The Voyage of Their Life

by Diane Armstrong

  ‘One of the workshops was in the same building as your father’s dental surgery at 21 Oxford Street,’ he recalls. That evokes memories of the fish tank in the waiting room, the smell of oil of cloves and my father’s gentle touch as he filled my teeth in the big dental chair. Although my father died of cancer in 1978, I still miss him, and he remains as vivid in my mind as ever.

  At the end of the day, after Morris’s employees had gone home, he would race the overtimers pressing skirts and trousers. ‘All through winter I only wore a singlet and if I shook my head, I could have filled a bucket with sweat! I worked twelve hours a day. I left home before our two children were awake and by the time I got back, they were already asleep. What drove me was not the urge to make money, but the need to succeed and be accepted.’

  Unable to maintain the punishing pace of the pressing business, in 1952 he bought a delicatessen in Chaleyer Street in Rose Bay, where he and Ruth worked together. Although the war had ended seven years before, some goods were still rationed. But having a shop entitled him to rations of tobacco and cigarettes which he sold on the black market. That proved more lucrative than selling bread, cheese and sausage. After ten months, however, he realised that standing behind a counter selling groceries was too slow and boring. He needed something with a challenge.

  At around this time, while watching their children play at Waverley Park, Ruth got talking to an American woman and noticed that she wore an unusual shawl-like wrap with cuffed sleeves. With her eye for fashion, Ruth saw the possibility of marketing this simple garment that consisted of a length of jersey with two seams. She and Morris copied it in jersey, the latest textile sensation, and made samples in various colours. David Jones and Grace Bros jumped at it and orders poured in.

  Their success led to the next phase of Morris’s career: knitwear. With a partner, he opened a factory they called Original Knitting Mills which produced high-quality cardigans and sweaters. ‘People were hungry for merchandise in the 1950s and we sold as much as we produced,’ he recalls. ‘The problem was to obtain enough yarn.’ In 1961, Morris travelled to a machinery exhibition in Manchester, bought the latest automatic machine and began producing Australian-made ski wear.

  In 1965, the partnership split up because Morris had ideas for expanding that his partner didn’t share. He was looking around for another business when he met a retailer who was looking for someone to run two dress shops, ‘Jane Edwards’ in Campsie and ‘Jane Lester’ in Burwood, which specialised in evening and cocktail wear. As he was about to move interstate, he made Morris an offer he could not refuse. All he had to pay was rent. At a time when retailers were charging 50, 000 pounds goodwill, Morris could hardly believe his luck. He took a five-year lease with a five-year option and he and Ruth managed one boutique each.

  The way Morris tells it, the shops were money spinners. They were well established and had a loyal clientele at a time when retail business was thriving and women splurged on outfits for special occasions. The mark-ups were good too. Morris would buy a full range of coats with fur collars from a Melbourne factory for thirty pounds each, and had no trouble selling them for 120. But the opening of Roselands, Sydney’s first huge shopping mall, lured away much of their clientele. The death knell for small retailers had begun to sound.

  Morris was looking around for a business once again when an advertisement in the Sydney Morning Herald caught his eye. A thirty-six-unit motel called Randwick House was for sale, across the road from the Randwick race course. Although the business was run down, Morris saw the possibilities straightaway, but Ruth was worried. ‘Every time Morris went into a new business, I felt sick inside, because each time he was taking bigger and bigger risks, but there was no stopping him,’ she says, shaking her grey head with the resigned exasperation of wives whose husbands never listen. One of the owners of the motel was Jim Killen, the federal minister from Queensland. While Ruth held her breath, Morris made an offer that Killen and his associates accepted.

  ‘I didn’t have a clue how to run a motel, but the couple who were managing the place agreed to stay on, so I wasn’t worried,’ Morris says. ‘But as soon as the contracts had been exchanged, the managers said they were leaving. This was just before Easter, one of the busiest times of the year. Can you imagine the state I was in?’

  He made a frantic phone call to an acquaintance who knew the motel business and showed him how to run it efficiently. The work was constant and required seamless efficiency but it wasn’t difficult. ‘Slowly, slowly, we were running it the way I wanted,’ Morris recalls. ‘We renovated it to look Spanish with white stucco arcades, and put in a licensed restaurant.’

  While Morris was running the motel, he became involved in yet another business, importing clothes and textiles from America, Italy and Taiwan. ‘My partner was a delightful man, but the business was in trouble, so I had to restructure the whole enterprise,’ he says. Within two years it was showing a healthy profit.

  When his partner retired, Morris sold the motel for half a million dollars, twice as much as he’d paid for it, and bought him out. ‘Business was good until the government opened up the market to foreign countries in 1990. These days there are too many people importing, they’re killing each other. And the big shopping centres are killing small business.’

  Mystified by the world of business, I ask what it takes to be successful. ‘Hard work and a bit of luck!’ cries Ruth.

  But Morris adds, ‘Common sense, judgment, but above all, you gotta believe in yourself. You need a goal. And don’t stick to something just because you’ve always done it. If it’s not working out or you don’t like it, don’t be afraid to try something new. I took risks in business, but I’ve always been ready to take a gamble. If I hadn’t been adventurous, I would have been shot or hanged a hundred times during the war.’

  Morris and Ruth have two children, Allan and Rita, and four grandchildren. ‘I wanted Allan to study textiles in Leicester, and promised him the best knitting factory in this country, but all he wanted to do was medicine. I warned him that with medicine you only have your two hands, but with a factory, other people are bringing in money for you, even when you’re not there. But he wasn’t interested.’ Allan Shell did become a doctor, but he has inherited his father’s entrepreneurial spirit. In 1998 his company introduced the Heartline Monitoring Service.

  As I’m about to leave, I take one more look at the harbour view outside the terrace. Following my gaze, Morris shrugs. ‘I feel sad that there is no one from my family here to see that I’ve succeeded. They’d be so proud. You see, I always come back to the Holocaust. When the war ended, I swore I’d never be a Jew again, and it’s only in the last few years, since I gave my testimony to Spielberg’s Shoah project, that I’ve started talking about my war experiences, and now I can’t get them out of my mind. I’ve been on the board of the Sydney Jewish Museum and still work there as a volunteer guide because I feel it’s my duty. Today I’m well accepted in the Jewish community. I’m proud that whatever I’ve done, I’ve done it honestly. But I feel sad that I can’t share it with my family.’

  44

  When I call her in Melbourne, Ginette tells me in a clear, resonant voice that she doesn’t want to discuss personal matters on the telephone. In any case, she adds, her story is long and involved and will take too long to tell. When this fails to dissuade me, she agrees to answer some questions, but first she wants to ask a few of her own.

  ‘You want to know about me, so tell me something about yourself first,’ she says in the ingenuously assertive manner of a little girl who knows that she is everybody’s favourite.

  And that’s exactly what she was during the voyage. I’m talking to Miss Derna 1948, whose coronation was recorded by Bruno Tohver, Fred Silberstein and Morris Shell. With the paper crown on her smooth fair hair, the Panamanian flag draped over her thin shoulders and a happy smile on her face, she looked like any normal nine year old. It’s only when she begins telling me her life story that I am struck by th
e infinite variations on the themes of loss and pain that the passengers of the Derna have suffered.

  Ginette was born in France in 1939, shortly before the war, and cannot remember her mother who placed her in a convent to keep her safe from the Germans. Although she managed to save her daughter’s life this way, she wasn’t able to save herself and shortly after the Germans occupied Paris she was deported and killed. For the next three years the convent became Ginette’s home, until a Catholic French couple became her foster-parents. After an idyllic existence at their château, she was brutally wrenched away from them by her cold aunt in Paris and sent across the seas to Australia. As Ginette tells me her story over the phone in her matter-of-fact manner, it sounds like a fable and I catch myself hoping that it has a happy ending.

  Several months after our telephone conversation, I’m ringing the doorbell of her Melbourne home whose façade resembles an English manor house. Dressed in black slacks and T-shirt, Ginette is trim and pretty with streaked fair hair cropped fashionably short. Pointing to the photograph of the passengers craning over the rails of the Derna, she says, ‘That’s me in the front with the big bow in my hair.’

  Peering down from the rails that morning, Ginette trembled at the prospect of parting from her friends on the ship, when she heard someone screaming her name: ‘Ginette Wajs! Ginette Wajs!’ Looking down, she saw that it was a tall, stately woman in a turban with a scarf draped over one shoulder. Even in her distraught state, Ginette was impressed by this woman’s elegance. The stylish woman was her dead mother’s sister, whom she had never met before. When her aunt looked up, she saw a little girl in a winter dress, howling, ‘I don’t want to go! I want to go back to Paris!’

  Squeezed into the back of the small Austin with her new cousin, unable to understand anything that her aunt and uncle said, Ginette glared at the city unfurling in front of her. She was even more distressed when they reached the drab semi in Carlton where she had to share a room with her cousin and use an outside toilet. Using the bathroom made her nervous in case someone looked in and saw her through the glass panel door. To shut out the unpleasant reality of her new existence, she would often daydream that she was back in Paris. In her favourite fantasy, she was standing at a Metro station when the carriage door suddenly slid open and her beloved foster-father stepped out, swooped her up and took her to the home she loved so much that she ached just thinking about it. Then she would open her eyes and sob because she was still in the gloomy house in Carlton.

  At the age of nine, Ginette was living with strangers for the fourth time in a life that had been marked by partings, loss and tragedy. ‘I was wild, naughty and miserable and gave them a terrible time,’ she recalls. ‘I screamed, had tantrums and ran away. I didn’t want to be here and I didn’t want them to be my parents, but there was nothing I could do and I had no one to turn to.’ Unable to cope with her niece’s disturbed behaviour, her aunt was at a loss to understand why the child wasn’t grateful and well-behaved. Searching for love, Ginette encountered coolness and disapproval.

  ‘The only thing that saved me was my cousin who was always like a sister to me. If not for her, I’m sure I would have gone mad or died,’ she says.

  Misunderstood, miserable and mute because she couldn’t speak English, Ginette found school such an ordeal that some days she became hysterical and had to be taken home. In her distressed state, everything upset her and whenever she had to walk to school in the cold and rain she became so anxious that she was often ill. Being adopted was another source of anguish. ‘Whenever anyone referred to my adoptive mother as “your aunt” I got terribly upset,’ she says. “She’s not my aunt, she’s my MOTHER” I would shout at them. I was desperate to fit in. Everyone had a mother and I didn’t want to be different.’

  When she had lived in France, she felt comforted by prayers and services in the chapel, and now she missed the solace of those rituals. Although she knew she was Jewish, alone in her room she continued to pray to Jesus. But whenever her aunt caught her, she would rebuke her sharply and say, ‘Stop that! You’re Jewish. We don’t do that.’

  ‘Actually it took me a long time to feel Jewish, even though they sent me to the Kadimah Centre in Carlton to learn Yiddish,’ she says.

  While she reminisces, Ginette bustles about in her modern kitchen, preparing spinach and mushroom pasta for dinner while her husband Ervin pours the wine. As I listen to her experiences of growing up in Australia, it strikes me that she and I were the same age on the Derna. As I had learned to speak French in the six months we waited in Paris for our passage, we would have been able to communicate, but we can’t remember each other from the ship.

  During the first few painful years in Melbourne, it was Ginette’s cousin, whom she lovingly describes as her sister, who showed her more understanding than anyone else. ‘She was five years older and put up with a lot from me,’ Ginette says. ‘She even let me sleep in her bed because I was too scared to sleep alone, and whenever she went out, she left chocolates under my pillow.

  ‘Sometimes she even let me tag along on a date. If I got frightened when I was on my own at home, I’d ring her and she’d come back and take me to the party in my dressing gown. She was my very good luck.’

  By the time her adoptive parents moved to Elwood, where she had her own room, Ginette could speak English, fitted in at school and had many friends.

  ‘I was popular because I was happy-go-lucky and loved sport. I was always invited to tennis parties, ice skating, horse riding and dances. And gradually I started feeling Jewish.’

  As she grew older, Ginette noticed that Holocaust survivors were not very well accepted in Melbourne, even by some of the Jews who had arrived before the war and now felt part of the establishment. They felt threatened by the obvious foreignness of the newcomers and looked at them with the critical eyes of Anglo-Saxon Australians. Although they assisted the refugees in material ways, they were embarrassed by their un-Australian behaviour. In keeping with the prevailing government policy of assimilation, some of the local Jewish organisations distributed leaflets advising the immigrants to dress unobtrusively, speak quietly and learn English as soon as possible.

  ‘But I was never treated that way because, for some reason, Australians were impressed that I was French. For me it was no big deal, but to them it seemed special.’

  On Sundays she would meet her friends on the lawn outside St Kilda beach which became known as Little Jerusalem. On Saturday nights most of the teenagers went to dances at the Toorak synagogue. It was there that Ginette met Ervin.

  ‘She was such a sweet little seventeen year old,’ he says looking at her fondly. ‘For me it was love at first sight.’ From their wedding photo on the wall, I can see why he was besotted. With her delicate features and tiny waist she resembled a Dresden figurine.

  ‘The night we met, Ervin asked if I’d like to sit on his lap and I said absolutely not!’ Ginette recalls. The three of us burst out laughing because she’s sitting on his lap right now in a black leather armchair in the study.

  ‘When he asked if he could drive me home in his father’s car that night, I said yes, as long as he took my girlfriends home too! The following day he turned up to take me for a drive in a borrowed MG. My mother took one look at the sportscar and said, “No way are you going out in that, and anyway, he’s too old for you. ” He was twenty-three, six years older than me. She sent me to my room. Can you imagine? I was so embarrassed!’

  Ervin gives her a sympathetic smile. ‘While you were in your room, she interrogated me!’ He’s a slim, fit-looking man who has recently retired. Like Ginette, he is also a Holocaust survivor whose parents were killed, but this is a topic he prefers to avoid. While Ginette talks about the past, he occasionally adds an observation, asks her opinion, or helps to elicit her thoughts and feelings in a sensitive, non-intrusive way.

  ‘I was eighteen when we married,’ she says. ‘My mother invited the whole of Melbourne to our wedding. She looked fantastic. Come upstairs
and I’ll show you her picture.’ Proudly she points to the handsome Junoesque woman with a square jaw. ‘She’s still good-looking at ninety-two, and she’s still a very strong woman,’ she says in a tone that implies that their clashes are not over.

  It was not until 1988 that Ginette discovered the identity of the young man who had dried her tears on the train to Marseilles forty years earlier. ‘When I came up to Sydney for the fortieth anniversary of the Derna’s arrival, Abie Goldberg told me about the incident on the train.’

  The bond formed by the orphans during the voyage was so strong that Bill Marr, André Wayne, Harry Braun, David Weiss, Leon Wise and Peter Rossler had organised the gathering which was as much a celebration of our arrival as a tribute to Australia in the Bicentenary year. I came to that reunion with my mother. Zofia Frant, who together with her husband had chaperoned the orphans, was also there that night. So was her daughter Christine, who has become a doctor like her father. The Frants and my parents had remained close friends ever since the voyage, from the uncertain early years when the men had to repeat their studies and the women became the breadwinners, to the mellow later years of grandchildren and retirement.

  There were shrieks of recognition and hugs of joy as friendships were renewed after forty years, but for the four of us the occasion was tinged with sadness because my father and Dr Frant were no longer alive. In the flood of bitter-sweet nostalgia that swept over us that night, Zofia Frant and the orphans exchanged stories. They recalled the way Dr Frant would prowl around the decks, torch in hand, looking for his amorous charges, and laughed over the mysterious disappearance of the hated torch. Everyone remembered about the baby who was born on the ship, and a group surrounded Halina Kalowski to hear her story.