The Voyage of Their Life

by Diane Armstrong

  ‘Only if you give me some gold or silver,’ the guard replied.

  Bill shook his head. ‘They’ve already taken everything, there’s nothing left,’ he said. Perhaps this guard hadn’t yet become completely dehumanised, because he looked away while Bill was filling the bucket.

  He returned with the water to see his father lifting his grandmother up into the train which was about a metre above the platform, and clambered up himself. Shortly afterwards, the door was slammed shut with a clang and locked from the outside. Bill counted 104 people squashed into a box-car with barbed wire strung across the tiny window. That bucket of water saved their lives, because the journey lasted for six days and nights. During that time they were given no food or water, and were not allowed out of that suffocating, fetid waggon which had no provision for disposing of human waste.

  They had no idea where they were going and wondered whether anyone would still be alive by the time they got there. In the past few years they had heard that almost the entire Jewish population of Poland had been murdered. They had heard about mass killings and mass graves. But Poland was a long way away, the stories were too far-fetched to be believable, so perhaps the rumours were false.

  When the train finally ground to a halt, Bill discovered that the reality was more incredible than anything they had ever heard. As the doors were unlocked, inhuman voices yelled at them to get out of the waggon, whips and batons flailed their bodies and wolf-like dogs snapped and bared their fangs. What was this place? What was going on? As they lined up in front of the elegantly disdainful Dr Mengele, he pointed at people with his stick. Prisoners in striped uniforms shuffled around whispering instructions that made no sense. ‘Stand up straight!’ ‘Say you’re older!’ Or, even more incomprehensibly, ‘Give the child away!’

  It appeared that they were being divided into two groups. Bill’s mother and the younger boys were ordered to go to the left while Bill, his father and twelve-year-old brother were told to go to the right with those who had been selected to work. Not understanding the significance of the two groups, his father assumed that the women and children would not have to work like the men, so he urged his twelve-year-old son to catch up with them. Bill watched his brother crawling underneath the railway waggon, hurrying to join the women and children who were about to be stripped, shaved and pushed into the gas chamber.

  On the ship the orphans never talked about their experiences. They had shoved them into a drawer marked never to be opened, locked it and kept away. As they strummed guitars, sang songs and glanced at the pretty girls walking past in their skimpy shorts, nothing existed except the present, and nothing mattered but the future that awaited them at the end of the voyage.

  5

  A light northerly breeze cooled the morning air on 7 September as the Derna passed the statue of Ferdinand de Lesseps at the northern entrance to the Suez Canal. While the ship sailed between the two breakwaters towards its mooring in Port Said Harbour, the crew knocked on all the cabin doors, urging passengers to keep their portholes tightly locked. ‘If you’re not careful, the coolies will slip inside and steal whatever they can find,’ they warned.

  Colonel Hershaw was ready for trouble. With his usual military approach, he had organised what he called a security corps from among the Baltic migrants and placed young Uno Mardus in charge. It was a popular choice. At twenty-five, Uno was good-natured and patient, the kind of person who could give instructions without sounding bossy or arousing resentment. Like so many of his fellow Estonians who had served in the Wehrmacht’s auxiliary forces, he had fled to Germany in 1944 when the Russians were advancing. His father had been deported to Siberia where he had perished, and Uno knew that deportation awaited him too if he returned to his native land. While living in a DP camp in Germany, he had decided to migrate to Australia where his uncle had settled before the war. When Estonia was free again, he would return.

  Uno stood at the rail, watching the Derna manoeuvre into position. The breeze had stopped and the air swaddled them like a blanket. The passengers had been advised not to go ashore because Egypt was currently at war, and the Jews particularly had been warned to stay out of sight or they would be in danger when the authorities boarded the ship. From the day the fledgling state of Israel had been proclaimed by the United Nations four months earlier, it had been attacked by all its Arab neighbours. As a state of war still existed, the Egyptians regarded all Jews who sailed in their waters as enemies.

  Jews who had survived the war and wanted to migrate now faced discrimination in the form of quotas imposed by the countries which had helped to vanquish Hitler. It was ironic that three years after the war had ended, Jews like my parents and me who had survived the Holocaust by keeping our Jewish identity secret, were obliged to conceal it once again in order to gain a passage to our new land.

  Eight months before we boarded the Derna in Marseilles, Arthur Calwell, Australia’s first Minister for Immigration and the architect of the post-war immigration policy, had set a quota for Jewish migrants. No more than twenty-five percent of the passengers of any migrant vessel were to be Jewish.

  After the Japanese bombed Darwin in 1942, exposing the country’s vulnerability to attack, Calwell became convinced that Australia must either populate or perish, because the national birthrate was too low to ensure security or sustain growth. The country numbered around seven million at the time and needed migrants to counter its fear of the ‘yellow peril’, the millions of Asians perceived as crouching on its doorstep, poised to invade. To maintain the homogeneous nature of the population, ninety-seven percent of whom were Anglo-Celtic in origin, British migrants were considered the most desirable, but to make up the numbers, other nationalities as well as Jews were to be admitted.

  When the government’s decision to encourage immigration became public, there was widespread opposition, especially to the Jews. Scurrilous cartoons in the Bulletin and Smith’s Weekly depicted Jews laden with gold and diamonds walking off the ships, while racist articles described them as capitalists and exploiters. According to an opinion poll held in 1948, only about seventeen percent of the population favoured Jewish migration. Anxious to pacify public opinion, the government decided to limit the number of Jews but import more blond, blue-eyed Baltic migrants, whose appearance and ethnicity led them to expect smoother, faster assimilation. In spite of the quota, however, Australia in 1948 accepted more Jewish refugees per capita than any other nation apart from Israel.

  While the Hebrew Immigrant Association (HIAS), together with the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JOINT), subsidised the Jewish passengers, the International Refugee Organisation (IRO) sponsored displaced people living in DP camps, and these organisations had together chartered the Derna. The Australian government, which contributed six million pounds to the IRO, directed its immigration officers in Europe not to include Jews among their sponsored migrants. Their motive was largely economic: if Jewish organisations could be induced to pay for all the Jews, Australia’s costs would be reduced.

  Caught between the twenty-five percent immigration quota and the discriminatory policy of the IRO, some of whose officers were disturbed by the racist nature of the selection procedure, Jews found it increasingly difficult to obtain a berth. That was why my parents and I were among 1200 Jews who spent months in Paris waiting for a passage to Australia. Faced with an indefinite wait, some Jews, including my parents, decided to be included on the non-Jewish list.

  Although we were described as migrants, we were really refugees, fleeing from Communism and persistent anti-Semitism. Even after the war ended, and ninety percent of the Jews in Poland had been murdered, violent attacks on Jews continued. Apprehensive about my safety, my parents sent me to a convent school in Krakow. Fifteen hundred Jews were ambushed and killed by right-wing nationalist groups and racist thugs in Poland in the years immediately after the war. But it was the pogrom in Kielce, in which a band of townspeople armed with pitchforks, clubs and axes, invoking medieval supersti
tions, savagely massacred forty-six Jewish survivors, that finally convinced many Jews they had no future in their native land. My father chose Australia because it promised tolerance, and was far from the ethnic and religious hatreds of Europe.

  Most of the Jews saw Australia as a permanent sanctuary. This was particularly true of those from Poland, who felt disillusioned and betrayed. They had no wish to return to a land where they seemed doomed to remain hated outsiders. The country had become a graveyard, where fields and forests were nourished by the bodies of their mothers, fathers, sisters and brothers whose bones gleamed whitely in the furrows of new-ploughed paddocks.

  Most of the Christian migrants, however, regarded Australia as a temporary haven where they could shelter until they could return to their homeland. The Baltic passengers who left the land of their birth with aching hearts and the songs of their native land running through their veins, believed that their exile would last only until the Communists were overthrown. That was Uno Mardus’s plan, and he thought nostalgically about the forests and meadows of his native Estonia as he waited for the Egyptian police to board the Derna.

  Not wasting any time, policemen in red fezes ran down the stairs and along the companionways looking for stowaways and, it was rumoured, for Jews. Their attention was drawn to a Ukrainian passenger standing at his porthole, camera pointed towards the harbour. They demanded to know what he was photographing and refused to believe that he was taking pictures of the hawkers. They confiscated his camera, ordered him to accompany them and took him off the ship as his distraught wife looked on. Her cabin-mates, the German sisters Elfriede and Ilse Hof, and a pregnant young Romanian woman called Elsie Pataky, tried to reassure her, although they were feeling far from confident themselves.

  At the police station, after interrogating the prisoner, the officers sealed his camera and promised to return it the following day. Why they didn’t simply remove the film, he couldn’t understand. Before releasing him they demanded three pounds and four shillings. When he protested that he didn’t have the money, they escorted him back on board where Colonel Hershaw came to the rescue. He never saw his camera again.

  Meanwhile, the police continued searching the ship from top to bottom. Worried in case they stole anything, Uno Mardus accompanied two of them down to the hold but later he told his friends with a boyish smile, ‘It’s just as well they didn’t take anything, because I don’t know what I would have done if they had!’

  Unsuccessful in their search, the policemen contented themselves with standing around on deck. Soon the ship was surrounded with small bobbing boats where white-robed men held up hands of bananas, leather sandals, woven straw baskets and intricately worked cushions. ‘Here, sir!’ they shouted. ‘Look, madam! Nice bag! Cheap!’ Passengers leaned over the rails for a closer look at the merchandise. In the heated bargaining that followed, small baskets were being hauled up and down on ropes looped around the rail along the starboard side.

  Those who had no cash traded possessions. Non-smokers traded their issue of cigarettes, forty of which Dorothea distributed to the IRO passengers each week. Helle, who watched the proceedings with interest, was thrilled when her father bought her a soft leather bag by trading some costume jewellery he’d bought in Germany. One of the Czech orphans traded his soft brown alpaca hat for a hand of bananas he later shared with his delighted friends. It seemed inconceivable that for a few coins or an old hat you could buy almost a whole tree of this ambrosial fruit. A shout of laughter made people turn around to see Addy Bunzl, another of the orphans, struggling to try on his new suede shoes. By the time he realised they didn’t match, the hawker was nowhere to be seen. A little girl’s wail suddenly rose above the commotion: Haneczka Poczebucka, who turned eight that day, had just dropped her new wine-red fez into the water.

  When his mother wasn’t looking, twelve-year-old Lars Meder decided to play a trick on the hawkers with some of his friends. The boys peeled a few labels off some cans planning to pass them off as banknotes. They waved them at the vendors, signalling for them to send up some food. After pulling up the basket, they took out the merchandise and sent their labels down as payment, craning forward to see what would happen.

  When the hawker saw that he’d been cheated, he shook his fist and shouted until the boys hastily sent the tins back. Luckily the hawker saw the joke, wagged his finger at them in mock anger and they all ended up laughing together.

  Several transactions concluded on a darker note. The middle-aged Greek who ran the bar at the stern of the ship and charged outrageous prices for his cocktails and spirits was negotiating for a bottle of whisky. As soon as they agreed on the price, he rolled up his money and placed it in the basket, but when he tasted the contents of the bottle he’d bought, he spat it out. With a curse he flung the bottle into the sea, narrowly missing the hawker who ducked just in time.

  Standing nearby, one of the crewmen was haggling over two tins of American bully beef. After much gesticulating and shouting, he sent the money down in the basket but when he pulled it up, it contained only one tin. Without a moment’s hesitation the seaman picked up the tin, which weighed about a kilo, and hurled it at the hawker. It struck him on the temple and he fell into the water like a stone. In the ensuing fracas, the hawkers shook their fists and screamed for the police. Worried about possible repercussions, the officers warned the passengers to say nothing or the ship would be detained, so when the police arrived no one seemed to know anything.

  Helle, delighted with her new bag, was even happier with the turn of events that evening. Rita’s handsome brother, who to her dismay seemed to have taken a fancy to her cabin-mate Lea, now turned his attention back to her and they sat side by side in the warm Mediterranean night, watching the film projected on the upper deck. Under a starlit sky, the breeze ruffled her long hair while the crackly loudspeaker relayed the passionate tenor voice of Beniamino Gigli. Portly and middle-aged, he was the unlikely hero of a heavy-handed German romantic comedy with French dialogue and an unbelievable plot which few passengers understood, but the film’s defects did not diminish Helle’s enjoyment of the evening.

  Early next morning, the loading began at a cracking pace. Amid much yelling the coolies, who were so thin that their bodies could have been used for an anatomy lesson, tossed boxes from one to the other until they reached the hold.

  Passengers watched fascinated as 400 tonnes of Syrian onions were loaded up, bound for Colombo, and marvelled as dozens of lamb carcasses were dropped into the hold through one hatch, and crates of beer for the bar through another.

  That afternoon, a Russian merchant ship docked alongside the Derna. The Baltic passengers froze when they looked into the faces of the Russian sailors. For several minutes they stared at each other with mutual dislike, until someone shouted an order and the sailors disappeared below. ‘Our ship is the safest one afloat because we’ve got three captains,’ quipped Bruno Tohver, a young Estonian. ‘There’s Captain Papalas, the first officer, and our Estonian submarine captain, Mr Puurand.’

  ‘And what about Mrs Meder?’ someone added. ‘Her husband is a sea captain too, even though he isn’t on the Derna!’

  Elisabeth Meder was travelling with her son Lars to join her husband in New Zealand. They came from the island of Saaremaa on the west coast of Estonia, a fertile farming region where Lars remembered windmills whirring in fields of wheat, and picnics in juniper forests on warm summer days. His father, a sea captain, was away most of the summer, sailing schooners to catch pike, flathead and herrings in northern European waters. At the outbreak of the war, he had been sailing between Portugal and England when his ship was blown up by a mine. Almost everyone on board was killed but although he had survived, his wife was clever enough to pretend that he’d gone down with his ship, so the Russians wouldn’t come looking for him. After spending the rest of the war years in Canada, Captain Meder had migrated to New Zealand. Lars couldn’t wait to see him so they could cast their lines out together again, just as they’
d done in Saaremaa when he was little.

  After the usual breakfast of white bread, marmalade and tiny boiled eggs, some of the passengers nudged each other when a couple stepped off the ship and went ashore together. It was Dorothea and Colonel Hershaw, whose sleeping arrangements had already aroused knowing glances and whispers. Among the married couples who were forced to sleep apart in segregated dormitories, the level of sexual frustration was high, while among the single young men and women, whose hormones were racing, fantasies bubbled to boiling point.

  This jolly, outgoing young woman didn’t conform to anyone’s image of a femme fatale, while the middle-aged, pompous escort officer was hardly a dashing Romeo. But just the same, eyebrows were raised and women whispered behind their hands whenever they saw Dorothea sunning herself outside their cabin. ‘Scandalous,’ the women sniffed. ‘That fellow has got it made,’ the men sighed.

  Dorothea couldn’t wait to go ashore. Ever since Marseilles, she had been wearing the same dress she had brought in her hold-all, and was delighted when Ogden offered to buy her some clothes in Port Said. Feeling the passengers’ eyes on her as she stepped into the tender, because they had been forbidden to go ashore, made this excursion doubly enjoyable.

  Distracted by so many strange sights in the town, she didn’t know where to look. Crowds jostled along the pavements while on the roads English officers swerved in jeeps to avoid ricketty bicycles, trolleys heaped with sacks and bananas, and ox-carts piled with straw. There were few women about, but men in fezes and long loose shirts talked volubly as they weaved along the footpaths. In a small dark shop an insistent shopkeeper dragged them inside and proceeded to pull out his merchandise. Dorothea selected a blue polka dot skirt which flared out as she walked, a white blouse and cool sandals. Ogden Hershaw bought himself a fez which he placed on his balding head at such a rakish angle that she burst out laughing.