by Gee, Maurice
‘So what you are saying is that you fought in collaboration with Nazi groups?’
‘No,’ I cried.
‘It seems to us, Mr Mandl, that you are a very shifty customer indeed.’
I made up my mind to be quiet. Their report does not use ‘shifty customer’. It says that my allegiance appeared to bend to whichever side might serve my interests best and this had led, in one instance at least, to my collaborating with Nazis. It says that I refused to name individuals who might become enemies of the state. It says that my morals in sexual matters were lax. It says that I kept a store of smutty magazines in the ceiling. It underlines that I was a Jew. For good measure it adds that I made the members of the Tribunal ‘deeply uneasy’. But they used another reason for locking me up.
‘There is no evidence that your parents are dead? You have no documentary proof of it?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘Believe me, Mr Mandl, you have our sympathy for the treatment meted out to members of your race by the Nazis in Vienna, and elsewhere, but it places us in a difficult position in relation to persons in your situation.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘It is possible, is it not, that your parents are alive and held prisoner in a camp? You must surely see that the Nazis could use them to bring pressure on you.’
‘Pressure?’
‘Would you remain loyal to this country, Mr Mandl, if threats of harm were made against your parents?’
‘Would you supply information if you were asked for it?’
‘Would you draw more maps?’
They gave me no credit for the straightness of my reply. ‘I’d draw as many maps as they wanted,’ I said.
I waited in the corridor, sitting on a chair, while the soldier, the judge and the civil servant decided my fate. When they called me back the judge said, ‘We feel very strongly, Mr Mandl, that your continued freedom would constitute a danger to the security of New Zealand. Our recommendation to the Minister is that you be re-classified in Class A.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘It means, Mandl, that you will be detained at the Minister’s pleasure for the duration of the war.’
‘You’re locking me up? I want to fight.’
‘You are free to appeal. The procedures will be explained to you. Remove the prisoner.’
Prisoner! That’s a word like an iron bar. It locked me out from everything I knew. If Susi and my parents had walked in at that moment we would have been invisible to each other. It was grief for my lost life, and theirs, that made me sob into my hands – which went down very badly with the judge, the soldier and the civil servant. But they were done with me and did not have to witness it for longer than it took the policeman to get me out of the room. He walked me to a lavatory where I could wash my face. I have always been grateful for that.
Prisoner or no, they let me go back to work. I suppose I could have run away and hidden in those three days. It crossed my mind. I could bed down in a bramble patch beside the Whau creek and swim across each night for bread and sausages with Rosina and Karl. My fantasies were of that sort: I turned in an imaginative circle that, translated into space, would have been no more than three feet in circumference. I reported daily to the police station and on the third day the sergeant said to me, ‘I’ll come back home with you and get your gear. You’ll go down on the Express tonight.’
‘What is this place?’
He shrugged. ‘An island. I’ve never been there. They used to use it for quarantine.’
We went to my bedsitter and I packed a suitcase of clothes. I had sold my skis. I had sold my overcoat with the fur collar. I dressed like a New Zealander now – although not like a workman, like a clerk. (And was clerkish in my manners; had said, Thank you’ each time someone handed me a plank when stacking timber in the lumber yard.)
‘Take warm clothes,’ the policeman said. ‘It’s bloody cold in Wellington.’
‘How many men are there?’
‘I don’t know. It’s mostly Eyeties, I think.’
He took me by tram to a military depot, shook hands with me, which made the receiving officer grunt with annoyance, and went away. So I became an object for delivery: a live body’ was the term.
A corporal and a private took me down. One sat in the aisle seat, locking me in. They took turns in fetching food (it was a pie each time, and a cup of tea) at stations whose names filled me with apprehension and dismay – Taumarunui, Taihape. My two years in New Zealand had got me used to outlandish names, but now, on this trip, they were new again, and I seemed to be heading into Africa or Peru. There was enough moon to show the emptiness of the country we passed through. Miles, miles, and not a single light, not a house or car, only trees, mountains, streams so deep in folds in the earth that they simply winked, a silver flash, and were gone, and a sky whose emptiness seemed of a different order from that of northern skies. I should not have been surprised if someone had told me that astronomers had proved there were fewer galaxies here and greater stretches of empty space. I could not sleep. The soldiers called me Fritz and were cheerful enough at first but grew surly as the night went on and one, at last, as the other slept, refused to take me to the lavatory. ‘Shit your pants, I don’t care,’ he said.
It was early morning when we reached Wellington. Sky, hills, water, that was my impression as the train burst from the tunnel on to the harbourside. I looked for buildings that might make a city and found them at last huddled at the foot of hills and looking, I thought, shrunken to be in a place so inhospitable.
The corporal and the private smartened up and managed good salutes, Prussian salutes, as they handed me over to an officer – a lieutenant, I think – who looked too young to be called sir. He led me to a truck full of soldiers and I took a proffered hand and was jerked, lightweight, off my feet and into the middle of a platoon, where I rode twenty minutes among feet and rifle butts until the truck stopped and someone said, This is your stop, Fritzie.’
I jumped down, caught my lobbed suitcase and was left alone, I thought, beside a beach. Then I saw the lieutenant standing on the sand, watching a man with a pair of oars on his shoulder walking towards us along the water’s edge.
‘He’s a slow bugger,’ the lieutenant said.
‘What is this place?’
‘Petone beach. That’s Somes Island out there.’
The sea was pink. The water seemed as thin as air. The island, on the other hand, appeared to be made of granite, although I was to learn soon enough that it was clay and sandstone eroded by the sea.
‘Mountains all around,’ I said. ‘Mountains everywhere.’
‘Oh,’ he said, ‘these are only hills. Come on, Wishart. God, he’s slow. We might as well have a cigarette.’
‘What I need is the lavatory,’ I said.
‘Dunny in the changing shed,’ he said, indicating a little wooden building. ‘There won’t be any paper, take some grass.’
So, unguarded, I sat on the lavatory. Then I washed my hands in the sea while the lieutenant practised handstands on the sand with his cigarette in his mouth. Perhaps he was just a lieutenant in the school cadets. I could run away from him – but where would I go? It made me shrug and laugh, and he laughed too. The boatman was rowing towards us and I studied Somes Island as he approached. Although it taught me nothing I had time to assemble myself and say, This is what comes next and I can handle it. So I reached the island in an adult frame of mind.
We had to wade to the dinghy. The lieutenant was not pleased. He was wet up to his knees. I was startled by the coldness of the water. The sky was clear, the morning windless and the sea calm, but the water came from deep in the south, from iceberg seas. Wishart rowed to his launch, climbed aboard, secured the dinghy and headed out towards the island. The trip took twenty minutes, the distance measured less than two miles. The lieutenant stopped being friendly. He took off his shoes and dried his feet with a rag Wishart tossed to him. He wrung out his socks over the side.
All right, I thought, I’ll show him, and I opened my suitcase and found dry shoes and socks and put them on. He was, I think, close to ordering me to change back. When I looked up, the island had grown taller and spread its boundaries. Figures on the wharf waited for me. I saw a track turning right and left up the hill towards low buildings on the second level, and a tramway running straight up like a parting in hair. On the right a smaller island covered in bush had detached itself – Leper Island.
‘That’s where they put you if you play up,’ the lieutenant said, but was too much a boy to make me believe him.
Wishart brought the launch in at the side of the jetty and held it with a throttled-back motor while the lieutenant and I stepped ashore. Pengelly, the sergeant, was there to – I was going to write ‘welcome me’, but no, to take possession, accept delivery. I stood between two privates, both armed with rifles and bayonets, while he and the lieutenant exchanged papers. From up the hill, from a working party hidden in the trees, a call came in Italian, ‘Hey, amigo …’ followed by words I could not understand, but welcoming me perhaps, or perhaps just asking if I was German or Italian.
‘Silence,’ Pengelly shouted. ‘Identify that man.’
Laughter came from the trees, then cows mooing, dogs barking, birds calling – the Italians were especially good at bird calls. Pengelly turned away, red-faced, signed a paper for Wishart, then strode off, leaving the privates and me to follow. We took a path leading away from the Italians.
‘Tell the bugger to slow down,’ one of the privates said. ‘Hey Fritzie, say you’ve got a sore foot, eh.’ But we maintained Pengelly’s pace all the way to the commandant’s office and I was pleased to find myself breathing more easily than the soldiers.
On the way I had taken a better look at the city; no city, I thought, but a settlement, a huddle of low buildings where perhaps a fishing village should have been; and looked south towards the harbour mouth and the reef, black and sharp, and beyond it the sea that ran on until it reached the polar continent; and, warmer, for one needed warmth after that emptiness, the yellow cliffs of the island with, at the foot of them, a party of men guarded by a soldier, making a sweep with a fishing net in the sea. I saw too, down a long slope, a group of men waist deep in a pond, clearing weed. One of them had the look of Willi.
I saw cows and sheep, which made me smile, for no prisoner of war camp I had ever heard of had those.
Pengelly marched me into the commandant’s office, and that silly man, although he had his clerk ready with pen and paper at a side table, ignored me and Pengelly, and pretended to work for five minutes – behaviour that never fails to make a man ridiculous. Pengelly kept himself at attention all the while and I could tell how he hated Dowden. When the man looked up I thought, Oh no, a comic-opera soldier, he’s a joke, and I never had to revise that judgement.
‘Mandl, yes,’ he said. ‘I’ve read your report. You’re a bad egg, aren’t you, Mandl?’
I made up my mind not to understand his English but look half-witted if I had to, and so have as little to do with him as I could.
‘You’re an Austrian aren’t you, Mandl? And a Jew?’
I shrugged.
‘It says here you speak English, so don’t play dumb with me.’
I kept quiet. I spoke single words when I was sure that they were wrong. I was more alert with Dowden than at any other time during my stay on the island. It is hard not to be stupefied and enraged by such a man but I managed to stay ahead of him, and stay calm. He gave up trying to question me after a while and ordered Pengelly to search me, which Pengelly did roughly, taking my pocket knife and straight razor and box of matches. He made me take my shoes off and felt in the toes and asked why the pair tied to my suitcase were damp.
‘No smutty magazines?’ Dowden said. ‘I don’t like grubby-minded Jews, Mandl. I’ve a good mind to confine you when the Wrens come ashore.’ But he got nothing from me and grew bored and went off to his morning tea in the mess, leaving his wry-necked clerk to deal with me.
‘You understand some English, don’t you?’ said the clerk.
‘Yes. Some.’
‘It’s better if you understand me. You’ll find life a lot more comfortable.’
‘All right.’
He read me the camp rules, which I did not try to memorise. Willi would tell what to do.
‘Do you want the German government to be notified you’re here?’
‘God, no,’ I said. ‘Why should I want that?’
‘You’re a German subject.’
‘I am not. I’m Austrian.’
Austria has been annexed. You’re a German by annexation.’
‘Not if I say I’m not. I’m stateless. Would you record that? I declare myself stateless.’
‘Declare all you like if it makes you feel better. But unless the German government is informed you’ll get no pocket money. It’s thirty-five shillings a month. You must want that.’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘How will you live?’
‘I dare say you’ll feed me. Or will you let me starve?’
The clerk laughed. The grub out here isn’t too bad. The money,’ he added kindly, ‘comes through the Swiss consul. You could argue that it’s neutral money.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I’d have to sign myself Reichsdeutscher, wouldn’t I?’
‘Yes.’
‘No.’
‘Good luck then, Mandl. Sergeant, take him to the quartermaster and get his issue.’
So, with Pengelly, who made up for the clerk’s friendliness by speaking to me loudly when civilly would have done and making every instruction an order, I went to the quartermaster’s store, where I received two shirts, two singlets, two pairs of underpants, two sets of denim trousers and two pairs of socks. I received a tin plate, a mug, a knife and a fork and a spoon. All these I carried away on my second trip, for on the first I was loaded down with a wooden bed, a kapok mattress, a pillow and three blankets, two sheets and a pillow slip. It was like settling in at a Boy Scout camp.
There were three barracks in the compound as well as a number of huts. I hoped that I would be in the same building as Willi but knew it would be pointless asking favours of Pengelly.
‘In here,’ he said. ‘You’ll be with the Jews.’
‘How many are there?’
‘No questions. You speak when spoken to.’
I saw from photographs of wives and families and one of Stromboli volcano that the dormitory was Italian. The Jews were housed together at one end. At least, I thought, they haven’t put me in with the Nazis. I made room for my bed and made it neatly, stored my suitcase underneath, and when Pengelly had gone put my shoes out in the sun to dry.
So my life on the island began. Wearing my new clothes, I sat on a bench and waited for the working parties to come in. The cooks were busy in the kitchen making lunch but everyone else was out. I saw the farmhouse down the hill, the farmer on his tractor, saw his wife carry a bucket of slops to the pigs, and his children ride a home-made trolley in the yard. A cluster of official buildings stood outside the wire. I wondered what a Wren was – surely he did not think I was dangerous to a bird. I wondered what work could be found on a small island to keep more than a hundred men busy. A guard, far off, walked a path beside a cliff, and I made out men in his charge, stripped to the waist, working with hoes and shovels and wheelbarrows. Others worked in gardens, which were luxuriant with vegetables. I saw a little swastika flag flying on a stake at the end of a bean row and wondered if I would make a good start by tearing it down. But Dowden might see me from his office so I stayed on my bench. The sun seemed cooler. And I became aware of the boundaries of the island. Although it sat in the great basin of the harbour and only a tiny city and its tinier satellite stood on the shores, and the mountains climbed row on row beyond, I began to feel hemmed in. It was more than the wire. It was more than guards carrying rifles. Nazis were here. It pressed on me and made the flesh shiver on my bones.
Why can’
t I go away somewhere and fight?, I thought.
At midday the working parties marched back to the compound. I had been right about Willi, he was one of those working in the pond. He went into a barracks and emerged a moment later in dry clothes. He saw me and we strode at each other, and although I had been ready to embrace him we made our greeting with a formal shaking of hands.
‘What took you so long, Josef?’ Willi said. ‘I have been waiting here. There is work to do.’
SEVEN
Somes Island. On the outer path you can walk around it in less than an hour. Its area is 120 acres and its height above sea level 200 feet at the highest point. I use these imperial measures because they are natural to me, they fit my times, and I stay with ‘Somes’ (an official of the company that colonised Wellington) for the same reason, even though I think it only just that some at least of our place names should change back to the original Maori. But Matiu Island would not be mine.
There are beaches on either side of the wharf. The rest of the coastline is rocky, and broken cliffs rise from the sea. The island is ideal for confinement – people and animals have both been kept there. It has been longest used for animals but its most intensive occupation was by human prisoners in the two wars. Many people believe von Luckner was there, but no, von Luckner was held on Motuihe Island near Auckland and made his escape into the Hauraki Gulf. Four of his crew members were held on Somes. But I do not mean to write a history of the island, even of the years when I was there. I’ll simply say that its cruellest story does not concern a German or Italian, or one of the Japanese who arrived after 1941, or one of the Thais, the Samoans, the Tongans (German Samoans and Tongans), or the Russian Sargoff, or the Pole, the Finn, the Norwegian, the Frenchman, the Spaniard, the Czech who were there – the worst story is that of Kim Lee, the Chinaman who was quarantined for leprosy on the little island off the north-western tip of Somes in 1904 and lived there alone, some say in a hut, some in a cave, until he died. Leper Island. (Mokopuna, properly.) The people on Somes Island sent him food on a wire.