While Cyla worked at the factory from early morning until three in the afternoon, Max worked the night shift at GMH from three o’clock until midnight. Distressed to see his fine white hands roughened and blackened from manual work, she sometimes pointed out that other immigrants borrowed money and started businesses which they gradually paid off. But Max had the soul of an artist, not a businessman, and the idea of borrowing terrified him. ‘I wouldn’t be able to sleep at nights if I owed money,’ he told her. Although their alternating work shifts meant that they hardly saw each other, she tried not to complain.
‘I was grateful that we had work and enough to eat, and didn’t have to run away any more,’ she says.
Max would take Slawa to kindergarten each morning, while Cyla collected her in the afternoon, and they communicated mainly through notes. Hers would read, ‘The soup is on the stove, be careful not to burn the pot.’ Late in the afternoon, she would sit by the window and gaze at the sea. In her melodious voice, she would tell Slawa fairy tales about princesses captured by dragons. But as the waves crashed outside and darkness fell, the stories often scared them both so much that she hurriedly invented happy endings. When the little girl finally fell asleep in her arms, Cyla put her to bed, and sat up alone listening to the radio playing ‘Begin the Beguine’ or ‘Girls Were Made to Love and Kiss’, which reminded her of the carefree pre-war days of their youth.
Late at night, she would finally hear the sounds she had been waiting for: the squeal of bus brakes followed by the creak of the iron gate as it swung open. Max was home. ‘Why aren’t you asleep yet, Cyleczka?’ he would ask, using the affectionate form of her name.
‘Because I wanted to wait up for you.’ She’d smile up at him as he scrubbed his hands to try and remove the stains and smell of engine grease. Sometimes he would bring her a bunch of grapes, leaving them in the second-hand ice chest until they were cold and juicy. Many years later, recalling those early days with the nostalgia of hindsight, Cyla wrote, ‘Since then, a lot of ice melted in our ice chest. The ice chest was exchanged for a modern fully automatic freezer but never again did the grapes have the balsamic taste of happiness like those from the second-hand ice chest.’
Cyla bought a sewing machine and supplemented their income by doing piecework at home. Every afternoon after work she would jump on the tram, clutching a big parcel of bras in one hand and Slawa in the other, to visit her closest friend from the ship, Fela Feigin. They are still in touch, although Fela has moved to New York. ‘Fela was beautiful when we met and she still is, even though she is eighty-two,’ Cyla says, pointing to the photograph of the pretty woman standing with a little boy in front of the Derna in Marseilles, just before they boarded.
Fela Feigin never wanted to come to Australia at all. She became a buyer in ladies clothes for the Myer department store but when she received a permit several years later from her sister in New York, she packed up and migrated to the United States with her husband and young son. ‘She thought her dream had finally come true, but it didn’t turn out that way,’ Cyla comments.
According to her, Fela’s son Danny couldn’t settle down in America. Although he was a brilliant student, he was unhappy at school. During the Vietnam War, he became a protestor and carried a banner in a protest march. Then one day he took a room in a hotel in Philadelphia and hanged himself at the age of twenty. He was their only son. ‘Fela always blamed herself for his death,’ Cyla muses, then adds ruefully, ‘We parents always blame ourselves, and when we’re not blaming ourselves, our children are blaming us!’
Not long after Danny committed suicide, Fela’s husband had a heart attack and died. ‘So her dream of life in America turned into a nightmare,’ Cyla sighs. ‘But Fela keeps very active. She has a brain like a computer, never forgets anything. To this day she gets up at six every morning and takes the subway to Brooklyn where she works in a clothing store! She never thinks about dying, like I do. Whenever I say that time is running out, she tells me to stop talking nonsense.’
We return to Cyla’s early years in Melbourne. Although she and Max alternated shifts during the week, at weekends all work stopped. Hospitable and energetic, Cyla always had a houseful of guests, many of them from the Derna. They sat around the small table eating her spicy borscht, herrings in sour cream, potato latkes and cheesecake while reminiscing about the voyage which, like many unpleasant experiences recalled in hindsight, provided an inexhaustible fund of amusing stories.
Eventually Cyla and Max saved enough money to buy a second-hand Renault, the smallest, cheapest car they could find, and went for drives on Sundays. Some nights they went dancing. Cyla sewed a dressy silver top for herself, bought Max a smart shirt, and looked admiringly into his dark eyes when they kicked up their heels on the dance floor.
As she cuts me another slice of her vanilla-scented cheesecake, Cyla becomes pensive. ‘We had a pretty jazzy life when I come to think of it. We worked hard but we were trying to make up for everything we missed during the war. If I had my life in Australia over again, with all the difficulties, I wouldn’t want to miss out on any part of it.’
As time went on, however, because of their separate work patterns, Cyla and Max began to lead increasingly separate lives, and their relationship suffered as a result. The war had deprived them of the best years of their life and now time was passing and so was their youth. She felt that unless they changed their lifestyle and spent more time together, they would continue to drift apart.
By 1958, ten years after arriving in Australia, they had saved enough money to put down a deposit on a business. Like many immigrants at the time, they bought a milk bar. It was in an excellent position in High Street, Armadale, and brought a good income, but Cyla came to hate the business. While their friends were free on weekends to go for drives and picnics, she and Max had to stand behind the counter in the milk bar serving customers. ‘We lived on the premises and it was seven days a week, no Saturdays or Sundays off. In addition to that, I think Slawa felt embarrassed about living behind a milk bar.’
Three years later, they sold it for a profit, but after looking around for some other business ended up buying another milk bar. Everything else was either too expensive, too risky or too unfamiliar. With all its defects, at least this was a business they knew how to run profitably. It enabled them to send Slawa to McRobertson, one of the best schools in Melbourne. And now that they had a larger deposit, they were able to buy a more expensive milk bar in Toorak Road for $10,000. This was a high-class place which sold exclusive chocolates, confectionery and ice cream. Three years later, after Slawa had matriculated, they sold it and started looking for a new business once again.
This time they tried something different. The wine and spirit shop was located in a narrow lane opposite Flinders Street railway station, which was the nerve centre of Melbourne. Although the shop had been neglected, the position was excellent and the business seemed promising. Max was in his element. He revelled in buying French wines and learning the trade, and soon built up a clientele of connoisseurs who trusted his judgment and enjoyed chatting to him about wine. For the first time since coming to Australia, he loved his work.
Cyla’s active mind was always looking for better ways of running the business. She wanted to expand by buying wine in bulk and turning the shop into a liquor supermarket, but Max resisted change. He liked the business as it was and was very particular about every detail. If she moved a bottle when he wasn’t looking, he could tell, and would immediately put it back the way it was. But in spite of his conservative personality, the business flourished.
The wine shop coincided with the best period of their life. Slawa obtained a pharmacy degree and when in 1968 she married another pharmacist, her parents gave her the kind of wedding they had never imagined possible when they arrived. They had reached the stage when they could buy whatever they needed and didn’t have to worry about the future. ‘Even though we’d been married for so many years, Max would often tell me I looked lovely,’ C
yla says with a nostalgic smile. ‘He was a Warsaw gentleman to his fingertips and knew how to make me feel good.’
When Max became ill in 1979, the doctor told her he had leukaemia. Understanding her husband’s nature, Cyla asked the doctor not to tell him. ‘So we played this game,’ she says. ‘I pretended nothing was wrong and he pretended that I didn’t know anything.’ Three months later, Max died at seventy-four when Cyla was fifty-nine. When the lease on the wine shop ran out, she was unable to get a new one so she sold the stock and closed the business.
With her daughter Slawa and her husband and two children living in Sydney, Cyla’s life became very lonely. As all newly single women discover, our society, like Noah’s Ark, focuses on couples and invitations dwindle for the widowed or divorced. Seven months after Max died, a friend offered to introduce Cyla to a widower. When Cyla protested that she wasn’t ready for a new relationship, her friend retorted, ‘If you’re going to wait until the time is right for you, maybe the right man won’t be there!’
When Ralph called her, they talked for hours. They shared a zest for life and a love of music and theatre, but what was more important, they felt good together. ‘That was twenty years ago and we’ve been together ever since!’ she says. Just then the door opens and Ralph comes in, an elderly man with a neat moustache and a friendly smile who calls her ‘Cyleczka’ and brings a girlish flush to her cheeks.
The next time Cyla and I meet, a few months later, she looks pale and sad. Ralph, her beloved companion, has died. ‘Even when he was dying, he didn’t lose his sense of humour or love of life. It sounds foolish but somehow I never really imagined that one day he wouldn’t be there,’ she says, and we both wipe our eyes. ‘It was a very different relationship from my marriage. When I was with Max, we were trying to establish ourselves and we worried about the future much of the time. But with Ralph it was all fun and pleasure. And now it’s over, and at eighty I have to learn to live alone.’
27
Like Cyla, many other women from the Derna were to discover with the passing years that widowhood is a stony and uncharted terrain. That’s how it was for Clara Kraus after her life partner died in 1977, and although she has come to terms with her single life, the vacuum that Jim has left can never be filled.
This is what she tells me in a Sydney restaurant one winter’s day, in a strong voice that belies her age and grandmotherly appearance. Apple-cheeked with a creamy complexion and soft white hair, eighty-seven-year-old Clara is forthright and energetic, with a formidable memory and a gaze that doesn’t miss a thing. I marvel that she had the energy to travel by train from Bowral this morning especially to meet me, but later when she describes her survival in a German forced labour camp, where she looked after one small child and gave birth to another in a bare hut in freezing conditions, I realise that for this determined woman no obstacle is too daunting.
Clara Kraus was relieved to see the last of the Derna when we docked in Melbourne in November 1948, but to her dismay the train to Sydney did not leave until the following day, leaving her and Jim stranded on the wharf in the rain with all their luggage and two little boys who couldn’t stop coughing. When they were told that they could stay on board overnight with other passengers in the same predicament, Clara was adamant that she would not spend another night on that hellship. ‘I’d rather sleep on a park bench in the rain,’ she said.
The only alternative was to find a hotel, but wherever they went, hotel clerks shook their heads, astonished that anyone would expect to find a room in Melbourne during Cup week. Although the Melbourne Cup had been run three days before, the socialites, graziers and punters were still clinking glasses at the balls and cocktail parties that continued throughout this gala week.
The city was buzzing with stories about sixteen-year-old Ray Neville’s spectacular 80 to 1 win on Rimfire, a six-year-old gelding that had recorded the fastest time ever run at Flemington. The grin that split the apprentice jockey’s bony face was still plastered over the front pages of the dailies being sold by paper boys shouting ‘Pie-pah! Get your pie-pah! Read all about it!’ on every city corner. The bakers’ strike, which meant that Melburnians literally had to eat cake that week, or at least pikelets and scones, occupied far less space in the dailies than the racing news. Premier McDonald’s warning about the striking miners, ‘We must fight the Reds on coal,’ received less prominence than gossip about the horse race that had brought the whole country to a standstill for three minutes several days earlier.
After spending the night in a room with the charm of a broom cupboard, the Kraus family boarded the Spirit of Progress for Sydney the following day. They had just settled down for the night and the boys had finally gone to sleep when the train lurched and ground to a halt in Albury. They had to wake the children and trundle to another platform with all their belongings to change trains, because the railway gauge in New South Wales was different from that in Victoria.
Morning had broken over Sydney by the time the locomotive pulled into the fuggy gloom of Central station. Worn out from months of travelling, they struggled into a suburban train with their luggage and watched anxiously for Bankstown as they passed a dreary expanse of red-roofed houses surrounded by ricketty fences in a city that, like a boring story, didn’t seem to know where to end.
Their sponsors owned a chicken farm in Canley Vale. The husband had been a chemist back in Czechoslovakia but as he couldn’t practise his profession in Australia without studying again, he had decided to try poultry farming. ‘I got the shock of my life when I saw that place,’ Clara tells me, putting down her fork on her plate of goulash as a look of disgust crosses her smooth round face. ‘It was filthy.’
We are having lunch at her favourite Hungarian restaurant in Centrepoint. Above the clatter of plates and hum of conversation all around us, she tells me about her son the doctor in Townsville. Peter, who as a six year old had watched tiny silver fish leap on deck during the voyage, became an obstetrician who now works at Townsville Hospital and lectures at the university there. It was thanks to Peter that I met Clara. Having read my memoir Mosaic , he contacted me to say that he and his family had also arrived on the Derna.
Leaning across the table towards me so she could be heard above the din at the next table, Clara shudders at the memory of the chicken farm. It was covered in dust and filth and the pungent smell of the chicken manure made her gag. Before stepping into the yard she would pray that the huge geese wouldn’t see her because she was terrified of their snapping beaks and loud hissing, while Peter and Paul became hysterical whenever the geese chased them. The boys were still coughing and whenever she took them on the train to see the doctor, the other passengers would glare in their direction.
A few weeks later, Clara took Jim aside before he left for an appointment in the city. ‘Tell me if the rest of Sydney is like this, because if it is, I’m not unpacking. I’m catching the next train out of here,’ she told him. As soon as he returned, she pounced. ‘Well, what is Sydney like?’
‘It’s a beautiful city,’ he reassured her.
‘Then let’s start looking for a place of our own,’ she said. ‘I can’t stand living here any more.’
But finding accommodation in 1948 was very difficult. As building had ceased during the war years, housing was scarce and landlords demanded large sums of key money. To aggravate the shortage, the government gave returned soldiers priority over civilians. While Clara was searching for a place to rent, aggrieved readers were bombarding the Sydney Morning Herald with letters blaming the migrants for the nation’s housing problems.
‘We read that 100,000 displaced persons will arrive in Australia in the next 18 months,’ wrote one reader on 18 November 1948. ‘Is there no way that the people of Australia can have some control over these sweeping invitations to displaced persons? Surely there is no room in Australia for hordes of foreigners until all Australians are housed? Like thousands of other Australian ex-servicemen and their wives, we are still unable to get a perman
ent flat or home.’
Mr Tasman Heyes, the secretary of the Department of Immigration, defended the government’s policy. ‘The arrival of migrants will not accentuate the housing shortage ,’ he wrote. ‘On the contrary, newcomers may be expected to relieve it. In no case will a displaced person be allowed to accept accommodation to the detriment of an Australian…The suggestion that displaced persons and migrants “buy off” landlords is absurd. These people have lost their possessions and their homes and most reach this country penniless. They come to Australia to find new homes and a new life. It is the moral duty of every Australian to welcome these fine people and give them every assistance to start a new life.’
While arguments about migrants and housing bounced back and forth, Clara heard that a cottage in Chatswood was about to become vacant. ‘I had no idea where Chatswood was or how to get there, but I couldn’t get there fast enough,’ she says. ‘If I could have run all the way, I would have!’
On the way to Chatswood, the train rumbled across the Sydney Harbour Bridge whose inaugural ribbon had been cut only fifteen years before. This huge iron web flung across the harbour linked the divergent parts of the sprawling city. While the boys excitedly craned out of the window for a better view, Clara became pensive as she thought of all the bridges she had already crossed in her life.
Several weeks earlier, a plan had been announced to erect another monumental structure on the shores of Sydney Harbour. ‘Only the prize-winning architectural design of an international competition, which I hope an Australian wins, will be worthy of such a site,’ said Eugene Goossens, chief conductor of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, quoted in the Sydney Morning Herald in October 1948. ‘An opera house we can be proud of will focus the international spotlight of culture forever on Sydney. Without it, we will stagnate in outer darkness.’ When his vision was finally realised, the Sydney Opera House became Sydney’s icon but by then Goossens had been unjustly disgraced and was no longer living in Australia.
The Voyage of Their Life Page 34
