by Tim Bonyhady
Gretl’s security file also grew when, as part of this climate of heightened fear and suspicion, members of the public began informing on refugees. The most notable incident involved a man who rented an apartment in their building in Rose Bay. When Mr. Dunlop found a slip of paper with German writing, he “deduced that it was connected with Mrs. Gallia, and thought it his duty to inform the section.” He also reported that the Gallias were using their radio, a key form of communication and entertainment in the era before television, which all enemy aliens had just been prohibited from using without a special license. The lieutenant who dealt with this report found that the sheet of paper revealed that Gretl was trying to get one of her friends out of Austria. He ignored the use of the radio, which Gretl soon made lawful when she became one of the few refugees to succeed in obtaining a license, aided by her invocation of high British authority in the form of the governor of Fiji, Sir Harry Luke.
Kathe’s relationship with a teacher at Sydney Technical College was another matter. Anne’s diary reveals that while Mr. Rawson occasionally saw Kathe with his wife, he usually saw Kathe alone, sometimes arriving early in the morning and leaving late at night, and visiting up to three times a week. As recalled by Anne, Mr. Rawson continued to see Kathe when his wife thought he had gone to England to work in the Royal Ordnance Factory, but in fact he was still in Sydney. Mrs. Rawson went to the Security Service after Mr. Rawson finally reached England and she discovered that he was in close correspondence with Kathe. Mrs. Rawson warned that Kathe might be using Mr. Rawson “to obtain information which would be of use to the enemy.” The security officer was dismissive, concluding: “The matter appears definitely to be one of straightout jealousy, unworthy of any further investigation.”
The Security Service responded more seriously in 1943 when one of its own agents reported that Gretl, who had been working as a secretary with the Free French Delegation, had resigned from her job because it was “involved in some dishonest venture.” The service began examining all of Gretl’s Australian mail, conducted its own investigation, and called Gretl in for questioning. This scrutiny revealed nothing more than Gretl’s difficulties in adjusting to the role of secretary. Her resignation, the service found, was due to her being “out of place” among her workmates, young girls thirty years her junior, because of her “superior knowledge and culture.” Two years later, however, she was still subject to special surveillance.
These controls saw Gretl, Kathe, and Anne live to a certain extent in fear, fueled by uncertainty about what some of the controls involved and whether they could ignore them with impunity. A letter written by Kathe early in 1942, when Anne was on holiday in the country, having secured special permission to go there, provides one example. It reveals that Gretl, Kathe, and Anne began by thinking that they needed permits for their favorite swimming place in Sydney harbor at Nielsen Park and decided sometimes to ignore this requirement, which meant that their swims were clouded by anxiety. Then, to their relief, they discovered that Nielsen Park was within their district so, as Kathe put it, they could “swim without worry.”
The Australian government belatedly began relaxing these controls in late 1942, when it decided that enemy aliens needed to report to the police once a month rather than every week and created one large police district stretching fifteen miles from Sydney’s general post office, so refugees did not require permits whenever they moved around the city. The next changes came in 1943, when the government reclassified sixty-five hundred “enemy aliens,” including Gretl, Kathe, and Anne, as “refugee aliens” and then allowed refugees to become naturalized. Gretl, Kathe, and Anne applied as soon as they could and, in March 1944, renounced the German citizenship that had been forced on them by the Anschluss. Because Australian citizenship still did not exist, they became British subjects.
The war also narrowed Anne’s world by putting an end to her correspondence with Anni Wiesbauer and leaving Erika Brünn as the only Austrian friend with whom she remained in contact. For all the refugees whom Anne met in Sydney, she regarded them as no substitutes for her “beloved Erika,” who shaped her choice of career when Anne decided to become a nurse in the hope that Erika and she might work together in the same hospital after the war. More immediately, the requirement that trainees live at the hospital would allow Anne to leave home, which she was desperate to do, since Gretl and Kathe got on as badly as ever and Anne often fought with at least one of them. While a nurse whom Anne met in Sydney warned her that the work of trainees was mundane and repetitive, Anne still applied.
She soon was struggling. When she sat her first examination in theoretical general nursing, her mark was just 54 percent, which put her second bottom in her class. After all the difficulties of the Leaving, she could not take seriously examination questions such as: “If you were proceeding to make a bed in the ward, how much of the bottom sheet would you turn under the mattress?” But she remained eager to be a nurse—until she began working in the wards. Where she desired challenges and responsibilities, she found herself making beds, changing bandages, emptying bedpans, and washing up. She also had one argument after another with her superiors, especially the deputy matron, who talked repeatedly about “dirty foreigners,” Anne’s first experience of sustained racism in Australia. For all her good intentions, she worked increasingly poorly by her own account and was dismissed after six months.
Her talents impressed John Ferguson, the judge of the New South Wales Industrial Court who befriended Gretl. When Anne decided that she wanted to go to Sydney University, the fees were an immediate issue. Ferguson offered to pay them. Although Gretl and Kathe did not accept his offer because their combined income had just reached a point where they were able to meet their expenses, Anne always remembered Ferguson’s generosity. While otherwise renowned for donating his great book collection to Australia’s National Library, Ferguson was celebrated in our household for a very different form of philanthropy.
University was the right place for Anne. She not only worked exceptionally hard, just as when she sat for the Leaving, but also studied with unprecedented pleasure and excitement. As her curiosity, confidence, and ambition grew, she ranged far beyond the subjects she was enrolled in, reading prodigiously and sitting in on lectures in other courses. She also made friends like she had never had before. When one girl wanted to sit next to her in class, another lent her a book, and a third invited her to spend part of the holidays with her family in the country, she was “surprised to be so popular” because she still could not treat friendship as an ordinary experience. In 1943, she observed, “I just love university life.”
Her last year, in 1944, was another triumph. Having excelled in history and German during her first three years, she embarked on double honors, which meant she had to write two theses. While she got upper-second-class honors in history, she got first-class honors and a university medal in German, which, her supervisor stressed, owed little to her natural advantage as a native speaker. Her “outstanding achievement,” he wrote, was her thesis, which exhibited “a grasp of literary method and a power of analysis that were remarkable in an undergraduate.” In her diary, an elated Anne saw her result as proof that she was “nearly a true intellectual.”
Kathe and Anne, Christmas shopping, Sydney, 1945. (Illustration Credits ill.44)
The obvious careers for her in Australia were as a schoolteacher or librarian—the two standard options for young women with arts degrees, regardless of their academic achievements. At the start of 1945, Anne embarked on a Diploma of Education at Sydney Teacher’s College, which was a prerequisite to teaching in government schools. But she was soon dreading the prospect of years in the country, which was the lot of many young teachers. She also found the diploma so boring that, just as with nursing, she could not bring herself to concentrate on it. Instead, she wrote letters, read books, and knit in lectures, when she did not skip them altogether, and was not surprised when she failed her exams.
In 1942 Kathe began working as
a senior technician in the Medical Research Department of Sydney’s Royal North Shore Hospital, prompting Gretl, Anne, and her to move from Rose Bay to the apartment in Cremorne. While Kathe’s work at the hospital was a marked improvement on her job in the pencils and carbon paper factory, she was still vastly overqualified for her new position. Whereas she had studied for six years for her degree, the other technicians had obtained certificates after three years of part-time study at technical college. Even the research biochemists typically had only bachelor’s degrees after three years’ study at Australian universities. While the hospital included Kathe’s doctorate when she appeared in lists of its staff, her superiors otherwise ignored it. The result was a profound disjunction between her professional and private identities. At work she was “Miss Gallia.” Otherwise, as in Vienna, she remained “Dr. Gallia.”
Gretl’s position as a part-time language teacher at St. Vincent’s led to similar jobs. From 1940, she worked at both Catholic and Anglican schools, transcending a profound religious divide in Australia. But when one of the Anglican schools that employed Gretl closed at the end of 1942, she could find no other teaching positions and so became a secretary. Her first position was with the Free French Delegation, where she looked forward to using her French. The next, where her German was an asset, was through Saul Symonds at the Jewish Welfare Society, underlining her exceptional interdenominational status in Sydney.
Gretl’s best job came in 1944, when she secured a job at one of Sydney’s most prestigious boys’ schools, Shore, which was a male bastion until the war. When several of the school’s teachers enlisted, it was forced to recruit three women, including Gretl. Because German was the enemy language, none of the boys wanted to learn it, so she taught only French. For two years, Gretl was intensely happy, making several lifelong friends among her pupils and delighting in the opportunity to teach full time. But when the war ended, Gretl was among many women required to give up their jobs to make way for ex-servicemen, forcing her to seek another post in the country. Just as she felt herself headed for the far end of the earth when she left Vienna in 1938, she felt the same at the start of 1946 when she left for the New England Girls’ School, three hundred miles from Sydney by slow train, set amid sheep pasture outside Armidale, population seven thousand.
When she returned to Sydney late in 1948, having found the school as snobbish and mean as she found Armidale lifeless and boring, Gretl knew she would have to work as a secretary. The job she secured was her worst: she found herself in a furniture store working for another refugee set on exploitation. On Christmas Eve he dismissed all his staff to avoid having to pay them for the public holidays and quiet days at the end of December but asked them to resume working for him in the new year. Gretl refused and lost her job.
Many of her evenings and weekends were devoted to a very different venture—a translation of the first part of Wilhelm Hauff’s Märchen, one of the most famous books of German fairy tales, which had particularly appealed to Gretl as a young woman. While Hauff’s tales were the stuff of several English translations, Gretl embarked on an Australian one after her pupils in Sydney and Armidale were entranced by Hauff’s stories. The resulting book, published in Sydney in 1949, was a stylish production with color plates and line drawings by one of Australia’s most accomplished illustrators, Mahdi McCrae, but it failed to sell.
Gretl finally found satisfying long-term work in the early 1950s as a result of Australia’s decision to expand its immigration program to boost its economy and strengthen its defenses. Because the government could not attract as many British migrants as it wanted, it took an unprecedented number from southern Europe. Intent on assimilation, the government funded several forms of English tuition for these men and women, including correspondence courses for those who could not attend regular classes. For almost twenty years, Gretl was the most popular correspondence teacher in New South Wales.
Gretl, Sydney, Christmas 1949. (Illustration Credits ill.45)
The sisters’ financial situation became easier after they recovered the house in the Wohllebengasse in 1950. They were able to regain it because the Aryanization of the house had resulted in its direct transfer to the Nazi state, and none of the family had consented to its taking in any form or received anything for it. While worth relatively little because Vienna was still a divided city and the Wohllebengasse was in the Russian zone, the house boosted the siblings’ capital when they sold it almost immediately. They were unable to regain the Villa Gallia because its Aryanization had resulted in its immediate purchase by a private individual and the new Austrian republic treated this sale as binding despite its being made under duress by Mizzi for a derisory payment. Instead, Gretl, Kathe, and Erni simply received token compensation.
The relationship of Gretl and Kathe was one constant. When the sisters resumed living together in Sydney because their position was so insecure, they agreed on almost nothing. What one embraced, the other almost inevitably scorned. Anyone who became a friend of Gretl’s was rejected by Kathe and vice versa. The one exception was Anne, whom they both loved too much, according to Gretl. Far from insisting on the primacy of her relationship with Anne, Gretl repeatedly described Kathe as if they occupied the same position. “Us doting mothers” was one of Gretl’s formulations for them. Yet that did not stop Gretl and Kathe from competing for Anne’s affections more fiercely than ever.
As relations between Gretl and Anne became increasingly strained, Gretl felt that Anne never adequately reciprocated her intense love and devotion. She was hurt by how, as Anne excelled at university, she followed Kathe in feeling superior to Gretl. In a twenty-first-birthday letter to Anne in 1943, Gretl begged Anne to be patient and love her despite her mistakes and weaknesses. Meanwhile, Kathe’s relations with Anne were better, although she, too, was often dissatisfied, rebuking Anne for her lack of kindness. When she wrote a poem for Anne’s twentieth birthday, Kathe compared Anne unfavorably to Hermine, expressing her regret that she could discern no trace of Hermine’s character in Anne, though she still hoped it might “come with the years passing by.”
Anne continued to delight in her new Catholic identity. Her intense devotion saw her go to early morning mass every Sunday, often attend Saturday services, typically record the sermon at length in her diary, and regularly go to confession. But her sense of Christian duty was tested when she received a call from one of her Viennese godchildren whom Father Elzear had baptized at the Franciscan church. As Anne acknowledged in her diary, she had been proud at age sixteen to be godmother to forty-nine-year-old Stella Groak. “It was exactly what I wanted,” Anne recognized. In Sydney, Anne wanted to avoid Mrs. Groak because she knew that Anne was another recent convert rather than a born-and-bred Catholic. Their first meeting became even more of a test for Anne when Mrs. Groak asked whether Anne was “completely Catholic,” implying that Mrs. Groak was not. After Anne failed to reveal the strength of her faith, she berated herself for not responding: “What should we be? Should we keep changing?”
The dominant Catholic organization for young women in Sydney was the Grail—a lay group founded in the Netherlands in 1929 that described itself as “a pro-God youth movement with the one great object of helping to win the world for Christ.” While Anne was attracted to the Grail partly because of the influence of its Dutch founders, which meant that she found it “so European,” the Grail also facilitated her assimilation. In a story about her arrival in Sydney, she described how she had dreaded the recurrent question, “And how do you like Australia?” She revealed that she always felt obliged to answer positively, giving no hint of her sense of alienation. This question lost much of its sting once she joined the Grail in 1941 and became one of its most fervent members. She “no longer felt like a stranger in a strange country” because she had “something to work for and dream about and love.”
Like many refugees, Anne later wondered how she would have responded to the Anschluss had she met the Nazi definition of “Aryan.” Far from consideri
ng whether she might have had the courage to oppose Hitler, she assumed she would have accepted the new regime like most Austrians and wondered how enthusiastically she would have embraced it. Would she have joined the Bund Deutscher Mädchen? Might she have persecuted Jews? She could not answer these questions but knew that another part of the Grail’s appeal for her was its triumphal, militaristic aspect, its mass displays, marching, banners, and uniforms. She recognized that the Grail allowed her to do what had been impossible for her in Vienna, where she had been “an outcast, not able to wear the swastika like everybody else.”
It took a year or more for most young women to be accepted as one of the Grail’s lay apostles. Anne was ecstatic when she succeeded in fewer than five months. Little knowing how Gretl had described her own first Communion and confirmation thirty years before, and how patterns of words and responses were transmitted across the generations, Anne declared her initiation the most beautiful day of her life. Before long, her involvement was so great that Gretl feared she was on her way to joining a religious order, which would see Gretl “lose” her only daughter. Having purported to be a complete Catholic since her arrival in Australia, Anne decided that she had to put an end to this deception and, despite Gretl’s opposition, she was confirmed in St. Mary’s Cathedral. Her closest university friend observed that she had never seen anything like Anne’s “complete and unquestioning faith.”