The Voyage of Their Life

by Diane Armstrong

  When Helle and Lembit married in 1952, they talked about migrating to Canada, but the quota was full. Two years later, when they could have migrated, Tonis, the first of their five children was born, and Helle began to feel more settled. Several years later, her mother fell ill. In an impassioned voice, she says, ‘You know, people talk about God, but where is the justice of things? In Estonia Dad completed his studies, got married and had an important job. But when the Russians came in, my parents had to leave everything behind and start over in a new country. And after Dad finally paid off the house and life started being easier here, Mum got MS and became a vegetable. He had to lead her around.

  ‘After Mum died, Dad was very independent and never wanted to bother us. He let me do his white shirts, that was all. He grew orchids. He must have felt his life was ending the day he phoned my sister to come and photograph his orchids. For some reason I decided to go with her, which was very lucky because that was the last time I ever saw him. That night we got a call to say he had died.’

  In 1975, Helle divorced her husband. ‘Lembit was a typical Estonian male,’ she says. ‘He thought a woman’s place was in the home. I had three children in three years but he didn’t help me at all.’ Throughout the years, Helle continued to correspond with her first boyfriend Ilmar who was living in England, and in 1980, when they were both divorced, she travelled to Europe to meet him. This reunion after almost thirty years sounds like the beginning of an autumnal second-time-round romance, but Helle hastens to assure me that no fires were rekindled. Quite the contrary. During their holiday she discovered that their personalities were incompatible. ‘I’m active and curious about things, I like travelling and camping in the bush, but he wasn’t interested in doing anything or going anywhere,’ she says. ‘He liked sitting around, and joining wine and gourmet societies.’

  Helle has five children. Tonis, who has a concreting company in Canberra, married a girl whose parents were Estonian-born; Ilmar spent six years in the army, where he met his Australian wife; Raoul is a radiographer in charge of the CT machine at Gosford Hospital; Lembit is very bright but doesn’t stick at things; while Linda Ann, who has two children, is now fulfilling her lifelong dream to become a nursing sister. ‘I made a scrapbook from my journal and inserted photographs from the Derna so my grandchildren would know all about our voyage to Australia,’ Helle says.

  All her children speak Estonian but none of them has visited Estonia yet. She hopes that one day they’ll all make the trip together. ‘I kept thinking we’d return to Estonia but when my oldest son Tonis was about thirteen, the age at which I was torn away from my home, I knew I could never uproot him and take him away from his friends and the life he knew.’

  Helle has been back five times since 1989. ‘It’s always a good experience,’ she says. ‘But whenever I hear Russian spoken, it makes me mad and sad. You took our country, you made us leave, and now you’re living here and we’re not. But out on the island of Kasary it’s very tranquil and I feel at home with my relatives. The funny thing is, when I get together with school friends I haven’t seen since we were thirteen, even though our lives and experiences have been so different, we still have the same outlook on life. But I wouldn’t like to live there now, even though I could live like a millionaire. Sometimes I feel I don’t belong anywhere. It makes me mad when I read about those illegal immigrants in the detention centres complaining and demanding to be provided with things. We got nothing from the government and didn’t want anything. We thought it was our job to look after ourselves. We were grateful that Australia took us in.

  ‘I’m a very loyal Australian and I feel cranky when people put Australia down, but I’m sitting on the edge of two chairs called Estonia and Australia. When athletes from both countries were competing in the Olympics, I barracked for the Estonians. I’m loyal to both, but Estonia is closer to my heart. It upsets me that the children and grandchildren of Estonians don’t speak Estonian. What future is there for Estonian culture if they don’t speak the language? I’ve passed on the language and traditions to my children, but when I’m gone, I think that feeling will also be gone. I know it isn’t as important to my brother or sister as it is to me.’

  Her brother, Dr Rein Nittim, studied civil engineering in Sydney. In his laconic way, he compresses his brilliant academic career into one unadorned sentence. ‘I worked for the Department of Public Works, got interested in water engineering, did my masters degree and then got a doctorate in water engineering.’ Now semi-retired, he works part-time at the water research laboratory at the University of New South Wales. And Estonia? ‘I never went back,’ he replies.

  Like Rein, Helle’s younger sister Maret Vesk also became an academic with a doctorate. After graduating in science at the University of Sydney with honours in botany, she chose the highly specialised field of electromicroscopy. An honorary research associate, she teaches postgraduate students at the university, although officially she has retired. ‘I married an Estonian but I’m not involved in the Estonian community,’ she says. ‘I feel more Australian than Estonian.’

  After fifty-two years, Helle has recently resumed contact with her shipboard confidante Rita, whose address I passed on to her. They have exchanged a few letters, sent each other family photographs, and have spoken on the phone several times.

  ‘We can’t figure out why we lost touch for so long after being so close,’ Helle muses, ‘but now that we’ve got in touch again, we want to meet before long, either here or in Brisbane.’

  One Sunday afternoon, a few months after our last conversation, Helle calls me, but this time she is not her usual calm, unemotional self. In fact she can hardly contain her anger. ‘Have you read that article in the Sun-Herald today about that fellow who said he threw an Estonian overboard during the voyage? I’ve spoken to some of the Estonians on our ship and they’ve never heard anything about it. If an Estonian was missing, one of us would have known. Maybe it was a Jew pretending to be an Estonian. It’s outrageous for that man to make out that Estonians are anti-Semitic!’

  23

  The man who upset Helle with his claim that he had thrown an Estonian overboard was Sam Fiszman. When Sam arrived in Sydney, the anger that had been bubbling inside him throughout the stressful voyage and had culminated in that fateful fight was still simmering. He was indignant that after accusing him of being a Communist agitator, the authorities refused to let him go ashore in Fremantle. Fortunately, Archbishop Rafalsky had written a letter vouching for his character, and the Jewish community in Perth, together with Sydney Einfeld, the then President of the Jewish Welfare Society, assured the government that he would not abscond. Without their support, he would not have been allowed to set foot in Australia.

  But things did not improve after his arrival in Sydney. One of Sam’s reasons for migrating here was to join his mother’s sister. Although she had arranged accommodation for them in an old cottage in Bondi and paid the first month’s rent, she lacked his mother’s loving personality. It wasn’t financial assistance he longed for but warmth, and he felt more alienated than ever.

  Everything about Sydney irritated him. In his unsettled state, it seemed a backward place. He missed Paris with its free-wheeling atmosphere, smoky bistros and pavement cafés with their strong coffee and intense conversations. Bread here tasted like cotton wool, coffee was tasteless, while wine was denigrated as ‘plonk’.

  ‘I can’t stand it, I’m going back to Europe,’ he kept threatening Esther. Every week he would go to Orbit Travel in George Street to book his passage back to Paris, and every week Esther would calm him down and persuade him to stay. ‘But it was a long time before I unpacked my suitcase,’ he chuckles, and adds with an affectionate glance towards his wife, ‘She didn’t have an easy time with me.’

  It’s Friday afternoon and the aroma of chicken soup wafts in from the kitchen where Esther has been preparing the Sabbath meal for their daughter Mia and her family. The man who used to argue about the existence of God on the
Derna with Archbishop Rafalsky is still not religious, but keeping the Jewish traditions is important to Esther and Sam respects that.

  I’ve known Sam and Esther ever since we arrived in Australia. My mother, who had helped Esther with the baby on the ship because she was ill, would sometimes run into her while shopping in Bondi Junction. After each meeting, she would regale us with an account of Esther’s bubbly personality and angelic face. Everyone felt protective towards this eighteen year old and her baby. Dr and Mrs Frant, who had accompanied the Jewish orphans on the Derna and had become my parents’ closest friends, occasionally mentioned the Fiszmans and the difficulties they were having starting a new life in Australia. Like my father, Dr Frant was forced to repeat his studies here, but when he began to practise again as an obstetrician and gynaecologist, many of the women from the Derna , including Esther, became his patients, so the shipboard links continued.

  Eager to continue working as a journalist, Sam applied for a job at the Mirror newspaper but was unable to obtain the kind of position he wanted. He started working at Crown Crystal in South Dowling Street, but unable to stand the heat of the furnace left after ten days. Working in a milk bar to improve his English didn’t last long either. When the owner tied an apron around him and told him to wash the dishes, he stomped out. And each week he returned to the travel agency to rebook his passage.

  Unlike Sam, however, Esther took to Sydney from the first moment. ‘I took one look at Bondi Beach and fell in love,’ she beams. These days her hair is cropped short and sprinkled with grey but her large grey eyes still glow when she looks at Sam. ‘Whenever I wheeled Mia in the pram down to the beach, I knew this was the best country in the world. Our cottage in Watson Street was small and decrepit, but the door was always open to our Derna friends. Yvonne and Magda stayed with us for a time. I believe I owe my life to Magda. If not for her, I would never have survived in Auschwitz.’

  Involuntarily I glance at the smudgy blue digits tattooed on her forearm. Following my gaze, Esther says in her forthright way, ‘Magda and I had very different attitudes towards the past and over the years we lost touch.’

  Magda, the intellectual young woman in Dr Frant’s group, fulfilled her academic ambitions. Soon after arriving in Melbourne she was awarded a university scholarship. After her Master of Science degree, she obtained her PhD in endocrinology, became a lecturer at Monash University and conducted research into the hormones of Australian native animals. Esther cites Magda’s achievements with pride, but her own ambition was never for herself. All she ever wanted was to take care of her family, who in her eyes can do no wrong. The feeling is obviously reciprocated. ‘Just look at the poem my grandson Tull wrote when I turned seventy,’ she says, bursting with grandmotherly pride. Tull Price, one of Mia’s two sons, has made news recently for inventing laceless jogging shoes.

  Esther, who lost her whole family at Auschwitz when she was twelve, has become the matriarch of her close-knit family. Her youthful beauty has been replaced with the glow of contentment and strength, but the warmth, outspokenness and youthful enthusiasm haven’t faded. Neither has her admiration for her husband, whose health is now uppermost in her mind. As we talk, she potters around her homely kitchen chopping vegetables and stirring the soup while their old black labrador, Gorbachev, pads into the kitchen with a white toy bunny in his mouth, hoping that one of us will play with him.

  Sam, who has been discussing some controversy with one of his political colleagues, hangs up, still laughing about the conversation. Back on the verandah, we resume talking about the Fiszmans’ first few months in Australia. ‘That was the worst period of my life,’ he says in a quiet but assertive voice, shaking his balding head. Behind the shiny glasses, there’s a watchful toughness about him, and even though the years have taken away the anger and added a settled rotundity to his frame, he has retained some of the intensity that reminds me of an elderly Michael Douglas.

  It was Syd Einfeld’s friendship that provided Sam with an emotional anchor, channelled his energy and helped to determine the course that his life was to take. Syd was the indefatigable friend of the immigrants, the poor and the disadvantaged; a lifelong champion of social justice, lighting the path for his son Marcus. ‘Syd was a jolly giant who would do anything for you,’ Sam says of his mentor. ‘He was always ready to help those in need and never wanted anything for himself, like a good father.’

  To make ends meet, Sam shifted sofas and tables at RM O’Keefe’s store in Pitt Street, drove a cab at night and hawked bolts of material door-to-door. Seeing an opportunity to sell goods in country areas, he teamed up with a Dutch hawker and they drove hundreds of miles along dusty roads, stopping at small towns to sell rugs, mats, materials, whatever they could lay their hands on. ‘That’s when I got to know salt-of-the-earth Australians,’ he recalls. ‘Country people were the most genuine and the kindest human beings I’d ever met. No matter how far you drove, as soon as you got to a town, they welcomed you with open arms. They accepted you for what you were.’ With all the travelling and taxi-driving, Esther and Mia hardly saw him, but by 1950 he’d managed to save the key money for a flat in Warners Avenue which they rented for seventeen shillings and sixpence a week.

  Sam discovered his flair for politics when Syd Einfeld asked him to distribute leaflets for the forthcoming Waverley Council elections. After Labor lost the election, Sam pointed out that dropping leaflets wasn’t effective because it was too impersonal. You had to go out there, knock on doors, visit hospitals and nursing homes, and meet the people. Syd was impressed with the young man’s political acumen and promised him a bigger role in the next council election. In 1962, the incumbent mayor of Waverley was Ray O’Keefe, whose wild son Johnny electrified audiences at rock concerts. True to his promise, Syd Einfeld encouraged Sam to work behind the scenes on behalf of the Labor candidate Doug Morey. Sam hoots with laughter. ‘He won! He scraped in with twelve votes!’ The year 1962 marked a new beginning for Sam and Esther in other ways as well, with the birth of their son Robert.

  Sam’s political activities brought him into contact with Labor politicians he came to admire as quintessential Australians. Syd Einfeld introduced him to Pat Hills, the Lord Mayor of Sydney, and Harry Jensen, the mayor of Randwick. In an impassioned voice, Sam says, ‘Those men didn’t care what I had, how much I earned, what I did for a living, what I wore, or whether I spoke with an accent. They took me at my own value. Their egalitarian way of thinking was amazing. I’d never experienced anything like it before. I felt I’d come home.’

  After selling rugs and materials door-to-door, Sam decided to go into business for himself and opened Univers Carpets in Bondi Junction. But building up a successful enterprise was only one of his interests. A keen soccer player, he played for Progress and Canterbury. After being one of the foundation members of the Hakoah Soccer Club, he became its president, as well as the chairman of Sydney City Soccer Club. The Polish migrant became chairman of the ‘Bring out a Briton’ committee which sponsored British migrants to Australia. On outings with his Australian mates, he discovered the thrill of horse racing, and to this day a visit to Randwick racecourse is a Saturday afternoon institution.

  His most consuming passion, however, was Labor politics. ‘Labor has never tolerated right-wing racists, which you can’t say about the Liberal Party and some of their National Party associates,’ he says. ‘Many Labor politicians have an Irish background and know about persecution. Even though there’s not much true socialism left these days, there’s a brotherhood, a kinship, that I haven’t found anywhere else.’ Later that day, I recall his comment when I hear that the Queensland National Party has given its preferences to the One Nation Party in the forthcoming state elections.

  Although Sam never became a member of the Labor Party, his dedication did not go unnoticed. When Syd Einfeld became Minister for Consumer Affairs, he encouraged Sam to sit on the Consumer Advisory Council. When the state elections were approaching, Sam worked tirelessly to raise funds fo
r Neville Wran. Gesturing around the comfortable loungeroom where we are sitting, he says, ‘We discussed the strategy right here.’ After Wran became premier of New South Wales in 1976, Sam continued his fundraising efforts and over the years has raised millions of dollars for the Labor Party, but his own lifestyle remains simple and unpretentious.

  When I follow him into his study in search of a book he has mentioned, I am amazed to see that the walls are covered in awards, certificates and citations for activities as diverse as sport, charity, consumer affairs and tourism. A closer look reveals that over the years Sam has been awarded the highest honours Australia has to offer. Pausing in front of a photograph, I recognise the tall man standing next to him as Sir Roden Cutler, the then governor of New South Wales, who had just presented him with the Order of Australia medal.

  ‘I was awarded that in 1981 for my work as chairman of the National Consumer Advisory Council,’ Sam says, and adds with considerable satisfaction, ‘It wasn’t political payback, because I got it from Malcolm Fraser’s government. That was an incredible feeling, being rewarded for doing something that benefited my new country. That’s when I was very glad I’d never bought that ticket to go back to Europe!’

  The honours kept coming. Eleven years later, in 1992, he received the Australia Medal. ‘That was mainly for my contribution to tourism,’ he explains. Convinced of the tourist potential of New South Wales, he promoted it energetically. As chairman of the New South Wales Tourism Commission, he introduced the idea of having a different theme each year. ‘I’m sure you won’t be surprised to hear that I chaired the Year of Sport!’ he laughs. In the years that followed, he was appointed director of the Australian Tourist Commission and until recently served on the board of the Darling Harbour Authority.