges. ‘I was angry when Indonesia, the Philippines and other Asian countries started copying my Australian designs!’ she says.

  But nothing stands still and in time the leather business changed too. Tanneries became uneconomical or were closed down for environmental reasons, the leather had to be sent away, tariffs increased and the costs became prohibitive. When Ilo completed his computer studies and became a programmer, they liquidated the business and in 1971 they moved into the house where she lives to this day.

  ‘When we liquidated the business, I felt useless. Ilo thought after all those years of hard work it was time I stopped, but that was the first time in my life I wasn’t productive and I didn’t know what to do with myself. So I took up painting.’ She shows me her portfolio of watercolours, which she donates every year to raise money for the Cancer Council and the Guide Dog Association. ‘Last year someone paid $3000 for my waratahs and flannel flowers, which went to charity,’ she says with quiet pride. ‘I didn’t know anything about art shows. The first time I saw a red dot on my painting, I asked someone what it meant!’ Among her watercolours I notice a bunch of full-blown roses. ‘They were the last flowers Ilo gave me,’ she says.

  Silva and Ilo had been married for forty-two years when he had a stroke, fell off a ladder onto the concrete part of the yard and cracked his skull in 1994. ‘We were so happy, always together. When he died I lost my closest friend,’ she says. I feel her loss so keenly that tears roll down my cheeks faster than I can wipe them away.

  Silva has visited Estonia three times. ‘I don’t belong in Estonia any more, but to be honest, I don’t belong to any country,’ she reflects. ‘When I travel overseas, I always say I’m Australian, but when I’m here I don’t feel it. I brought up my children as Australian. They grew up here, this is their country. I thought it better to give them a strong sense of belonging here, than to encourage them to dream about something that doesn’t exist. They know about their background but they never went to Estonian classes or folk dancing. When parents encourage dual allegiance, the children don’t know where they belong and feel unsettled. A lot of Estonians insisted that their children marry Estonian partners—I never did. People have to choose according to their heart.’

  Her son Tarno, the bright little boy who was instrumental in getting his mother appointed as assistant purser on the ship, became a stockbroker and a partner in one of Australia’s leading stockbroking firms. Anneke, an English and History teacher, is doing her master’s degree in English literature. When she came with her mother to my talk about the Derna at the Museum of Sydney in March 2000, they sat near Bob Grunschlag and his daughter.

  Several months later, Anneke sends me some photographs of herself, Tarno and her grandparents that were taken on the Derna. ‘I wish I had asked my grandmother more questions when she was alive,’ she says. ‘But I was never encouraged to ask questions. That’s a matter of culture, and perhaps personality too. Whenever I asked Mother about things she didn’t want to discuss, she would give me a cold stare and I got the message that questions weren’t welcome. Like so many migrants, my family didn’t want to talk about the past. They wanted to look to the future and build new lives.’

  During my last conversation with Silva, she reflects on our migrant experience. ‘Life was hard when we arrived, but we became strong because we had to struggle for what we achieved,’ she says.

  Her voice, usually quiet and measured, suddenly becomes more animated.

  ‘You know, when we first arrived in Sydney, we had friends who lived in one room in Kings Cross. Everyone was so hard up that whenever we visited them we had to bring our own cups and plates and we sat on the bed, but we had the best time I can remember, sharing our problems and making plans for the future. Years later, when we all had our own homes and enough chairs, cups and saucers and cutlery for all our friends, we never enjoyed ourselves nearly as much. We had so little, but we didn’t expect anything and enjoyed what we had. All those hardships made us strong. Today migrants demand so much. They should be happy to be here, like we were. Shouldn’t a country expect something of its citizens, not just give them things? When a country gives you the opportunity to start a new life, you owe it your loyalty, don’t you? You have to show your new country what you can do, and not expect it to do everything for you.’

  40

  Joe Neustatl ushers me into his flat, apologising for the chaos as we step over boxes, papers and stacks of books waiting to be unpacked, but the grey-haired woman near the window does not look up from her knitting. Curious, I step closer and burst out laughing. It’s a mannequin.

  ‘She was made for the Australian Bicentenary celebrations and I bought her at an auction,’ Joe explains. ‘When I used to supply mannequins for films, I sat her in my office. Everyone that came in spoke to her, thinking she was the secretary! After I sold up the business a few months ago I decided to keep her. I wonder what the neighbours thought when I brought her upstairs in a wheelchair when I moved in a few days ago!’

  Joe has white hair and deep-set eyes overhung by tangled, craggy eyebrows. There is something familiar about the low confidential whisper that makes me strain my ears even though I’m sitting across the table from him. For the past twenty years Joe has run a weekly classical music program on 2MBS-FM called Thanks for the Memory which has become a favourite with music-lovers all over the country. For years I have admired his depth of knowledge and been fascinated by the breathy voice that seems to be whispering into your ear, never dreaming that the speaker was a fellow passenger from the Derna.

  When Joe arrived in Sydney from Czechoslovakia at the age of seventeen, his guardian employed him in his ladies underwear factory. Joe worked long hours at the knitting machine earning five pounds per week which only covered his board and lodging, so his guardian supplemented his income with a little pocket money. ‘I had no idea how to organise myself or save money in those days, but my landlady and her husband treated me like their own son and organised me. They even found me a night job at a hamburger shop near Wynyard station,’ he recalls. After finishing work in the factory, Joe would catch the bus into town and cook hamburgers until one o’ clock in the morning. Next morning he was up at six to be at the factory at seven.

  For the first few years he tried a variety of jobs, including making cigarettes for WD & HO Wills in Kensington. Although he had no goal for the future, he did have a vocation which seemed destined to remain unfulfilled. Joe dreamed of finding an outlet for the creative flair which had begun to flower in the unlikely environment of the Theriesienstadt Ghetto.

  ‘I was eleven years old when they deported me to that place. The strange thing is that what I remember most clearly is not the terror or privation, but the culture. They had some of Europe’s most prominent writers, musicians, philosophers, actors and artists interned there, and they passed on what they knew, though they had to teach us on the sly because lessons were strictly forbidden. Whenever the Germans would approach, we had to pretend we were playing. The art lessons and lectures about drama and art history sparked off my love for art. I often got so engrossed in drawing that I forgot where I was. Sometimes I even forgot about food.’

  While he was employed in menial work in Sydney, Joe heard that a big store in George Street was looking for a window-dresser. Such openings were rare and he jumped at the opportunity of doing something creative. Although his wages as an apprentice were so low that he had to continue working on knitting machines at night to survive, financial hardship did not dampen his enthusiasm.

  By the time he was thirty, he had become a successful freelance window-dresser, but over the years the business changed. ‘In my day, window-dressing
was a real art,’ he reflects. ‘We worked with pins and fishing lines, but gradually all that changed. To cut expenses shopkeepers started doing their own window-dressing, and these days they just drape clothes over stands.’

  When the profession died off about twenty years ago, Joe looked around for some way of using his expertise and created a niche for himself in the industry he loved. ‘I started collecting display mannequins and hired them out to exhibitions, functions, TV productions, film companies, schools, trade fairs and so on. You’d be surprised how many film companies use mannequins as extras in crowd scenes because it saves paying actors,’ he explains. ‘Shopfront Image became a good business, but I’ve just retired. Now I’m going to devote more time to art.’

  To illustrate his point, he picks his way across piles of records and boxes bulging with papers and points proudly to his sculptures of lions and elephants which are already displayed on the shelves. Rifling through bulky portfolios stacked against the wall, he opens a folder and shows me charcoal portraits, nude studies and crayon drawings of animals which he is preparing for a forthcoming exhibition.

  Joe’s wife Cathy, who was born in Hungary, will not be living here with him. At a time when many couples resign themselves to remaining discontented, Joe and Cathy have found an unusual solution to their problems. ‘We have a close relationship but we just can’t live together,’ he says. ‘Now that our two children have left home—our daughter is an occupational therapist and our son is studying science—we’ve decided to live in separate units. Music, which is my passion, gets on her nerves. I like being surrounded by my pictures and sculptures, but she hates clutter and regards sculptures as dust catchers. We both have strong views and both want our own way. I’m seventy and I want to feel free to have relatives come and stay, spread my sculptures out and listen to loud music. Having two apartments is an expensive arrangement but you pay for everything in life. But even though we can’t live together, we can’t stay apart either, so we see each other a lot and are planning to travel together.’

  One of the places Joe plans to visit is the site of the Theriesienstadt concentration camp. ‘I want to convince myself that it’s really there. After so many years you start wondering whether it was real or some sort of hallucination. I feel very grateful to Australia and probably feel more bonded than many native-born Australians. I feel I owe it a lot for accepting me, giving me a second chance and the opportunity to devote my life to art and music.’ Studying me with his intense gaze, he adds, ‘I don’t know about you, but when I arrived here, I didn’t want to be important but I didn’t want to be insignificant either.’

  It’s Thursday night and Joe’s breathy voice fills the empty spaces in music-lovers’ lives all over Australia as he introduces a melody by Franz Lehar. As I listen to this evocation of the world Joe left behind, his words continue to resonate in my mind. Like him, I have also had that unconscious drive to leave some mark on the world. Perhaps surviving the Holocaust made us feel that our lives had been saved for a reason, and that we had to make it count. My dreams were easier to achieve because I was not alone and my parents smoothed the path for me, but for orphans like Joe, the road was hard and stony.

  It was because they knew that life would be difficult for the orphans when they arrived in Australia that the Jewish Board of Deputies appointed guardians for them. Their role was to provide guidance, emotional support, a family to visit on Friday nights and the security of knowing that in this foreign land there was one corner that offered a semblance of home. It was an idealistic plan with no defined parameters, giving each side the flexibility to spend as little or as much time together as they chose and to become as close or as distant as their personalities dictated.

  But although they appreciated their guardians’ benevolent intentions, some of the boys found it difficult to communicate with them other than in a superficial way. Part of the problem was that most of the guardians had left Europe before the Holocaust and although they sympathised with their wards, they were unable to grasp the depth of suffering and loss that these young people had experienced. As the survivors never spoke about their experiences, it became even more difficult to understand the grief and confusion that lay beneath a sometimes brash and over-confident façade.

  ‘My guardian was a good man but I couldn’t relate to him at all,’ André Wayne tells me. ‘He was so English, so proper. When I started explaining that I was actually a couple of years older than my papers said, because men over eighteen weren’t allowed to leave Czechoslovakia, he was so shocked he didn’t even want to hear about it. “But that’s dreadful, it’s dishonest!” he told me. So I didn’t say any more about it. It was obvious we came from different worlds.’

  Today the guardians would receive counselling to alert them to potential problems and help them understand their wards’ contradictory mixture of bravado and vulnerability, their longing for warmth and guidance yet resentment of advice. No one who had clung to life as tenaciously as they had, suffered what they had suffered and lost what they had lost, could emerge from humanity’s blackest night without becoming tough, determined and confident of their ability to survive anything. They missed their families, but having fended for themselves for years, the older ones were not disposed to take orders from anyone.

  André’s cabin-mate and lifelong friend David Weiss also found it difficult to connect with his guardian. ‘He and his wife did their best to make me feel welcome, and I admire them for taking me on, but I didn’t feel comfortable with them,’ he says. ‘Perhaps I was too sensitive, but whenever they introduced me to their friends as “my David” I felt I was being paraded as their show-piece. I couldn’t discuss my problems with them because they were so affluent they couldn’t understand how it felt to have nothing. I missed having someone who could give me advice without patronising me.’

  David, a tall, balding man, still has the sunny smile and equable nature that made his friends on the Derna turn to him as a peacemaker. Speaking of the voyage, he recalls the shoes he bought from the hawkers in Port Said. ‘They had thick white soles and brown suede uppers. I thought they looked terrific, but the first time I wore them a guy on the Bondi tram stared and hissed, “Bloody reffo!” As soon as I earned some money I went to Palmers and bought myself a pair of square-toed Aussie shoes, an Aussie suit and an Aussie briefcase!’

  Dismissing the problems of the first few years, David prefers to put the past behind him. ‘I try not to carry the burden on my back all the time,’ he says. After working for a while as a house painter, he decided to go into business with his older brother who was a chemist, and together they started a pharmaceutical company called Orbit Chemicals. They started off producing sulphadiazene which was the current wonder drug, in the early sixties they made slimming tablets, and later on won a government contract to supply anti-malarial and salt tablets for the army. These days their small company produces vitamins.

  At first David missed Prague so much that whenever he thought about it he would cry. ‘For years I dreamed of going back to Prague,’ he says. ‘In my mind I would see the wide Moldau River, the lovely old square, the promenade, the bridge, the grand buildings and all the old haunts. But when I finally did return, what a shock! The river was narrow, the square was crowded, the statue was small and the buildings were shabby. And the people weren’t the same either. They were scared of saying what they thought and looked over their shoulders all the time, whereas I was a free man and didn’t belong there. That’s when I knew that my dream really came true in Australia.’

  Every Friday night, David and his Polish-born wife Nellie extend their dining table to seat fourteen members of their family, which includes their eldest son, who is an award-winning researcher in biochemistry, and seven grandchildren. ‘When I look around the table at my family and I think how I came out here alone in 1948 with nothing, there’s a beautiful glow in my heart,’ he says.

  When André Wayne realised that his cabin-mates Harry Braun and David Weiss had settled
in Sydney, he moved here from Melbourne where he had initially been sent. With his thin moustache, smooth brown hair and slim build, André looks much younger than his seventy-three years. ‘I looked terribly young when I arrived. That’s why I grew a moustache, so when I applied for work as a jeweller, employers would take me seriously,’ he says. His ploy must have worked because he was employed by a firm that supplied Sydney’s leading jewellery stores, Dunklings and Percy Marks. ‘I worked on the elaborate champagne diamond brooch with the Australian wildflowers design which Prime Minister Menzies sent as a coronation gift to Queen Elizabeth.’

  André has never forgotten the debt he owes to the woman who made his life in Australia possible. ‘If it hadn’t been for Anita Freiberger, I would never have got out of Czechoslovakia in 1948. She’s old and frail now and lives at the Montefiore Home in Sydney these days. I still go and see her, but not many of the others do.’

  Although the orphans of the Derna are aware of the debt they owe Mrs Freiberger, some of them continue to feel uncomfortable about having changed their date and place of birth on their papers in order to leave Czechoslovakia. Conditioned to fear the heavy hand of power, a couple of them are still worried about the possible repercussions if the Australian government discovers that they entered the country with inaccuracies in their documents. The prospect of being exposed alarmed one of them to such an extent that he asked not to be named or even referred to in this book. Five decades of life in a tolerant country have not succeeded in dispelling the anxiety created by totalitarian regimes that controlled their lives and destroyed their trust.

  Bill Marr, another of Mrs Freiberger’s protégés, reflects on the unexpected turns his life has taken since he arrived in Sydney. The first few weeks were not promising. He was living at the Isabella Lazarus Home for Children in Hunters Hill and had to travel for two hours to get to the garage in Oxford Street where he worked as a motor mechanic. Seeing a room advertised in Rushcutters Bay, which was much closer to his workplace, he put on his best shirt and tie and set off, hoping to make a good impression on the landlady. ‘The mother and daughter looked me over and went into the next room. A moment later I overheard the daughter saying, “I think he looks suspicious. Maybe he’s a French gigolo?”’ Bill shakes with laughter. ‘I must have looked too good! I didn’t get the room!’