A sweet-faced brunette with a soft voice and a friendly word for everyone, Halina described her traumatic arrival in Australia. The ambulance was waiting for her on the wharf, and as it sped through quiet city streets she prayed that her baby would survive. At the Royal Melbourne Women’s Hospital, the wards were full and they placed her bed in the corridor, in full view of everyone who walked past.
After Mietek and her six-year-old son Stefan had left, Halina felt panic-stricken. The nurse had taken the baby away and left her alone, unable to answer the simplest question or express any request. The hours dragged, until late in the afternoon a nurse handed her something. Seeing the rug in which she had wrapped the baby, Halina broke down and sobbed. She thought they were returning the clothes because the baby was dead.
Mietek returned in the evening with their suitcase. Impatient to take out her clothes, as she had nothing with her in the hospital apart from the nightdress she had arrived in, Halina froze. Instead of the clothes and gifts they had brought for their relatives, she was looking at stones wrapped in newspaper. Someone had stolen their things and filled the case with rubbish, as they had done with my parents’ luggage and that of many other passengers.
Four days later, Halina was discharged from hospital because they needed the bed, but the baby had to stay there until she weighed six pounds. Halina moved into a hostel close by so that she would be able to come every day with the milk she expressed for her. It turned out to be a home for unmarried mothers, run by nuns who displayed little charity or compassion for the girls, some of whom were only thirteen. They served out their time there to keep their pregnancies secret and avoid bringing shame on their families. In return for accommodation, they scrubbed tiles and polished floors under the disapproving eyes of the nuns who served spartan meals and frequent reminders of their fall from grace.
Halina was distressed by their plight. While she had a loving husband and a baby she would soon take home, these unfortunate girls were treated like outcasts and would have to give up their babies for adoption without ever having held them in their arms. She was upset for herself as well, because Mietek was not allowed to visit and she had to sneak outside to see him.
Six weeks later, when little Jennifer was discharged from hospital, they flew to Sydney to join their cousins. If Halina had felt isolated at the hostel, she felt even more lonely in the cottage they rented in Lindfield. Alone all day with a fretful baby who was slow to gain weight, she worried about the future. As she pushed the pram around the leafy streets, she found the emptiness of Sydney’s outer suburbia oppressive. Where were all the people? Occasionally a curtain moved and she detected a figure standing at the window, but she rarely met anyone.
While Halina was existing in a solitary suburban vacuum, Mietek was racking his brains for some way of earning money. After discussing the matter with his cousins, he bought a second-hand machine for making socks, but when it broke down shortly afterwards, he gave up the idea of hosiery and took a job in a saucepan factory instead. In the meantime, Halina learned to sew. ‘I was hopeless. I told my boss he was wasting time and money on me, but he insisted that I would learn and finally I did. Later I made aprons at home,’ she said in her cheerful way. She stopped sewing after they opened a menswear shop in Pitt Street.
At the reunion, Halina was excited to see her shipboard friend Matylda Czalczynski Engelman who had looked after her like a sister on the ship. Matylda, who had travelled from Melbourne to be there that night, brought copies of the two-part memoir she had recently written: The Endless Journey and The End of the Journey. In her books, she gave a moving account of her struggle to survive with her little daughter Karmela in Poland during the war, and her heartbreak when she discovered that her husband had given up hope of her returning alive and had formed a relationship with another woman. Several years after arriving in Melbourne, Matylda found happiness again and was thrilled that Karmela loved her step-father, but her joy was short-lived. Three years after the wedding, her husband fell to his death out of an apartment window.
An excited crowd gathered around Topka Barasz that night at the Maccabean Hall. Her former charges surrounded her, all talking at once, recalling their adventures and misfortunes during the voyage and holding up family photographs, asking questions and telling their stories without pausing for breath. Speaking rapidly in her accented English, Topka teased them about their flirtations, fights and foibles. Together with her supportive husband John, Topka had run several successful cafés in Sydney. Her sisters Bella, Ruth and Miriam were all married and had children, but Topka remained childless. Having spent most of her life mothering her sisters, she had no room in her life for children of her own.
Sam Fiszman, whom many remembered as a young hot-head during the voyage, read out the congratulatory telegram sent to him by the then prime minister, Bob Hawke. ‘I am delighted to extend my best wishes to all those gathered here who arrived in Australia on board the SS Derna exactly forty years ago. In choosing Australia as your home you have helped to create the multicultural nature of our society. As a result, Australia is a richer, more exciting, more diverse, more prosperous society with a more distinctive identity. It is fitting that you are marking the Australian Bicentenary of European settlement with your own important anniversary.’
An outpouring of emotion greeted Syd Einfeld when he rose to speak. Syd, a big bear-like man with an infectious grin, had always championed society’s underdogs and had fought to have more Jewish refugees admitted. ‘You were all called reffos or New Australians, and the unions were worried you would take jobs from their members. So was the prime minister, Ben Chifley,’ he said.
Beaming, Syd recalled the day he had taken Mr Chifley to a Jewish kindergarten in North Bondi where his son Marcus was playing in the yard. ‘Pointing to the children, I said, “Now, Mr Chifley, some of those children were born Australians, some were born to pre-war immigrants and others were born overseas. Can you tell the difference?” His reply was, “How many papers do you need?”’
Sitting across the table from my mother and me was a corpulent middle-aged man with a bald head and a double chin who had also travelled from Melbourne to be there that night. He was rather reticent and I found it difficult to engage him in conversation as he gave brief answers and volunteered little. If someone hadn’t told me that he was one of Australia’s richest men, I would never have guessed.
It was Abe Goldberg, who had brought three knitting machines with him on the Derna and had started off as a factory worker in his uncle’s knitting mill. Three years later, he struck out on his own and over the next twenty years built up Australia’s biggest textile empire. With his takeover of Bradmill in 1985, he became the king of the biggest textile and clothing group whose labels included Pelaco shirts, Speedo swimsuits, Exacto knitwear, King Gee overalls and Formfit lingerie. Finance writers nicknamed him the Square Dancer on account of his nimble footwork in taking over businesses and changing partners.
Alice Zalcberg didn’t recognise him that night. A livewire on the Derna when she was part of Dr Frant’s group, she had fallen in love with Abie during the voyage, but had no idea that this bald paunchy man was her shipboard beau.
‘I was looking for the tall, slim, good-looking boy with thick wavy hair I remembered, but found this little butterball of a man,’ she told me. Alice, who still works part-time as a pharmacist, married another migrant, Sever Sternhell, who became Professor of Organic Chemistry at the University of Sydney. They have three sons. Alice still has a merry laugh and a dimple in the corner of her mouth. When she asked Abie what he did for a living, he made a vague comment about being in the schmatta business. ‘I must have been the only person in Australia who didn’t know that he was one of the wealthiest men in Australia and that there were articles written about him every week in the business journals,’ she said.
Not long after the reunion, there were even more articles written about Abe Goldberg, but they were no longer full of admiration for his business acumen.
Within eighteen months, Australia’s richest man had become Australia’s biggest bankrupt and had fled the country owing creditors $793 million. He returned to his native Poland and set up a business manufacturing jeans, protected by the absence of an extradition treaty. Anxious to avoid publicity, he guards his address and telephone number jealously, even from old friends, as Bob Grunschlag discovered. When I tried to contact him through an intermediary to discuss the voyage or borrow his photographs, I did not receive a reply.
On the night at the fortieth anniversary reunion, however, Abe Goldberg passed around the photographs he had taken on board the Derna with his Leica camera, including one of the lamb carcasses being flung into the sea. Another photo depicted the crowning of Miss Derna, who was sitting at the next table.
‘That’s when Abie told me that he had looked after me on the train from Paris to Marseilles when I cried the whole way,’ Ginette says.
Reflecting on her life, she says, ‘My destiny must have been to come to Australia and meet Ervin. I’ve always been lucky. I had wonderful nuns looking after me at the convent, wonderful foster-parents in France, a wonderful cousin who made life easier for me in Paris, and then a wonderful, patient sister here who took care of me. I’ve had a good life. Ervin and I have been married for forty-three years, we have two daughters and a gorgeous little granddaughter. My husband is my everything. He’s made up for everything I’ve lost and what I never had.’
45
Towards the end of a long day in 1970, a social work student researching low birthweight babies was in the middle of a ward round with her professor in the Royal Hospital for Women in Sydney when he introduced her to a tall grey-haired obstetrician. Fixing her with a piercing gaze, the specialist asked, ‘Do you have a brother called Stefan?’
Puzzled, she nodded, and was even more surprised when he gave her an enthusiastic hug. Turning to the professor with a beaming face, he said, ‘This is the first low birthweight baby I ever delivered!’
Dr Frant had come face to face with Jennifer Fay Derna Kalowski, the premature baby he had delivered on board the Derna twenty-two years before.
That baby who was born two days before the ship reached Melbourne and fought for her life in hospital for several weeks, is now an outgoing, energetic middle-aged woman. Jennifer, who has a husband, three daughters, elderly parents and a busy psychotherapist’s practice, manages to combine all the demanding roles in her life. ‘Sometimes I’m stretched to the limit, but I was brought up to have a strong sense of responsibility,’ she says.
As we talk in the loungeroom of the Woollahra apartment she shares with her husband Les, two of their three daughters and a shaggy white poodle called Paddington, we return to her dramatic entrance into the world. ‘I’ve always enjoyed the fact that I was born at sea, and that my birth certificate states my place of birth in terms of latitude and longitude and not as a town,’ she says with a laugh. Then in a more serious vein, she adds, ‘My birth symbolised my parents’ hope for the future, but from an early age I realised that I was also carrying some of the burden of their past.’
Although Halina and Mietek Kalowski never talked about the relatives who had been killed during the Holocaust, Jennifer grew up with an acute sense of their loss. Growing up in Sydney, where her parents struggled to earn a living, she was aware that her schoolfriends had grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins, while her family consisted only of her parents and her brother Stefan.
‘From an early age I felt an emptiness, the loss of a family who were never spoken about because the subject was too distressing. Except for two cousins, my mother’s entire family perished, including her seventeen-year-old twin brothers. We didn’t even have a photograph of any of them. That lack of extended family has given me a strong sense that family and friends have to be cherished and held onto at any cost.’
Looking back over her early life, Jennifer feels that she and her brother lived in the shadow of their parents’ history. ‘Their grief, although silent, was so obvious that we grew up overshadowed by it. Everything else paled by comparison and I developed very little sense of my own importance,’ she reflects. ‘I felt a pressure to make up for the loss of the relatives who had died, and to protect my parents from any more pain.’
It was a heavy burden for a child growing up in the sunny world of Australian children. Like all the children of migrants, Jennifer became aware of the difference between the expectations and attitudes of her parents and those of her friends. While her schoolfriends had easy-going parents and seemed to lead a light-hearted existence, the atmosphere in her home tended to be serious and intense. Dislocated and anxious about the future, her parents seemed to be swimming against the tide in an unpredictable current. Their energy was focused on creating security for the family, and that meant not wasting time or money.
‘When I was a little girl I wanted to learn tap dancing like my friends, but my father couldn’t see the point,’ she says. ‘His attitude was that since I wasn’t going to become a dancer, why waste all that time and energy?’
In 1971, one year after her unexpected encounter with Dr Frant, Jennifer graduated in social work, but fourteen years later she embarked on a new profession. ‘It’s not a coincidence that I became a psychotherapist,’ she says. As the sun streams through the russet autumn leaves outside the large windows, flooding the room with light, she leans forward and speaks slowly and earnestly, weighing every word to make sure she gives an accurate account of the process that has illuminated her life. ‘I did psychotherapy to heal myself and recover what I had lost. As part of my training, I had individual therapy, which helped me to deal with the issues that resulted from being the child of Holocaust survivors and migrants.’
As she tells me about growing up with little sense of her own worth, unable to express her feelings and uncertain of who she really was, I realise that she is speaking for many of the children of the Derna whose spontaneity and self-confidence were subdued by the long shadow of an oppressive past. In her case, as in so many others, the struggle to cope with loss, change and insecurity led to a fierce determination to believe that happiness and success lay ahead, and that she had to take advantage of all the opportunities that she was given in their new country.
‘My parents always stressed the positive. Negative emotions were swept aside and anger was taboo, so I didn’t learn to express my feelings. I became a compliant, co-operative child who never rocked the boat or made any demands. Compared with what my parents had gone through, my own problems seemed trivial. It wasn’t until I started working on myself that I came to understand that my life has just as much value as theirs.’ Like most descendants of Holocaust survivors, she doubted whether she would have the courage and resources to survive if she found herself in similar circumstances. ‘I still respect and admire their strength, but now I know that I am also a survivor with my own inner strength. I have learned that I could hold onto myself and still embrace others,’ she says.
In the process of exploring her own life and relationships, Jennifer gained a deeper understanding of human nature. ‘I struggled for a long time with the concept of man’s inhumanity to man. It was devastating to realise that we are all capable of good and evil and that goes for every person, including myself.’
We are discussing man’s inhumanity to man on a dazzling April afternoon. It happens to be Anzac Day, the day when we pay tribute to the courage and sacrifice of our soldiers and remember the tragic waste of lives in war. Just as the Holocaust became the defining event for an entire generation of Jews and their descendants, Gallipoli has become the focus of Australian national identity, a legacy of courage and heartbreak to be remembered and passed on to future generations. And like the survivors of the Shoah, the soldiers who returned from Gallipoli buried their stories in silence because there were no words to express what they had seen. Decades passed before they were able to talk about the memories that haunted their waking and sleeping hours.
And that’s what happened to Jennife
r’s mother. Halina Kalowski was so traumatised by what she had gone through that she could not bring herself to talk about experiences she relived at night in terrifying dreams. ‘It seemed to me that the vacuum which surrounded my mother stemmed from not dealing with the past,’ Jennifer says. ‘One of my reasons for becoming a psychotherapist was to find a way to communicate more openly with her. For years she didn’t speak, and I didn’t challenge her. But it wasn’t until I was able to cope with my own emotions that I became strong enough to bear her tears and her pain. And that’s when I found the strength to ask the questions which eventually produced the answers I was searching for.’
Training as a psychotherapist gave Jennifer the strength to ask those questions, but it took a pilgrimage to Poland in 1993 for her mother to start answering them. It was Jennifer who suggested that she and her brother Stefan should visit Poland with their mother, because she felt that it might help her to heal and come to terms with the past.
‘It was a profoundly emotional experience for us all,’ she says. ‘Going to Poland helped me to understand my family’s roots and reclaim my Polish identity in a way I hadn’t been able to do before.’
But the most powerful effect of the trip was the transformation in her mother. ‘From the moment we left Sydney and stepped onto the plane, she started to open up. For the first time she talked about her parents and her brothers, described their home life and told us what happened during the Holocaust. That’s the first time I had a sense of what her life had been like before I was born. That journey broke the wall of silence which had always surrounded her. Being able to talk with my mother brought us closer. It was the turning point in my own emotional growth.’ At the age of forty-five, Jennifer came out of the shadow of her mother’s past and began to blossom.
The Voyage of Their Life Page 51