In the three weeks they had spent together, Halina had told her friend about her first husband who had saved the lives of his family, but had been killed in the last week of the war. Her heart ached for him because he had been such a good, unselfish man.
‘I didn’t even know where he was buried, but you won’t believe it, one night the answer came to me in a dream,’ she said in her quiet voice. ‘Guided by my dream, we started searching until a gravedigger in a Polish country town remembered burying him!’
Dreams had also sustained Matylda through those terrifying years. Separated from her husband at the very beginning of the war, she had managed to keep herself and Karmela alive by posing as Christians, while she worked as a field hand in the Polish countryside. The one thing that had kept her going during those years of danger, fear and maltreatment was the certainty that, when the war ended, she would be reunited with her husband. She would fall asleep dreaming that his strong arms were enfolding her once more and that they would spend the rest of their lives together.
After being separated for six years without any contact, Matylda miraculously did find her husband, and felt as ecstatic as she had always known she would be. But her dream was shattered. Convinced that she must have died, he had formed a relationship with another woman who had recently given birth to their child. The shock Matylda had felt when she discovered this showed on her strained face as she spoke, staring blankly at the ocean. In a dull voice she said, ‘He offered to leave the other woman so that we could be together again, but I couldn’t accept that. I was too hurt. And I couldn’t bring myself to build my happiness on the misery of another woman and child.’ Her eyes filled with tears while Halina stroked her small cold hand in silence.
Was it possible for anyone to be completely happy again after this terrible war? Even though Halina had waited for eighteen months to find out what had happened to her first husband, even after she discovered that he had been killed, guilt tugged at a corner of her heart. Although she was happy with Mietek, in some irrational way she felt disloyal, as though she had abandoned her first husband and started a new life with another man.
The longer the voyage lasted, the more oppressive the heat became, causing more quarrels among the passengers. In the claustrophobic cabins, people complained that the other occupants were taking up too much room, scattering their belongings all over the place, or ruining their clothes. In the washrooms, women shouted at those who pushed ahead of them, left the showers and toilets filthy, or let their desperate children urinate on the floor. The plumbing in the toilets had never worked properly, so within two weeks the flushing mechanism didn’t work, and the doors that didn’t hang properly were sometimes wrenched off by passengers in frustration.
Out on deck, two enemy camps had formed and the adversaries eyed each other with suspicion, looking for evidence to support their criticism. A Jewish passenger sweeping in front of his deck chair sent clouds of soot onto an Estonian sitting downwind. An altercation ensued along ethnic lines, with the Jews complaining about the anti-Semitic Balts, and the Estonians muttering about pushy Jews.
Although this antipathy developed between the older generations, the young people were drawn towards each other despite their parents’ warnings. Like Helle Nittim, some Estonian and Latvian girls found the Jewish boys attractive and lively with their guitars and songs, and the dances at the back of the deck led to romantic strolls and secret embraces on starlit nights. But any discussions about the war usually ended in stalemate. The Jewish youths, who had experienced the brutality of some Baltic guards in the concentration camps, wanted their ship-mates to at least acknowledge their nations’ responsibility for collaborating with Hitler, but their arguments were met with defensive replies and a counter-litany of the atrocities committed against the Baltic states by Stalin.
Among the girls who attended the dances and enjoyed the company of the Jewish youngsters were Olga and Nina Matussevich. Although their parents spent most of their time in their cabin, they heard the ship gossip from their countryman Boris Arkadievich Sapojnikoff, a bear-like man with a deep voice who kept them enthralled with colourful stories from his days in the French Foreign Legion.
‘They’ve found some of those Jewish youngsters cuddling in the lifeboats,’ he boomed one day. The Matussevich parents resolved to keep a stricter watch on their daughters.
What they didn’t know was that some nights Nina sneaked out to dance. She was a fun-loving sixteen year old with a full mouth turned up in constant laughter and fair hair braided on top of her head, and she enchanted Emil Kopel, one of the Czech orphans. The impetuous Nina was equally smitten and couldn’t wait to see him. Sometimes she was accompanied by her older sister Olga, who liked talking to Kurt Reich and his sister Magda. But when the girls rushed back to their cabin at the end of the evening, afraid of being found out, Emil hoped that his sweetheart’s father would not find out she had been socialising with a Jewish boy. The mysterious Russian couple who seldom left Cabin 14 and rarely mixed with their fellow passengers aroused curiosity among the other passengers who speculated about possible reasons for their aloofness. There were rumours that the girls were afraid of their strict father who beat them if they disobeyed him.
Rita Lindemanis had spent the past few days in her cabin because she had a boil on her nose and didn’t want anyone to see her looking so ugly. Back on deck again, she found her friend Helle bent over some sewing. Helle was making some white shorts to set off her tan and couldn’t wait to tell her friend about the romantic evening she’d had at the dance the previous night. The stern had been lit by three lanterns, tango music had sounded through the loudspeakers, and everyone was swaying to the slinky rhythm. One of the Italian stewards, Luciano, who was twenty-six and had been giving her soulful glances for some time, had grown bolder. Not content with eyeing her longingly, he had actually touched her hand. Helle was aglow with romantic possibilities.
But she wasn’t the only one with news that day. From Rita’s beaming face it was obvious she also had a story to tell. ‘I’ve met this fantastic boy!’ she burst out, hardly able to sit still. Philippe was tall, dark, handsome and very French. So exotic. And those smouldering eyes! Helle was intrigued. Where did this fellow spring from? Who was he? Moving closer to her friend, Rita whispered, ‘He’s a stowaway! Three of them sneaked on board in Aden. The captain knows about them. They’re allowed out while we’re at sea but they’ll be locked up when we get to Colombo.’
Philippe Sauvage had been standing beside Rita one afternoon as she held onto the rail. Although she seemed to be gazing out at the ocean, she was lost in a daydream. She saw herself in Queensland, wearing a nurse’s uniform, trim in her starched cap and apron, looking after patients the way those wonderful German nurses in Munich had looked after her. On her day off, she saw herself picking tropical fruit in her aunt’s orchard.
She turned and smiled at the young man standing next to her, but couldn’t follow much of what he said. She knew only a few words of French and English, while his German was equally poor, but mutual attraction overcame their linguistic deficiencies, and in a halting way that made them both laugh, they managed to communicate.
‘He’s very worried about what will happen when we get to Australia,’ Rita confided to Helle. ‘He’s illegal, so they won’t let him enter. They’ll send him back.’
Helle remained unmoved. ‘He should have thought of that before he stowed away,’ she said.
But her soft-hearted friend shook her head. ‘He had a terrible life there. He can’t possibly go back.’
By now the romantic hothouse created on the long voyage had affected many of the passengers who had paired off, providing titillating gossip for their compatriots. The Estonians watched the glamorous Silva Rae strolling around the deck with the attentive Greek purser she was working with. Dorothea was spending more and more time with the first officer. Salezy Potok was regaled with comments about his daughter Alina from his censorious Polish acquaintances, who pointe
d out that her behaviour was giving her a bad reputation. But when he confronted her about spending too much time in the fourth officer’s cabin, Alina was indignant. She insisted that Michael Sikoutris was just a good friend who let her iron her dresses in there.
Some of the married women, anchored to fidelity by the presence of their husbands, envied the freedom of the single mothers and nudged each other whenever one of them emerged from an officer’s quarters after a rendezvous.
‘You’d think that with a young daughter, she’d set a better example,’ they sniffed. A Polish woman composed a ditty on the subject and circulated it among her friends.
‘For an extra bowl of soup
Or a slice of bread,
Our female compatriots
Will sometimes go to bed.’
On the afternoon of 24 September, the passengers were summoned for their first lifeboat drill, shortly after the crew had held theirs.
‘That’s a fine time to hold a drill, when we’ve been at sea for over three weeks!’ Colonel Hershaw scoffed. Vassiliki and Petro rushed to their station, thinking this was going to be fun, when they ran into an old Greek woman who latched onto them because she was frightened. She was too old for this kind of exercise, she lamented. What if she fell into the water when they lowered the boats? A blind woman travelling with her daughter had become ill on board and was too debilitated to come out onto the deck. What would happen to her in an emergency? someone wondered.
To Helle’s disappointment, the drill lasted only a few minutes. After showing them the assembly point for each cabin, a crew member demonstrated how they should put on their life vests, and dismissed them. By now it was common knowledge that one of the engines had broken down. ‘We have to pray that the other two keep working so we never need those vests and lifeboats,’ people muttered as they dispersed, wondering whether they could depend on this antiquated equipment and indifferent crew to save them if the need arose.
‘They didn’t even lower the boats or test the tackle,’ Colonel Hershaw commented to his companions afterwards, shaking his large head in disdain. ‘I only hope that the lifeboats are more seaworthy than the Derna!’ But some of those who had already examined the lifeboats at close quarters when lying concealed inside them with their sweethearts, had noticed chinks of light shining through parts of the gunwale, and doubted whether they’d stay afloat.
‘Nothing would surprise me about this ship,’ Colonel Hershaw would comment, puffing on his meerschaum pipe. The carelessness of the crew defied description. He’d often had to call a seaman over and point to a hatch left open close to a ladder or to a companionway where children were playing. He often noticed booms and derricks swinging free, which could have given unsuspecting passers-by a nasty thump and sent them flying. And even when they were secured, it was only with a flimsy bit of cableyarn. Poking around the ship, he noticed that funnel stays were tied on with rope thinner than that used for clotheslines. When he pointed out an open space in a railing, where he’d recently grabbed hold of two small children who could easily have gone overboard, someone later closed the gap with a piece of twine! It took some forceful language in an officer’s ear to get it securely fixed. The inexperience, laziness and irresponsibility of most of the crew were disgraceful, and he intended to submit a detailed report about it at the end of the voyage.
While ruminating about the appalling state of this vessel, Colonel Hershaw looked up and saw that young Jewish couple talking to the two sailors again. Verner Puurand agreed that there was something very odd about them. And as for those Communist propaganda songs that they had been hearing lately, he’d certainly have something to say about them in his report.
14
Colonel Hershaw and Verner Puurand were correct in observing that the only people Guta* and her husband Dick spent their time with were two seamen. The young couple sat there day after day, hardly moving from their spot on the portside deck, talking only to Stelios Boundalis, the young Greek carpenter, and Charlie, the grey-haired Asian deckhand. Their friendship had begun when Stelios noticed them sitting by themselves under the blazing sun. He had been hammering away on deck, fixing one of the many loose planks that passengers often tripped on, and was intrigued by the wistful expression of this young woman with crinkly ash-blonde hair and a nose with a curiously flattened bridge.
Stelios was an outgoing fellow in his mid-twenties with a big smile. He bawled maudlin Greek songs at the top of his voice while he fixed doors, nailed planks and repaired lifeboats. With a combination of slapstick, mime and goodwill, he managed to convey his offer to erect a little awning for this forlorn couple, and was rewarded by a grateful smile.
Day and night Guta and her bespectacled husband sat on the forward deck to escape not only their stifling cabins but also their fellow passengers. Wiping the perspiration from her neck, Guta gazed around with the bewildered expression of a child who is lost in a dense forest and can’t find her way home.
According to her birthdate she was eighteen, but sometimes it seemed as though she had lived for a hundred years. She breathed in the bracing smell of the sea and pinned her gaze onto the rocking waves whose motion soothed her mind. As the buzz of conversation from the Polish group sprawled out on deck chairs wafted towards her, she reflected that she no longer spoke the same language as her compatriots. They seemed so confident, capable and articulate that she didn’t even have the courage to try. She had lost the art of communication just as she had lost so many other skills that life required, and felt as though her inadequacies were emblazoned on her forehead for all to see.
But she didn’t feel inferior to Stelios the carpenter. He always stopped to talk to her and Dick as he passed, and treated her as though she was quite normal. Sometimes at night when he was off duty, he brought his guitar and sat at her feet, serenading her. He made it his job to bring a smile to her face by bellowing his favourite Mexican song and changing the heroine’s name to Guta.
Stelios’s mate Charlie became the fourth member of their close-knit unit. One of the oldest seamen on board, he had skin like polished mahogany and a roguish grin. Charlie’s origins were a mystery but, like a character from a Conrad novel, he’d spent his life sailing to exotic places on freighters and steamers, and had lived through enough escapades to fill a dozen adventure books. Charlie had slaved on the Panama Canal at the turn of the century, and told them terrible stories about the hardships he’d suffered during the construction which had claimed thousands of lives.
Guta was grateful for the company of these two men. At times she felt like that wolf-boy they had found in Poland after the war, who had lived for years with a pack of wolves and could only crawl on all fours, grunt and growl. The women’s talk of cake recipes, clothes, hair styles and love affairs all seemed as incomprehensible to her as the laws of gravity would have been to the glittering fish that sometimes jumped out of the sea and landed at her feet.
In the bestial world from which she had recently emerged, speech had been reduced to its most primitive elements. Stripped of all ornamentation, delicacy and nuances of meaning, basic communication consisted of abbreviations, vocal short-hand, grunts and curses. Nothing existed except survival, and that demanded total concentration. In a world where evil reigned unchecked, the refinements of language had been irrelevant.
Nine years had passed since the carefree nine-year-old girl from the Polish city of Poznan, whose indulgent parents had provided her with piano lessons, a Brownie camera and a belief in the innate goodness of human beings, had been transformed into a quivering mass of instincts focused solely on survival.
Her induction into the underworld had begun in 1941 in the Lodz Ghetto where, instead of going to school, the Nazis forced her and the other inmates to watch public hangings. After enduring two years of starvation and daily terror in the ghetto, Guta, along with her parents and several hundred strangers, was pushed into a cattle car that began a slow and terrible journey into the unknown. During a brief stop, one of the guards discov
ered a newborn baby whose mother had tried to conceal its existence. He tore it from its mother’s arms, held it by its tiny legs and smashed its soft skull on the floor. It lay there like a broken waxen doll while the mother uttered a hyena laugh that Guta would never forget. For the next three days, as the train rattled along the endless line, the sound of her deranged laughter resounded in their ears. Guta could hear it now, over the rhythmic slapping of the waves.
She had tried to cling to her father when the waggon door finally slid back, but someone pulled them apart and herded her into the barracks with her mother. Things happened so fast that there was no time to think above the inhuman yelling, the ferocious snapping of the dogs and the cracking of whips that slashed faces. One shock followed another as incomprehensible orders were screamed at them. ‘Faster, faster! Deposit your parcels on the trolleys. Line up! Strip!’ Their teeth and fingers were searched for gold.
What did it all mean? What was this place? Cringing with embarrassment, Guta tried to hide herself but a woman with hard, unfeeling hands grabbed her, shaved off all her hair and left her staring at the mountain of human hair, blond, red, chestnut, black and grey, plaited, rolled in a bun or tied in a ponytail, heaped on the floor, disembodied and bizarre. Someone smeared a pink viscous disinfectant all over her, even in the most private places. Just when it seemed there could be no worse humiliation, they were prodded like cattle and made to parade naked in front of hard-eyed men who separated them into two groups. She kept looking around. Where was her father?
The shocks at Auschwitz–Birkenau kept coming. Fortunate to be assigned a job instead of being gassed on arrival, Guta was ordered to unload the corpses from the carts and pile them up in front of the insatiable maw of the crematorium.
Occasionally as she touched an arm or leg before pushing it through the oval iron door, she could feel a weak pulse struggling to assert its right to live. After their bodies had been pushed into the oven on a long plank of wood, flesh, skin and bone emerged as anonymous ashes that were carried to the Birkenau swamp and used as landfill.
The Voyage of Their Life Page 17
