The Voyage of Their Life

by Diane Armstrong

  Olga Matussevich, a striking woman with dark hair parted in the centre above straight dark brows and intense black eyes, had a pensive expression reminiscent of the heroines of Russian plays. She brought up her children in the old-world manner that she had learnt in St Petersburg when her father was a diplomat in the days of the tsar. Brought up in a luxurious mansion, she had worn fur-trimmed cloaks with matching hats, ridden an Arab pony she had received from the Shah of Persia, owned aristocratic-looking borzoi hounds and was cared for by governesses in long dark coats. When the Russian Revolution broke out, Olga’s father had fled to London with his daughter, educated her at boarding school and later had her social skills polished at a Swiss finishing school.

  It was while visiting Prague during a Girl Guide jamboree in the 1920s that Olga met the taciturn, forceful Vasily Matussevich. Just as her father had done, Vasily had also fled from Russia. Having joined the White army as a cadet, his life was in danger when the Bolsheviks seized power. He escaped to Prague where he fell in love with the fetching, aristocratic Olga and married her, changing the course of her life in ways that she could never have imagined.

  By the time war broke out in 1939, they had six children. In 1942 the family moved to Germany, where Vasily had apparently gone voluntarily as a worker. Two more children were born in Berlin where they all clung to each other while their building shook and bombs exploded all around them. When it was obvious that the Russians would soon enter the city, Vasily headed to Prague to avoid being arrested by the Bolsheviks because he had fought in the White army.

  Left behind among the ruins of Berlin to fend for herself and their eight children, Olga had set off on foot with them and their few belongings across Germany in the hope of joining her husband in Prague, not knowing where he was or even whether he was still alive. They joined the mass exodus of refugees fleeing from the Russians. Pushing the two little ones in the pram and their belongings on a makeshift trolley, they trudged across the devastated countryside. They inched across bridges that barely hung together and wobbled beneath their tentative steps, and hastened past concentration camps where the nauseating stench of thousands of corpses piled up inside barbed wire fences made them press scarves against their noses and mouths. They pushed on past the rubble of Dresden. Not much longer now, we’ll soon be there, Olga had promised, coaxing the exhausted, hungry children with occasional crusts of bread and a few raisins.

  Eventually they reached Prague, where they managed to find Vasily. As Czechoslovakia was in the grip of the Russians, he was still in danger of being deported to Siberia so they made their way to Austria and lived in a DP camp in Linz. There, in 1946, Olga gave birth to her ninth baby, Peter Paul. He was only a few days old when her eldest daughter picked up the sleeping baby to bring him to her mother to feed. She looked at her brother’s motionless little body and froze. He was not asleep. He was dead. Olga’s screams resounded throughout the camp.

  Although her last few years had been an unremitting struggle, and her impoverished circumstances contrasted bitterly with the life she had once led, Olga Matussevich insisted on maintaining the standards she had been taught. Even though she sewed the girls’ clothes and could provide only them with the basic necessities, their manners and behaviour were impeccable. Olga herself never emerged from her bedroom until she was dressed and her lustrous black hair was pinned back from her high cheekbones, and her home, whether it was a cellar in Berlin, a room in an Austrian DP camp or an overcrowded cabin on the Derna, was always dusted and polished.

  Whenever strangers looked at this family group they were usually drawn to the lively girl with a coronet of flaxen braids on her head. At sixteen, Nina, the second eldest daughter, had a rippling laugh and a quicksilver personality.

  High-spirited and impulsive, she always found something to laugh about, and attracted admirers wherever she went. She was daring too, because it required defiance and resourcefulness to slip away from her parents who kept to themselves and forbade their daughters to mix with boys on the ship. Olga and Vasily had the suspicious nature of those whose history has taught them not to trust strangers. The only people you could rely on were your family, and you had to keep together and support each other, as Vasily was always telling them.

  But the spirited Nina had already noticed that every evening many of the young Jews congregated at the stern where there was music, dancing and fun. Some of the boys strummed songs on their guitars, laughed and danced to romantic tunes on the gramophone. She wished that her parents would let her wear her hair loose instead of insisting on this old-fashioned hairstyle, but Emil Kopel, who was smitten with her, thought that her Russian braids looked charming. He would watch out for her as she strolled around the deck holding her younger sister’s hand. Nina had discovered that her sister provided a good excuse for staying out of the cabin.

  Emil was one of the sixty-one Jewish orphans who were travelling under Dr Frant’s care. Although several of the youngsters had lost only one parent, the majority had lost both and most of their relatives as well. Many were left without family, home, possessions or even a photograph of their parents. Like Emil, most of them had suffered such inhuman treatment in the camps that when they were finally liberated at the end of the war, they were one sigh away from death.

  They all had their own theories to explain why they had survived. Emil believed he owed it to the strict treatment he had received at school in the Carpathian region of Slovakia. When his father died in 1938, his mother had found it so difficult to cope with her nine children that she had sent him to a Jewish orphanage where the slightest misdemeanour, inattention or poor scholastic results were severely punished. During the war, when Emil became a slave labourer in the IG Farben factory at Auschwitz, all around him young men were dying from starvation and exhaustion, but he found the strength to keep going because his school had toughened him so much that he could haul railway sleepers on his thin shoulders and last for three days without eating.

  When the war ended he returned to Czechoslovakia, ill and dying, but by 1948 he had recovered and was beginning to feel settled. He was learning the upholstery trade in his brother’s shop in Teplice and had started going out with girls. In those heady days of regained health and freedom, few young people anticipated the dangers of Communism. Euphoric at the defeat of the Nazis, they were ready to believe the propaganda of their Russian rescuers about the new socialist society: a workers’ paradise where everyone would be equal, without class distinction or discrimination. For those who had suffered from injustice, discrimination and persecution for much of their lives, this society appeared to offer hope for the future.

  Emil might never have left Czechoslovakia if not for the softly spoken woman with the round face and wavy brown hair whom he met one night while visiting cousins in Prague. ‘What are you doing with yourself?’ Anita Freiberger asked him. ‘Are you happy here?’ He was taken aback but before he had time to reply, she went on to say, ‘The Communists will soon get a tighter grip on Czechoslovakia. Wouldn’t you like to get out while there is still time?’

  Although Emil had never thought of leaving, he knew that the atmosphere was becoming tense. There were whispers about shadowy figures in trenchcoats who hung around the streets listening in to conversations, about censorship of the press, increased government control and paranoid accusations of conspiracies. In spite of the rosy glow with which the Communists painted their world, some people foresaw the imminent rise of a new totalitarianism, while others predicted the outbreak of another world war as tension grew between Russia and the West.

  In the uneasy coalition between Communist and non-Communist parties in Czechoslovakia’s post-war government, several ministers from democratic parties resigned en masse in protest at the growing manipulation by the Communists. Seizing their chance in February 1948, the Communists staged a coup and took over the government. The only non-Communist who remained in power was Jan Masaryk, the Foreign Minister. In the expropriations that followed, many merchants and
tradesmen, including Emil’s brother, had their businesses confiscated. Purges, plots, persecutions, witch hunts, torture and executions became more frequent.

  When Masaryk fell mysteriously to his death through an open window a month after the coup, people whispered that he had been murdered. It seemed as though the trap could snap shut at any moment.

  Although until then Emil had not considered leaving, the methods of the Communists worried him. He was already forced to spend every second weekend working for the party in a so-called voluntary capacity, cleaning streets or weeding gardens. After they took over his brother’s business, it became obvious that they were determined to control everything. So when Anita Freiberger mentioned the idea of migrating to Australia, Canada or New Zealand, Emil sparked up. ‘But how?’ he asked.

  ‘Leave it to me,’ she replied. ‘Come and see me in my office and I’ll arrange it.’

  Like Emil, most of the orphans on this voyage owed their chance to have a new life to Mrs Freiberger. She had been appointed by Oeuvres de Secours aux Enfants (OSE), a Jewish organisation devoted to rescuing, helping and resettling Jewish children during and after the war. From her spartan office on Jozefovska Ulica in Prague, with its plain wooden table, big black telephone and old typewriter, this indefatigable woman processed applications from all over the country, organised the documentation and even accommodated some of the orphans in her little flat while they waited for their passage.

  A Holocaust survivor herself who had been deported to the ghetto at Theriesienstadt before having time to complete her medical studies, she’d made it her mission to help these young people who had lost everything.

  When she began organising their departure, she discovered that there were major obstacles. For one thing, they had no documents, and for another, some of the boys were over eighteen. This meant that they were eligible for military service and would not be permitted to leave the country, so their age and nationality would have to be concealed. This was a period when every transaction was carried out under the counter, in secret, in whispers, between the lines or on the black market. Anita used her personal connections to organise the documents, some of which contained incorrect dates and places of birth.

  Before the war, her father had been a prominent scientist. His closest friend had been Mr Drtina, now the Justice Minister, and it was thanks to Drtina’s co-operation and the efforts of his secretary, Miss Brohastskova, that the orphans were able to leave.

  Money for their passage had been provided by JOINT, which also arranged their transfer by train to Marseilles. They travelled to Paris on the glamorous Orient Express, a train famous for intrigues, deceit and espionage. Mindful of Mrs Freiberger’s warnings, the older boys did not utter a word of Czech during the journey, for fear that the guards would arrest them and bring them back.

  On the train to Marseilles, Emil met David Weiss, who had not thought of leaving Prague until his older brother suggested it. Life was just becoming enjoyable again after the nightmare years. While imprisoned together with his father at Kufering, a Dachau satellite labour camp, David was forced to build barracks in such horrifying conditions that for the rest of his life he was unable to talk about it. Six hours after being liberated by General Marcus Clarke, he watched helplessly as his father died of typhus and malnutrition.

  Three years later, however, in 1948, David was studying engineering and life was sweet again. In spring, lilac bloomed in parks where lovers cuddled on wooden benches or strolled arm in arm along the embankment of the Vltava. Prague’s baroque spires and palaces were floodlit at night, and plays were performed in the courtyards and gardens of villas and museums. On the terrace of Manes, the artists’ café, intellectuals discussed the meaning of life. At Flek’s beer garden, at tables under chestnut trees, students downed steins of Pilsner and ate smoked sausage on black bread. When his oldest brother urged him to migrate because of the deteriorating political situation, David was eager to go to Palestine but as the ships bound for that country were being turned away by the British, he decided to join another brother in Sydney.

  David’s sociable nature and ready smile made friends wherever he went. A born peacemaker, he disliked confrontations and always managed to find an amicable solution. On the train to Marseilles he had met Harry Braun and André Wayne who became his cabin-mates on the Derna and often asked him to resolve their arguments.

  Harry lost no time introducing himself. ‘My name is Harry Braun and I like your smile and your teeth,’ he told David. Harry was a dental mechanic, a tall boy with a shy, retiring nature who felt he owed his survival in Auschwitz to the fact that he had managed to make himself invisible.

  André, the third member of what was to become a lifelong triumvirate, had been captivated by the mystique of Australia for a long time, and the prospect of a new beginning at the other end of the world, in a country with no anti-Semitism and no wars, fired his imagination. He was alone in the world, with no responsibilities, and although he was enjoying life in Prague, his pragmatic nature told him it was time to leave. The future beckoned. He scoffed when the others complained about the Derna and accused them of lacking a spirit of adventure.

  Another of their cabin-mates, Bill Marr, had found life very lonely in Prague where he worked as a motor mechanic after the war. The days were long, food was rationed, and the atmosphere of political instability unsettled him. Rumours circulated that the Russians were going to stay on, that they’d soon start deporting people to Siberia and there was talk of another world war. It was about that time that he experienced the reality behind the Communist myth. He was standing at the main railway station talking to a friend when a locomotive carrying German prisoners bound for Siberia pulled into the station. Without any warning, one of the Russian guards grabbed Bill’s companion and hauled him into the train. Horrified, Bill yelled that they had the wrong person, that his friend wasn’t a Nazi, but it was like shouting at the sky. As expressionless as a cardboard box, the Russian refused to release his victim, and from his menacing manner Bill sensed that it wouldn’t take much for him to be abducted as well. One of the German prisoners had escaped from the train, and since the guard was responsible for the whole group, he was making up the numbers. The identity of the captives was irrelevant as long as the numbers tallied. Bill didn’t need anyone to convince him that it was time to leave.

  When he asked at the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society where Australia was, the officer chuckled. ‘You go to the end of the world and turn right!’ The most reassuring fact Bill heard was that Australia was an island.

  ‘No borders means no wars,’ he said. ‘Australia will do fine!’ The following day he went to see Mrs Freiberger.

  He knew only too well what havoc borders could play with the lives of ordinary people. No one who saw the handsome dark-haired fellow with the angular jaw and affable manner would have imagined that only four years earlier he had not expected to survive. Like many of the orphans on the ship, he came from the Carpathian region, a disputed border province inhabited by Hungarians, Ukrainians, Slovaks and Jews. The war against the Jews began in earnest there after Adolf Eichmann marched into Hungary in 1944 and recruited the brutal local Nazis, the Arrow Cross, to round up the Jews into ghettoes and deport them to concentration camps.

  Bill could still hear the drum resounding through his home town of Sevlus the day the town crier, in his dark blue police uniform, had stopped on every street corner to announce the latest news. As radios were forbidden, newspapers were expensive and few residents owned a telephone, this was the way of broadcasting official information. His message was short and shocking. All Jews had to leave their homes and move to a designated part of town.

  Bill’s parents were sitting around the table, stunned by the order, when three locals came inside, sat down and without any preamble demanded all their jewellery, silver, money and valuables. ‘You have an hour to get out because a truck is coming to take you all to the ghetto,’ they said. With trembling hands his parents packed the bed
linen, a few clothes and crammed whatever food they had into a bag. As Bill glanced out of the window, he saw neighbours craning their necks to see inside, impatient for them to leave so that they could go through the house and take whatever was left. He was shaken to see people with whom they had lived side by side all their lives so indifferent to their fate, and ready to take advantage of their misfortune.

  Inside the ghetto, over 10,000 Jews were squeezed into a tiny area with four or five people squashed into each room. As Bill and his family had no beds, they spread their bedding on the floor. How could such injustice go on? he wondered. Why does God just watch and do nothing?

  Food in the ghetto was so scarce that in desperation the sixteen year old risked his life and ran home to bring back their goat, which had recently had a kid. The goat’s milk was a blessing, especially for the mothers who had no milk for their babies. Several days later, Bill saw one of their neighbours riding past the ghetto in a big wooden cart pulled by long-horned oxen. His heart lurched when the man scrambled up onto the seat, peered into their yard and saw the goat. The following day another local entered the ghetto and demanded the goat. For the first time since their deportation, Bill broke down and wept. Swallowing his pride, he begged them not to take the goat, explaining that so many babies depended on its milk, but they ignored his pleas and dragged it away. Any lingering hope Bill had entertained that the locals would come to their aid vanished with the goat.

  In spring, when tender pale green buds began to appear on the birches and poplars, Bill with his family and other inmates of the ghetto were loaded into trucks and taken to the railway station. They took what little food they had: a few boiled eggs, scraps of leftover potato. At the very last moment, on impulse, Bill grabbed a bucket. Each member of his family, his parents, five-year-old sister and seven- and nine-year-old brothers, all carried as much as they could manage. At the station, SS officers were waiting for them. ‘Let me go to the pump to fill up the bucket with water,’ Bill asked one of them.