Even now, three years later, Ella could remember how difficult it had been to believe that she was really free, that the humiliation, hunger and suffering were over. Some of the prisoners broke into a store and stole as much food as they could carry, because they were convinced that this was just a trick. On the boat to Sweden, when they were told to throw away their old clothes because they would be given new ones, no one believed it. They stuffed their rags into the crevices of the boat, just in case. When the Swedes tried to build them up with cod liver oil, they spat it out when their benefactors weren’t looking. You could never tell if you were being poisoned.
In the Swedish town of Lund, Ella took months to heal. She had weeping sores all over her body, weighed thirty-five kilos and tottered on ostrich legs. When she had recovered sufficiently to return home, she was reunited with her mother in Prague, but their relationship was thorny. Festering beneath the surface, but never referred to, was their shattering reunion at Auschwitz which had caused a rift that was difficult to heal. Apart from that, her mother had trouble adjusting to this defiant young woman who had been fending for herself for the past few years, while Ella resented her mother’s criticism and demands. They were at cross purposes, because the girl who didn’t want to be treated as a child still wanted her mother to look after her.
Rebellious and resentful, Ella couldn’t settle down at school. She still hoped that her beloved father would return and his last words to her in the cattle train to Auschwitz still rang in her ears. ‘Be a good person and never lower your standards.’ Although she was lively and popular with the other students, she felt alienated. Her school-mates laughed, joked and played the guitar, but she couldn’t see anything to laugh about. What her mother called her wild streak was anger and grief that couldn’t find an appropriate outlet. With her fluent Swedish, English, French and German, Ella worked part-time interpreting radio news bulletins, a welcome relief from the tedium of school. Occasionally she was employed as a guide for international groups visiting Prague, but when her schoolwork suffered her mother forbade her to do it any more.
Ella’s rebelliousness sometimes manifested itself in dangerous ways. Whenever Communist propaganda was blared through loudspeakers in the street, she would make critical comments and mock the slogans. Strangers would sidle up and warn her to be careful or she’d end up in jail. When two of her equally outspoken friends disappeared from the gymnasium, she finally realised that if she wasn’t careful she’d meet the same fate. The sudden death of Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk darkened the skies over Prague. The Nazis had been defeated but another kind of dictatorship was looming.
At about that time Ella’s mother heard of a scheme to send orphans and youngsters with only one parent to Australia, and urged her children to take advantage of it and leave.
Although Ella suspected that her mother wanted to get rid of her because she was so difficult to handle, she knew that it was a good idea. Her resentment intensified, however, when she found out that while she was to be smuggled across the border illegally, her mother had obtained legal papers for Anton at considerable expense.
His moans broke in on her reverie. He was mumbling through fever-scabbed lips and when she looked at his face, she was alarmed to see that it had a greenish hue. Something had to be done urgently. Perhaps Jean-Pierre the barman would think of something. She jumped up and started running towards the stern, past rows of sunbaking passengers. Surrounded by his friends, Otto was strumming his guitar and composing raunchy lyrics to familiar songs. ‘Hey, Ella! Come and join us!’ one of the boys called out, but she shook her strawberry blonde curls and kept going while their admiring glances followed her. There was something foxy and self-contained about her that men found intriguing. She was friendly but inaccessible. They envied the young barman whose company Ella preferred, although they found it ironic that the only guy she was keen on was unlikely to reciprocate her interest as his sexual orientation was towards men. But she felt relaxed with him because he was easy to talk to and had no personal agenda. Her brother needed help urgently and since the doctors on board weren’t doing anything, perhaps this street-wise barman would suggest something.
Apart from Dr Frant, there were two doctors on board. One of them was my father’s bridge partner Leon Ament. Many women on board had designs on Dr Ament, but their hopes were never realised because he remained faithful to his fiancée, a Swiss nurse he had met in Germany after the war, who was later to join him in Australia.
The other medico was Irene Abrahamsohn, an attractive brunette. Irene had studied medicine in Berlin when Hitler came to power. It was a dark time in her life that she tried not to think about.
Ostracised by the other students because she was ‘tainted’ with Jewish blood, she had felt like a leper and it had taken every gram of strength to hold her head high and concentrate on lectures in such a hostile environment. But after she graduated, she wasn’t allowed to practise. The only work she could get was in a forensic laboratory, assisting the pathologist. She loathed the dead bodies and the sickening smell of formaldehyde, putrefaction and faeces, but there was no choice because she was her family’s sole breadwinner.
Stripped of his business and assets and forced to wear the yellow star, her father had sunk into a profound depression. Like so many German Jews, he loved his native land and considered himself a German patriot, but he was so shocked at being deprived of all his rights and treated like an enemy of the state that he stopped going out altogether. His rations were so meagre that if it hadn’t been for a Quaker from the local pharmacy bringing them food in secret and the butcher’s wife occasionally leaving some meat on the roof of the neighbour’s shed, they would have starved.
After her father died of a heart attack in 1943, Irene and her mother lived through the terrifying bombardment of Berlin, and then through the Russian occupation which was so dangerous for women, especially lovely young ones like her. Fortunately the Russians respected doctors, so she pulled on an armband with a big red cross and proceeded to treat the soldiers, most of whom were suffering from gonorrhoea.
Irene’s only friend on board was another young German woman, Herta Birnbaum, who was also a lone mother travelling with a small child to New Zealand. Afraid that their children would fall out of the bunks, the two women spent most of their time on deck under an awning that Irene had rigged up to protect them all from the sun. One day, the stresses of the voyage, the pain of loneliness and anxiety about the future overwhelmed Herta who broke down and sobbed. Moved by her friend’s plight, which she shared, Irene resented the self-centred attitude of the other passengers. They were all out for themselves and had no compassion for anyone else. To add to her own anxiety, one morning her mother slipped and fell over on deck and broke her leg. Irene splinted it and took care of her for the rest of the voyage.
It was Irene who advised Ella to prepare nourishing but easily digestible food like barley broth and light sponge cake for her brother. Although Ella had no idea how to cook and had never been in the galley before, she ran down to the bowels of the ship. She shrank back when she looked into the cavernous hall where an army of kitchen hands with sweating faces were stirring huge pots, beating doughy mixtures and flourishing long sharp knives as they chopped onions and opened tins of tomatoes, shouting and cursing each other across the work bench.
They stared at the young girl asking in a nervous stammer if she could cook something for her sick brother. Beckoning her inside, they showed her the Ali Baba sized jar where they kept the barley, gave her an enormous pot to cook it in and burst out laughing when she asked for a small saucepan. The catering requirements of the Derna made small utensils quite unnecessary. By then the kitchen crew had become used to passengers coming into the kitchen to supplement their diet, because mothers often came in to prepare semolina for their babies.
While Ella was struggling to make barley broth for her brother, which despite all her best efforts burned and stuck in lumps to the bottom of the pot, Archbishop Rafals
ky fell ill with gastroenteritis. When Ella emerged from the galley one afternoon with her bowl of barley broth, Dr Frant asked if she could also boil some rice for the archbishop. A few hours later, carefully balancing the two bowls, she climbed the stairs gingerly, one at a time to steady herself against the rolling of the ship. She knocked on the door of the cabin which had been converted into a sickbay for the archbishop. The gaunt man managed to smile when she brought his rice and blessed her kindness, and even though they had no common language, she felt uplifted by his blessing.
When Ella returned to her brother with the broth, he was writhing in pain. She was through with being helpless. The doctors had said that performing an operation was out of the question and there was nothing they could do, but their inaction made her blood boil. She would take matters into her own hands. When Jean-Pierre suggested enlisting the radio officer’s help, she burst into the radio room. George Alexiou, for whom she had occasionally translated Swedish news bulletins, listened while her angry words tumbled out.
‘Something has to be done to save my brother,’ she blurted out. The radio officer was sympathetic. ‘Perhaps I could send an SOS to see if there is a ship nearby with surgical facilities that can take your brother on board, but you have to speak to the captain first. Go and plead with him, throw yourself on his mercy. Kneel and beg if you have to, because I can’t send an SOS without his permission.’
Ella rushed to the captain’s cabin three stairs at a time and stood in front of him, hardly able to catch her breath. ‘My brother is dying,’ she gasped, trying to suppress the tears that were welling up. ‘Please, let them radio for help. Or turn back to Colombo.’ But the captain shook his head. He was deeply sorry but the ship was already behind schedule and he couldn’t delay the voyage by turning it around, or waiting for another vessel to catch up. Ella felt that she was choking on her fury. ‘You are nothing but a murderer! If my brother dies, I will hold you responsible!’ she shouted and slammed the door behind her.
As suddenly as it had appeared, Anton’s crisis passed. The pain disappeared and the colour returned to his face. The relieved doctors on board the Derna were left to reflect on the mysterious workings of the human body, which so often succeeded in healing itself without their intervention.
17
The fact that the Derna had the same type of expansion engine as the Titanic did not escape the notice of passengers who had looked around the engine room and noted the condition of its antiquated machinery. ‘It’s a good thing there are no icebergs in the Indian Ocean,’ someone joked after a visit to the bowels of the ship. The broken engine had not been fixed in Colombo and the ship was crawling along even more slowly than before. The triple expansion engine had three cranks which drove steam at high pressure into the crank shaft and cylinders in turn, but the boiler was not generating enough steam. One engine had already broken down and now the second was failing.
The gravity of the situation became obvious when the chief engineer asked some of the young men, including Bill Marr and his friend George Rakusan, to go down into the engine room and shovel coal. ‘We need help to keep the engine going, because the stokers are worn out,’ he said.
With its suffocating heat and the grinding din of the machinery, the engine room resembled Vulcan’s forge. Pistons laboured, thick coal dust coated everything and blasts of smoky air made their eyes water. The stokers shovelled coal as fast as their muscular shoulders could manage, but despite their efforts the steam did not build up and there was talk of a leaking valve.
Bill and George emerged on deck with faces as scarlet as chili peppers and backs streaming with sweat, while other boys took turns shovelling. Even such gruelling work was preferable to the usual lethargy of shipboard life. When the chief steward asked Verner Puurand’s older son Hans to help in the galley, the sixteen year old jumped at the offer. Too shy to approach the girls or mix with the boys, he was bored. Besides, he welcomed the prospect of earning some money so that he wouldn’t arrive in Brisbane with empty pockets.
Meanwhile Captain Papalas continued to tell anyone willing to listen that only the poor quality of the coal they’d taken on in Colombo had caused the Derna to slow down. About a week out of Colombo, Verner Puurand woke up and looked around in astonishment. ‘We are going backwards!’ he exclaimed. During the night, a number of people had heard two hollow thumps and then an ominous silence. The second engine had ground to a halt. Exhausted from thirty years of hauling cargo across the oceans of the world, the Derna was close to collapse.
The dawdling pace of the ship was a constant source of jokes, but beneath the jollity there was genuine concern. We were floundering in the middle of a vast ocean on a ship with two broken engines. It had been obvious for some time that we couldn’t possibly reach Melbourne by the scheduled date, but now our chance of reaching it at all seemed remote. When it was suggested that the captain send out an SOS in the hope that some nearby ship would come to the rescue and tow us to the nearest port, he shook his head. He knew only too well that his boss, Stavros Livanos, would oppose such a costly operation. It would eat up the profit from the fares. ‘We must keep trying to repair the engines,’ he said.
The mechanics who had tinkered with the leaking valves in Colombo had patched and soldered as best they could, but the patient was old and had too many diseased organs. Down in the engine room, the engineer, greaser and stokers toiled in a losing battle. It was the worst possible situation in the tropics, where temperatures in the engine room could soar to over a hundred degrees, dehydrating their bodies at a pace that outstripped the fluids they drank. The stokers knew the danger: they had all heard stories about colleagues who had leapt overboard to their deaths, confused and crazed by heat, thirst and the loss of salt through the pores of their sweating bodies.
Although he was too young to help, Petro Fatseas sneaked into the engine room whenever he could. He was fascinated by the machinery, especially the huge pistons that slid up and down, and watched them until the stokers chased him away. He had noticed that the man in charge of the engine room was the second engineer they called Johnny. Older and more corpulent than the others, he was bald with a curiously pale skin and experienced eyes that darted everywhere as he barked instructions and directed the work.
Petro was scrambling down the ladder that led to the engine room one afternoon when he looked down and stopped, glued to the spot. Johnny was lying on the floor. His face, always pale, had a waxen look, his eyes were closed and he was as motionless as the plank he was lying on. From the hushed conversation of the stokers, Petro figured out that a leak in one of the valves had extinguished the fire that kept the steam building up inside the boiler. It appeared that Johnny had crawled inside to find out which tube was leaking so he could plug it with a metal seal. Working in the heat, smoke and fumes, he had collapsed and died in an effort to prolong the Derna’s life.
Those who rose early the following day witnessed a scene they would never forget. Sunrise at sea is a spiritual experience in which the dawn of creation is staged anew each morning. The dark horizon gradually lightens, as though illuminated from behind by an invisible celestial lamp, tinting the sky with wisps of rose, apricot and lemon. As the sun climbs above the vast horizon, it licks the crests of the waves with a silver light. But on this particular dawn, the attention of the passengers was distracted from the miracle in the sky. Gathered at the stern of the ship, several officers stood on either side of a plank on which the rotund body of the second engineer lay wrapped in the Panamanian flag. Beside the captain, Archbishop Rafalsky, an imposing figure with his long black robe and big silver panagia on his chest, was intoning a prayer to bless the soul of the departed engineer.
Wide-eyed with awe, Pauline Seitz clutched her mother’s hand. But another little girl found this ceremony strangely comforting. It was Ginette, whose heart beat faster when she heard the cadences of Christian prayers. They transported her to those happy days when she had been part of a loving Catholic family and would sit on
polished wooden pews with her foster-parents on Sundays, listening to the chanting of the priest. Watching curiously from the top deck where she slept every night beside her mother and step-father, Ginette’s friend Haneczka was puzzled by one aspect of the ceremony. Why had they retrieved the flag instead of leaving it wrapped around the dead man to keep him warm?
After the archbishop had finished praying, the captain and officers stood at attention while the seamen tipped the plank up. As the body slid into the sea, the water parted with a reverberating splash to receive it and quickly closed up again.
The finality of the burial at sea haunted those who witnessed it. Rita, who watched beside her mother, felt hot tears roll down her cheeks. ‘That poor man,’ she said. ‘Now he’ll be eaten by sharks.’
Her mother nodded. ‘That’s how it is,’ she sighed. ‘When you’re dead, you’re dead.’
Although the burial had cast a momentary gloom over the passengers and evoked philosophical reflections about the ephemeral nature of life, the presence of death reaffirmed the joy of being alive. Soon they regained their spirits and resumed their preoccupation with more worldly topics. Since Colonel Hershaw’s seduction of the Italian girl, Dorothea’s relationship with her boss had become restricted to her secretarial duties. Brisk and businesslike, she only entered his cabin to type letters and notices, collect the soap and cigarettes to distribute among the passengers and to make announcements over the megaphone.
The Voyage of Their Life Page 21
