The Voyage of Their Life

by Diane Armstrong

  ‘They told me I can’t belong to two unions,’ she protested.

  ‘All I know is, you can’t work here if you’re not in the union,’ he insisted. At this point Doris barged in, hands on hips and thunderbolts flashing from her eyes. ‘Now you just listen to me,’ she snapped. ‘The kid just come here. She needs the money, see. She wants to work here and we want her to stay here, so why don’t you bloody well get off her back? Shut your gob and push off!’

  In her homely kitchen, Guta throws her head back and laughs triumphantly. ‘That fellow never came back!’ She has a gift for mimicry and imitates their speech with affectionate amusement but no resentment.

  Gradually she regained her zest for life but she noticed that Dick was still finding things difficult even after he completed his degree. They hadn’t known each other for long when they had decided to marry, two orphans who had survived the war and clung to each other from loneliness. Like her, he had also been withdrawn and depressed at the time, but now that their life was becoming easier, Guta was forced to face the fact that, for all his charm and wit, Dick was basically a loner with a depressive, introverted personality.

  One of their major disputes was over having children. Although when they met neither of them had been keen on the idea, now that life was running more smoothly, Guta wanted to have a baby, but Dick wouldn’t hear of it. Whenever her period was late, he panicked. ‘You can’t have a baby, because I won’t be around to help you bring it up!’ he would say. Dick had been two years old when his father died of a heart attack, and like many men whose fathers have died young, he was convinced that he would meet a similar fate.

  Although Guta scoffed at his gloomy forebodings, he insisted that it wasn’t pessimism but clairvoyance. When she came home after a pathology exam one day, he said, ‘In the middle of that exam you blanked out for a few minutes and didn’t know what to write.’

  She stared at him. ‘How did you know?’

  He shrugged and gave a knowing smile. ‘I’m clairvoyant, remember?’

  By 1955, their relationship had deteriorated to such an extent that they could no longer live together, but they separated amicably. ‘We never stopped caring about each other but we couldn’t make each other happy. We functioned better as brother and sister than husband and wife,’ Guta says. As she looks up, her cat Pushkin is standing on his hind legs, scratching his forepaws on the glass outside, spreadeagled against the window. ‘Oh, you are so theatrical!’ she exclaims and lets him in again. Now that she’s up, she puts the kettle on and as we sip our mugs of tea, she continues reminiscing about the relationship. ‘Dick would cry on my shoulder whenever he was depressed, and whenever I started to get close to someone, he would suggest us getting back together. We weren’t compatible but the bond between us never died,’ she says.

  Nine years after their split, while Guta was working at the pathology department of the Alfred Hospital, Dick came in to the casualty department. He had broken a finger at work but because of the current anti-TB campaign, he was ordered to have a routine chest x-ray. They found a shadow on his lungs. A week later, the thoracic surgeon opened his chest, took one look and closed it up again. As soon as Dick came out of the anaesthetic, the surgeon told him, ‘I’m afraid there’s nothing we can do. You’ve got adenocarcinoma which is inoperable. I give you about three months.’

  With perverse triumph, Dick told Guta, ‘You see, I said I wouldn’t live long.’ Determined not to let him give up, Guta persuaded him to try radiotherapy. The treatment was still in its infancy and his sternum was badly burned in the process, but it gave him two additional years of normal life. In the last months of his illness, when he refused to go to hospital, she moved him into Tosia’s flat.

  The two women nursed him devotedly through the worst three months of his life, during which he suffered agonising pain and slow suffocation, and became so emaciated that his bones pushed through his skin. His torment ended in 1964, when he was thirty-seven. Not long afterwards, while cleaning out his flat Guta found a slip of paper wedged beneath the lino on the kitchen floor. He had left her a message in Polish. ‘In spite of what you thought,’ he had written, ‘I loved you very much.’

  Three years later, Guta fell in love with a teacher from Czechoslovakia.

  ‘He was the love of my life. But eight years after we got married, he died of bowel cancer,’ she sighs.

  She continued working as a medical pathologist at the Alfred Hospital. ‘It was just like detective work, chasing an invisible foe,’ she muses. ‘There were terrible moments when I saw a death sentence in the microscope, but there were great rewards too.’ In 1975, after twenty-three years at the hospital, she started working for a privately owned laboratory. She had been working there for some time when a chance remark revealed that she and her boss had something in common apart from their passion for medical pathology. They had both arrived on the Derna.

  It was Ella, the rebellious young woman with the strawberry blonde curls whose brother Anton had almost died of appendicitis during the voyage.

  The turmoil in Ella’s life that had begun during the war continued in Melbourne. As soon as she arrived, she was told that the guardian assigned to her had reneged on his agreement, so she would have to go to Sydney where another guardian had been appointed. The vehemence of her reaction startled them. Ella refused to go to Sydney. She hadn’t travelled to the other side of the world to be separated from her brother, the only person she knew here, she told them. She was staying in Melbourne and that was that.

  While Ella waited unhappily in the Frances Barkman Children’s Home for accommodation to be arranged for her, Anton was having problems as well. His guardian, who had promised to send him to university, now wanted him to work on the family property in the country. Seeing how distraught Anton was at this prospect, Ella assured him that this would never happen. ‘Even if I have to scrub floors, you’ll study science,’ she told him.

  While Ella found a job at Kodak, testing paper emulsion, her brother found work as a bottle washer at a paint factory. It was so far away that he had to leave home at four in the morning and cycle across the city on his ricketty bicycle. But he did fulfil his dream of becoming a scientist and later worked for the CSIRO.

  Ella’s luck changed unexpectedly when she met a European couple who became so enchanted with her that they asked her to move in with them and treated her like their own daughter. In her foster-mother, Ella found exactly the kind of mother she had always wished for: uncritical, undemanding and warm. Their close relationship continued even after her own mother arrived in Australia several years later.

  ‘I started blossoming in Australia,’ she says when we talk in her bright modern home which is surrounded by bushland. The angry, sexy girl from the Derna has become a warm, grandmotherly woman who leads a hectic existence juggling the demands of business and family life. ‘Over the years, I became a different person from the rebellious girl I was on the Derna. Two things healed me: one was marrying the kindest, most understanding and patient human being I’ve ever met; the other was becoming a social worker, which enabled me to do something useful for others.’

  As Ella tells me about the harrowing events of her teenage years, she recalls standing on a platform about to be shot by German guards while her red-eyed father was restrained from rushing towards her. She describes her anguish after crawling to her mother’s barracks in Auschwitz to find not a loving mother but an empty shell.

  We sit in silence, surrounded by the ghosts of the past. Finally she says, ‘For thirty years I avoided talking about these things. I decided that the past was finished, the Holocaust happened to somebody else in another century on another planet. But while I was studying family therapy, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross warned me that if I wanted to help patients who were afraid of death, I’d have to confront my own demons and let go of my own baggage. I wasn’t afraid of dying because I’d already died more than once, but I didn’t want to revisit the past.’

  Several years ago, ho
wever, Ella was forced to do that. She was jolted when her son asked one evening, ‘Who are you? You are a one-dimensional person. You have no past.’ ‘So I sat down with the whole family and talked all night about what had happened to me,’ Ella recalls. ‘I told them everything. They listened and cried with me. But next morning it was as though I hadn’t said anything, and they have never alluded to it since then. They couldn’t cope with it.’

  As she shows me the photos from the Derna , she suddenly recalls an incident that happened recently while she was in Spain on a bus tour. ‘One night over a bottle of red wine, some of our group started reminiscing about coming to Australia. When I said that I came out on a hellship, one of the guys from Melbourne said, “Well, it couldn’t have been as bad as my hellship!” So we started competing to see whose ship was the worst. Then another woman joined in. “You haven’t heard anything yet. On my ship, we had to throw all the meat overboard.” That’s when it dawned on the three of us that we all came out on the Derna !’

  The other two were Morrie Frid and Anne Irons, both of whom were children during the voyage. Morrie travelled with his parents and sick baby brother. Anne, who was then called Haneczka Poczebucka, was the girl who dropped her new fez in Port Said harbour on her eighth birthday.

  Ella is still laughing about that coincidence. ‘Fancy having to go to Spain to find out that three people who live in the same city all came out on the same ship! But the same thing happened with Guta and me,’ she says. ‘We’d been working together for years before we discovered that we were ship-sisters!’

  After Don and Marjorie Read passed away, Guta’s network of friends expanded to include the younger members of the Read family. When Don died, his children asked her to give the eulogy in celebration of his life. ‘They all laughed when I reminded them of the first time I made yoghurt and cottage cheese fifty years ago. Of course now they all eat it!’ she laughs.

  Like any proud aunt, she takes an album out of a drawer and shows me the family photographs. ‘I’ve become an honorary aunt to the children and to their children too. For my seventieth birthday they gave me a party at a restaurant and brought out a huge cake. They asked me to invite whoever I wanted, and there we all were, my dearest friends in the whole world, Polish, Australian, Jewish and Christian, one big family.’

  Now that she has retired from medical pathology after forty-four years, Guta spends her time trying to make the world a better place. ‘Because of what happened to me during the war, I feel a kinship with the persecuted, the humiliated, the unjustly treated,’ she says. She belongs to the Humanist Society and to the Jewish Democratic Society, a secular organisation that supports peace and Palestinian rights. A fervent activist and inveterate letter-writer, she pulls out folders bulging with brochures, letters and documents. The woman whose speech was once reduced to grunts and curses, who became so withdrawn that she could not talk to anyone, has become an impassioned fighter for the rights of others. ‘I write letters, serve on committees and chair meetings on issues such as gun ownership and domestic violence. I’m for family planning, voluntary euthanasia, land rights and gay rights,’ she says. ‘I still have trouble managing time, but now I know that it is too precious to waste.’

  26

  While Guta was cleaning offices and washing cars, elsewhere in Melbourne another Polish couple from the Derna , Cyla and Max Ferszt, also struggled to support themselves. Max, who was a photographer, knew that he had little chance of practising his profession here. ‘Melbourne isn’t like Warsaw,’ his sister had written. ‘People here don’t appreciate fine photography.’ The problem of earning a living had preoccupied him during the voyage, but as soon as he stepped off the ship, he was offered a job. Among the throng milling around South Wharf when the Derna docked were representatives from General Motors Holden who had come to recruit labourers for the assembly line that was about to produce the 48-215 Holden, the forerunner of the FJ model which came out in 1953.

  The launch of Australia’s first locally manufactured car was a national milestone, marked by a special ceremony attended by Prime Minister Ben Chifley and 1200 luminaries including federal and state politicians, chiefs of the armed services, consular, trades hall and business representatives. The music played by the ten-piece orchestra was almost drowned out by the popping of champagne corks in the flower-decked hall. In a moment as dramatic as any Hollywood Oscar presentation, the silver lamé curtain was swept aside and a spotlight fell on an ivory sedan resting on black velvet. The prime minister’s enthusiastic endorsement, ‘She’s a beauty!’ was quoted in newspapers throughout the country.

  The cost of the Holden, with its six-cylinder engine and 21.6 horsepower which could reach speeds of up to fifty miles per hour, compared favourably with its American and British competitors such as the Chevrolet, Pontiac, Chrysler, Morris Oxford and Austin A40. Australia’s own car cost 675 pounds, about double the annual male basic wage. Cars were still a luxury but the advent of the Holden was to change that. I can still remember the excitement in my family the day in 1953 when my father called my mother and me to come outside, and watched our incredulous faces as he unlocked the door and sat behind the wheel of the first car he had ever owned: a ‘Potomac blue’ FJ Holden we always referred to as Oscar.

  On his first Monday in Australia, Max Ferszt was already at work on the GMH assembly line at Fishermans Bend. In Siberia his artist’s hands had been blistered by axes and chafed by frost; in Melbourne they were blackened by engine grease. Factory work was not what he had envisaged for his new life but at least it provided a steady income, which was essential with a wife and child to support.

  Like so many children on the Derna , their three-year-old daughter Slawa had developed whooping cough. The child had been miserable throughout the voyage but now she was seriously ill. Every few minutes the paroxysm of coughing ended in a frightening croup-like rattle, after which she vomited up the little she had managed to eat.

  It was actually Slawa who had put me in touch with Cyla. When she read in the Sydney Morning Herald that I was searching for passengers from the Derna , she immediately contacted her mother in Melbourne. Cyla wasted no time in writing to me, jotting down vivid vignettes of the voyage with finely observed details that whetted my interest. Even before we met, Cyla threw herself wholeheartedly into the search. Over the next few months, she sent descriptive letters containing her own recollections as well as the names of other Polish passengers in Melbourne with whom she was still in touch: Anna Szput Stern, Zosia Rogers, Hanka Pilichowski, Irka Falek and Leah Fein, all of whom by then had been widowed like her. Hardly a week passed without a cheery note from Cyla together with photos, reminiscences and more names and phone numbers of our ship-sisters.

  ‘It was a difficult time when we arrived,’ Cyla says slowly, in her lilting Polish–Russian accent. She has the placid sensuality of large women and even when she talks about bad times, she sounds philosophical. Although we have never met before, she wraps her arms around me and I feel as though I’ve known her for years. Everything about Cyla is warm and welcoming, from her big smile to the bright flowers she has painted all over the walls in her Elwood apartment. There are even sprigs of roses on the toilet walls and on the brick wall of her small balcony. This is a woman who opens her heart to embrace life instead of erecting walls to keep it out.

  Over coffee and homemade cheesecake, she tells me about their early days in Melbourne. After meeting them at the wharf, her husband’s sister drove them to a boarding house in Beaconsfield Parade, where she had rented them a room. As soon as the landlady heard Slawa coughing, she glared and Cyla felt her stomach churn whenever the child made those frightening whooping sounds. The room was cold, dark and damp and felt like a prison. The landlady continually watched to make sure that she didn’t put the light on, and refused to let her use the kitchen, even to make tea. The whole house was saturated with the gamey smell of grilled chops and fatty sausages, which made her feel sick.

  Depressed in the boarding
house, Cyla started looking for a flat. She set her heart on a vacant bachelor flat in the same street, but when the landlord demanded 350 pounds key money, the situation seemed hopeless. Everyone urged her to be patient and wait until they were better off, but Cyla was adamant. ‘I’m not staying in this boarding house. I didn’t come to Australia to live like this. We’re going to live in a flat on our own,’ she insisted. By a stroke of luck, her aunt in Israel sent her a gift of 200 pounds and Max provided the rest by selling his Leica camera. After his attempts to stay in his profession resulted only in occasional weekend assignments to do snapshots at weddings, he finally abandoned all hope of working as a photographer.

  After the bustle of European cities, with their sociable coffee houses, lively markets and crowded squares, Cyla found Melbourne lifeless. The centre of the city died every afternoon at five when shops and offices closed and the workers went home to their suburban streets of red-roofed houses. In that sprawling urban landscape, hardly anyone walked in the street or invited neighbours home. Australians guarded their privacy fiercely and seemed more comfortable looking out from behind drawn blinds than chatting with their neighbours.

  Like many migrant women at the time, Cyla found work in the rag trade, which was concentrated around Flinders Lane. Until 1948, almost everything had been imported from Great Britain but in the post-war boom, manufacturing began to flourish. Many of the migrants from the Derna , including Abie Goldberg and Heniek Lipschutz, found their niche in this burgeoning industry. While making bras in a lingerie factory, Cyla enthralled her workmates with stories of life in Siberia. With her gift for storytelling, she described walking for miles across thick snow, chopping trees and sawing logs, and building huts with their bare hands. Listening to her was like watching a movie about exotic, far-off places.