Goodbye, Mr Hitler

by Jackie French

  Vati smiled, but his smile held pain. ‘No one wears gloves in the dining car.’

  Mutti nodded. But she kept her hands in her pockets when other women were nearby.

  Their bunks on the train were narrow, rattling, shaking as the train snorted through the night. Bunks with sheets and quilts and pillows, coffee and rolls and jam for breakfast, the crumpled nations of Europe rattling by, interspersed with forest, deer sometimes, or hare, and once a Wildschwein, a sow, followed by her piglets, uninterested in the train and its passengers.

  The trees in Australia are grey-blue, he thought, with strange animals called kangaroos and murderous koalas. Were there even cats, in Australia? The sailor hadn’t seen a cat on his brief stay in Australia; nor were there any books in the camp that might have told him more.

  Goodbye, green trees, he thought. Goodbye, deer and Wildschweine. Goodbye, Helga.

  No! For he would see her soon. He must! All the rest . . . he was glad to see it go. Its beauty had tricked him for a moment, to think it was a land of safety, kindness and rules. The belly of the ogre had no rules.

  Soon, soon, they’d leave the ogre far behind.

  Chapter 32

  JOHANNES

  EUROPE, 1949

  Night. The train rattled, engine snorting. Men yelled outside.

  Johannes struggled from his bunk just as a man with a strange English accent walked along the aisle. ‘No worries,’ he called out. ‘Everyone stay calm. The Russian soldiers just want to see your papers.’ A Russian guard followed the Australian — he must be Australian, thought Johannes, though he wore no uniform. The guard called the same instruction in German.

  And then more Russians came along. Big men, in shabby uniforms, with angry eyes. They snatched the papers, examined them, thrust them back, person after person.

  ‘What are they looking for?’ whispered Johannes as the soldiers headed to the next carriage.

  ‘People who are trying to escape from Russian-occupied territory,’ Mutti whispered back.

  ‘People like us?’

  She crossed to his bunk and put her arms around him. ‘No. We have DP papers and Australian papers. The Russians cannot know that we came from Poland.’

  Johannes nodded. But he could feel her fear. Smell the fear of all of the passengers, only easing as the train plunged into darkness again.

  Another warning at breakfast. ‘The Italian Red Army Brigade has units in this area. Everyone stay low on the floor. If you must move, stay away from the windows.’

  They cowered on the floor for an hour. Two hours. Johannes wanted the toilet — he should not have had the second cup of cocoa at breakfast. Suddenly the train halted. Rifles were thrust through the windows, and then men’s faces. Johannes heard a woman scream in another carriage.

  The men shouted, gesturing at the passengers, but they spoke in Italian, which no one understood.

  Or if they did, like Vati, they did not translate.

  Five minutes. Six. The train clanked and began to move. The men withdrew their rifles, jeering as the train left.

  The country changed again. Villages that were mostly rubble, with no attempt yet to rebuild them. Farmhouses no bigger than a cow byre. Every hill was planted with olives or grapevines. Each time they stopped at a station, men and women with careworn faces smiled and handed them oranges as presents with cries of ‘Buona fortuna!’ and ‘Australia!’ Italians joined the train now, heading to the ship to Australia.

  Johannes could hardly remember what an orange tasted like. It was sweet sunlight, he decided, and ate another and another, and two more after that. The other passengers in the carriage smiled at the boy so dedicatedly eating oranges, and gave him most of theirs too.

  The final DP camp was near Naples, tucked below the mighty volcano that had buried the Roman city of Pompeii. Even that early in the year it was so warm they took off their overcoats.

  The camp was . . . a camp. Bunk beds. This one had a kitchen too, where people could make their own cocoa or even other meals, as well as a dining room.

  They sat there the first morning with ersatz coffee and bread and margarine, the same as at the other camp. Even the official who marched into the hall looked the same, though he spoke in English. ‘The ship is not ready. I’m sorry. You will need to stay here till it is.’

  Vati stood up. ‘How long?’

  The man shrugged. ‘Three weeks? Six weeks? Materials are short just now — you must know that.’

  All around, people translated for each other. Vati sat down.

  No one grumbled. No one shouted, ‘You have tricked us! Give us our ship!’

  The people in that dining room were experts in waiting. Nor had they a choice.

  So they waited. The food was poor: pasta like lumps of glue, sauces with no meat, just bread and margarine and watery stews of vegetables again. But they were free to roam outside the camp, up the steep slopes of the volcano, strange red pebbles on either side, the giant caldera steaming gently, splattered with yellow crystals; hills of olive groves and vast stretches of tomatoes. Some of the camp inmates visited Pompeii.

  ‘It will be educational,’ said Mutti half-heartedly.

  They did not go. They had no wish to see more ruins, even ancient ones.

  And then, at last, the ship.

  Chapter 33

  JOHANNES

  VOYAGE TO AUSTRALIA, 1949

  The ship smelled of salt and fresh paint and sawdust. It took a whole day to assign everyone to their quarters. Johannes’s family were given a tiny cabin to themselves, on the lowest level. Single men slept in the hold and single women shared cabins.

  Johannes gazed at his bunk. It was a good bunk, with new-looking sheets and blankets. One day, he thought, I will have a proper bed.

  He joined the crowds up on deck as the Italians on the docks cheered and waved goodbye. Engines vibrated, then silently the ship drew out of the harbour and, as night fell about them, glided south under an umbrella of stars.

  The bell rang for dinner. Tables! Proper tables, not benches. Starched linen tablecloths, proper knives and forks, Italian waiters bringing proper food — real bread and butter — butter, not margarine! And if the meat was mostly corned beef, it was meat, and the potatoes were roasted till they were crisp.

  People laughed. It unnerved him. Every few nights the DPs held a concert. An Australian delegation on board joined in, performing cabaret songs or dancing or reciting poems in English, which volunteers in the audience had to translate.

  Every day, up on deck, the Australian delegation members were surrounded by people asking questions.

  ‘Why does Australia want so many DPs when America and England take so few?’

  ‘Is Australia beautiful?’

  ‘Can I be an architect there, as I was before the war?’

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ said the Australians. ‘Of course you can practise your professions in Australia. Australia is the best country in the world. The weather is as warm as Naples and there are beaches everywhere, with sunshine and golden sand. Australians believe in a fair go for everyone. No worries! In five years you will become Australians too!’

  Johannes listened. He didn’t quite believe it all. An Australian delegation had told Herr Schmidt he could be an engineer once he was there. They had either lied or been wrong.

  Were they lying now? Perhaps all officials lied, in Australia too. Perhaps there were no beaches, just sheer cliffs and rock, and desert like it said on the map.

  The Australians had not mentioned desert.

  The ship sailed on, stopping at ports before the final vast ocean to Australia. But they had little money to spend ashore. And what if the ship sailed without them? Life was too precarious to risk a trip ashore.

  The ship creaked and groaned through a rising sea. A passenger, a man, was washed overboard, and a sailor too, lost in a storm. Johannes, Mutti and Vati stayed in their cabin. Vati ventured out once a day to bring back water — when you were seasick, it was important to
keep up your fluids — and bread, because bread helped line the stomach.

  The air grew thick. Johannes gasped for breath. At first he thought that he was sick, that Mutti was sick and Vati too. They all had sweat upon their foreheads.

  The door opened and a steward looked in. ‘Better get on deck, mateys. The engines are crook and the air-conditioning has broken down.’

  Up onto the rain-wet, sea-wet decks. Drinking water was scarce now too. The family huddled under a bench on deck most of the day, as well as night, visiting their cabin only to change into less damp clothes. I thought we were leaving the ogre behind, thought Johannes numbly. Perhaps when an ogre swallows you there never is a true escape.

  He was too old to think about ogres now, he told himself. But the ogre had gripped him too long.

  The ship sailed on, their cabin still too stuffy to sleep in. More sea and sky. They had been sailing for six weeks now.

  Someone cheered on one of the higher decks. A face appeared, upside down, peering at the family huddled under the bench. ‘Come on. Land!’

  Johannes struggled to his feet, while Vati helped Mutti up.

  ‘Land!’ A wall of people stood along the deck, peering at grey sea, at clouded sky. And darker grey shadow that might be land or storm cloud split the horizon.

  The shadow grew as the ship sailed on. By afternoon the sky had turned blue. The land became a headland: treeless, barren, the colour of dirt that’d had all its goodness washed away. Johannes stared at it in horror.

  But the ship sailed past the barren headland. At last he could see trees, greener than he had expected. A port called Fremantle — which was in Australia, but further from where they were going than the German camp had been from Naples.

  The ship’s engines vibrated to life again. They sailed once more. Fog fell, shrouding them as the ship coasted onwards, onwards. They might have been heading anywhere. Once again they were just parcels, bundles of meat, helpless. DPs to be taken where their captors willed.

  They slept under the bench again, huddled together. When Johannes woke, they were in Melbourne.

  Chapter 34

  JOHANNES

  AUSTRALIA, JUNE 1949

  The wharf teemed with ants — tall lean ants with tanned skin and short haircuts, bustling here and there and pushing trolleys, lifting sacks. The skin around their eyes was wrinkled, as if they had had to squeeze their eyes to slits against the sun for so long. But most of the faces seemed kind.

  The passengers lined up. They waited. They marched. All of them were well practised in lining up, in waiting, in marching, in showing papers as they were herded onto a bus, and then to a railway station.

  It was not a cattle car. Nor was there a dining car, just bench seats. But they were comfortable and the wood was polished, and Johannes could open the window when the smoke from the engine wasn’t blowing their way, and gaze out.

  Flat land. Brown grass. Square fields with nothing but cows or sheep inside. A few farmhouses, with corrugated-iron roofs, more like barracks than proper homes. Spiky grass and skinnier trees, the wrong colour, as Nurse Stöhlich . . . Frau Marks . . . had said.

  The train stopped. Passengers got off to use the toilet, to line up on the station platform in front of tables made cheerful with bright tablecloths, with smiling women in floral dresses serving the passengers. ‘Here you are, love,’ said one, handing Johannes a parcel of sandwiches wrapped in paper, an apple and a big wedge of cake.

  She called me ‘love’, thought Johannes as he walked back to the train. An Australian called me ‘love’.

  Perhaps Frau Marks was right and one could live in this strange ugly land.

  The next stop, at Albury, was the last stop on the train. They lined up, they waited, they marched. They showed their papers and boarded a bus.

  Another camp, called Bonegilla — a weird name that meant nothing to the newcomers. A camp that was just a camp, with round-roofed metal barracks and bunks, except this camp had no fences. Cows grazed around the buildings. At night they licked the moisture off the outside walls, scritch, slurp, scratch.

  The camp was cold — as cold as the DP camp, so again they had to wear all their clothes all day and night — but here there was no snow to make the world look bright, though for the first hour or so after sunrise the world glittered with frost. At night Johannes’s spit froze to the pillow. He had to remove the tiny icicle from the fabric each morning, so it could melt.

  A dining room. No tablecloths but good food. Frau Marks had been right there too. Sheep meat, three times a day, chops with eggs and chips for breakfast. Chops with eggs and chips for lunch. Chops with eggs and chips for dinner, and all the leftovers were thrown away, not even fed to pigs or hens.

  Johannes thought of Helga, hungry back in the camp in the green forest, where it would be summer now. The leftovers from his family’s meal alone, the fatty tails from the chops, the too-browned chips, would have fed her family for the whole day.

  At least, though, now he could write to her. The Australians gave each inmate five shillings a week, enough to take the bus to Albury, to buy a milkshake and chocolate and stamps, a pen and ink and paper and an envelope.

  Dear Helga,

  I hope that you are well.

  We are in Australia.

  Johannes tried to think what he should say now. He could not say how strange Australia was, because unless Herr Schmidt had decided to leave when his three years’ service was up, Helga and Frau Schmidt must come here too. He didn’t want them to be afraid. Nor could he lie to Helga. And maybe things would be better in Sydney, as Frau Marks said.

  There is meat three times a day, and always sheep, as Frau Marks told us, but there are cows here too, so sometimes there must be beef. There is a lot of milk. I drink it five times a day, as Mutti says it will help my bones grow. I didn’t think I would ever get bored eating meat and drinking milk, but now I am.

  The Australians are friendly. I saw six kangaroos on the train journey from Melbourne. They are bigger than I thought, some taller than Vati, but the train conductor said they mostly do not attack people but run away. I asked him about the savage koalas and he laughed, and said it was a joke, and not to worry, that koalas are just soft and fluffy and sit and eat gum leaves and sleep all day. He said people have cats in Australia too. I think I would like a cat again, and there is a lot of meat here to feed a pet.

  I visited the library in Albury. It was strange to be surrounded by walls of books again. It was so good I just sat there, and only remembered to find a book to read half an hour before I had to leave to catch the bus.

  Soon we will go to Sydney. I will write from there.

  He wanted to write, Love from Johannes, but that might seem too . . . forward. He wrote instead, Yours, always, Johannes. Then he sealed the envelope and posted it in the red letter box before they took the bus back to the camp.

  The next day Vati argued with the Australian officials. So did Mutti. Every inmate had to put down their profession, to be assigned to jobs.

  Doctor, wrote Vati.

  The official stared. ‘You can’t put doctor! All the men must write labourer and the women must put domestic servant.’

  ‘I am not a labourer,’ said Vati angrily. ‘I am a doctor, and I have English papers that say I am.’

  Mutti took the pen and wrote doctor too.

  ‘But a sheila can’t be a doctor!’ expostulated the official.

  ‘But I am,’ said Mutti, and her voice was steel. ‘I have been a doctor in Edinburgh, a doctor in Poland, a doctor in a camp run by the Nazis, a doctor in a camp run by the Americans, and a doctor in another run by the United Nations and the English. I would not let the Nazis stop me being a doctor. I will not let you.’

  ‘But we don’t have jobs for —’ began the official.

  ‘We have jobs waiting for us. And a place to live,’ said Vati calmly.

  ‘What the heck . . . have it your own way!’ The man waved them through.

  A bus again. Anoth
er railway platform, not the one they had arrived on, because in this strange land it seemed the railway tracks were different in Melbourne and in Sydney, and you must change onto different trains to get from one to the other.

  More brown paddocks and more cows and sheep. Brown streams and forests of white-trunked trees and tin-roofed houses sitting in more brown paddocks. Night fell before they reached the outskirts of Sydney. All Johannes could see from the train were streets with streetlights, and lighted kitchens with people eating dinner in them.

  But they were eating, with tables and stoves and curtains at the windows. He hadn’t seen bomb damage, nor were there soldiers stopping trains to check their papers, nor savages or bands of convicts holding them up to steal all they had, their brown-paper packages even more stained from the voyage. Even the officious man at the Bonegilla camp had not punished Vati or Mutti for insisting they were doctors.

  The train drew up in a cloud of steam. And there, on the platform, in a pretty coat not made from a blanket, and her hair short and curled, was Frau Marks, wearing lipstick and totally different and totally the same, smiling, waving and, beside her, a tall boy and a skinny girl with tanned skin, smiling and waving too, and an elderly couple with smiles as bright as the moon.

  For the first time Johannes thought: Perhaps this might be good.

  Chapter 35

  JOHANNES

  AUSTRALIA, 1949–1950

  Frau Marks’s house was shabby, but big enough for them all. She and Mud shared a bedroom, and Johannes and George another, while Mutti and Vati slept in the third. ‘Just till we find a place of our own,’ said Vati, trying to find words to thank Frau Marks. But what words could you find for someone who gave you not just a life, but a new life, in a safe country?

  Australia had only been bombed a little, in the war, but most of its men and many women had fought, instead of building houses, cars or furniture, so there were not enough houses for everyone to have their own now, nor had houses been repaired or tended much during the war.