The Voyage of Their Life

by Diane Armstrong

  While Peter and the other boys were picking strawberries, in another part of Brisbane, Elsie Pataky was about to give birth. Exhausted from the voyage and her advanced state of pregnancy, she let out the last pleat in her navy skirt and thanked God she had only one month to go, because the skirt was now stretched to the limit and so was she.

  The Brisbane immigration officer who interviewed the young couple was charmed by the pregnant young Romanian woman who had a beguiling manner and spoke excellent English. When Elsie gave her aunt’s address at Kangaroo Point, he called a taxi and wanted to pay their three shillings and sevenpence fare because he saw that they didn’t have two pennies to rub together, but she was too proud to accept and took the bus instead.

  A few weeks later, Elsie’s cousin was shopping in the stocking department of David Jones. After she had given the saleswoman her address, a man standing nearby asked, ‘Did you say 33 Kangaroo Point Road? Do you have a relative who has just arrived from Europe?’ When the astonished girl nodded, he asked, ‘Has she had the baby yet?’ It was the immigration officer who had stamped Elsie’s passport.

  Their paths were to cross one more time. Eight years later, in 1956, when one of their friends in Budapest wanted to migrate, he told the Australian immigration officer that his sponsors were Elsie and Ignac Pataky. As soon as the officer heard the surname, he asked, ‘Did they by any chance arrive in 1948 when she was pregnant?’ It was the same man!

  As she relates this story, Elsie’s dark eyes sparkle with merriment. She’s a lively, outgoing woman who connects easily with people. She’s slightly hunched and walks with difficulty as the result of recent by-pass surgery and a mild stroke, both of which have taken their toll on her body but obviously not her spirit.

  In St Lucia where Elsie and Ignac live, timber cottages are partly concealed by bushes and trees line the winding streets. Jacarandas are in bloom and their fallen petals cover the pavements like violet eiderdowns. Today this area includes a university campus and bustles with students, but when they moved here fifty years ago, it was mostly woodland and open space.

  Their inviting bungalow, made out of native timber, was designed by their friend Roman Pawlyszyn, the Ukrainian architect they met on the Derna with whom they have remained close friends ever since. Elsie points proudly to the sideboard that her husband Ignac made, along with all the other furniture in their house. On the wall of Elsie’s office hangs a framed photograph of the Queen in crowned regalia, and another one hangs in the bedroom. A staunch monarchist just like her English mother, Elsie is delighted that most Australians voted against becoming a republic in the referendum of the year 2000.

  In the intricate chain of connections that has led me from one passenger to another during my search, I had heard about Elsie and Ignac from Kurt Herzog in Sydney.

  ‘Have you spoken to a Romanian couple called Pataky?’ he asked, and proceeded to describe Elsie’s terror on the train from Innsbruck to Marseilles when the guard took away their passports. It was Kurt who had collected money for their hotel room in Innsbruck when they were so destitute that they picked up mouldy bread in the street, and Kurt who had shared his five pounds with them in Fremantle so that Elsie could buy herself a pair of shoes.

  ‘Kurt is one in a million,’ Elsie tells me, as she takes fine bone china cups out of the cupboard to make tea. ‘One day I mentioned that I’d love to own some Rosenthal porcelain, and when our anniversary came round, he bought us a whole dinner set!’

  Returning to their first year in Brisbane, Elsie says that it was a disappointment in many ways. The food was tasteless and the wooden houses on wooden poles with toilets in the back yard reminded her of backward Romanian villages. In comparison with Brisbane, her Romanian town of Braila had been a sophisticated metropolis.

  But Elsie didn’t have much time to dwell on the food or the architecture. Soon after they arrived, she had a check-up at the Brisbane maternity hospital. She was eight months pregnant and had never been examined by a doctor. When the obstetrician saw her swollen legs and took her blood pressure, he admitted her immediately. Her kidneys weren’t working properly and both she and the baby were in such danger that for the next four weeks she wasn’t allowed out of bed.

  Their daughter Eve was born in December 1948 after being induced because Elsie’s condition was so serious that the obstetrician couldn’t risk waiting any longer. When I ask if it was traumatic having a baby in a strange country, she shakes her grey head vigorously. ‘It was wonderful! The Queen of England couldn’t have had better treatment! I arrived in hospital with nothing and left loaded up with clothes, a pram, a high chair and a cot. The sisters all knitted, crocheted and embroidered baby clothes for me! The chief obstetrician brought me a basket of red roses. Then the neighbours started coming over with things for me, for Ignac and for the baby. Don’t laugh! To this day I love hospitals!’

  Although the strangers were kind, the relatives were cool. Elsie missed her family and ached with loneliness. They had been sponsored by her aunt and uncle but their relationship was distant. Her aunt was so pernickety about her belongings that Elsie felt like an intruder, constantly under hostile scrutiny.

  ‘From the moment Ignac started working, I started saving to return to Europe,’ she says. On Fridays he received eight pounds and on Mondays she would deposit three pounds in the bank for their passage back. ‘Everything here was so strange, even the way they set the table. Looking after a baby was strange too. I did my best but I’d never had anything to do with babies, and it didn’t come naturally. Do you know, I never even saw a pregnant woman until I came to Australia! In Europe pregnancy was hidden, as though it was something to be ashamed of. In Romania only peasants walked around in the streets when they were visibly pregnant.’

  When Eve was old enough to go to school, they sent her to Brisbane Grammar even though the fees took all of Elsie’s earnings as a secretary: nine pounds a week. One day Eve told her mother with great pride that she was the only tradesman’s daughter in her class. They lived in one room and cooked on a primus stove so that the most complicated meal Elsie could cook was a pot roast. ‘But if I hadn’t been so lonely none of that would have mattered,’ she says.

  As soon as she could, Elsie studied accountancy at Queensland University and later worked at Brett’s in the city. ‘I didn’t like it,’ she recalls. ‘They were very tough in those days. If you spent one minute longer at tea break or went to the toilet, the boss would call you into his office and demand to know why.’

  After working at the university for twenty-three years, Elsie retired in 1990. ‘Since then I’ve become a bit depressed,’ she says. ‘I miss my work and have never been able to come to terms with retirement.’

  Her daughter became a microbiologist. When I ask whether she is still working, there’s a long pause. ‘Eve is a very sick girl,’ Elsie sighs. ‘She’s living on borrowed time. Five years ago they discovered a malignant tumour in her bile duct. The surgeon removed the tumour and reconstructed her bile duct with stents which have to be replaced every few years. She’s only the fifth patient in Australia to survive this operation. But if you met her you wouldn’t suspect anything was wrong because she’s so full of life. Eve has a wonderful husband and three brilliant children and that’s what keeps her going,’ she says. ‘Her daughter Tegan was awarded a $35,000 a year scholarship at Brisbane Grammar School and topped the school in Chinese and Science.’

  Among Elsie and Ignac’s friends from the Derna were the Hof sisters who had shared her cabin. For the first few years they were so close that when Elfriede and Ilse’s parents arrived in Brisbane, they became Eve’s surrogate grandparents, but over the years they drifted apart. ‘We got together again when we organised a reunion in 1998 to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Derna ’s arrival in Australia,’ Elsie says.

  Inside Elfriede’s spic and span cottage in a modest Brisbane suburb, the shelves have never seen dust. On the polished sideboard stands a framed photograph of Ilse’s three
granddaughters. ‘I regard them as my grandchildren too,’ says Elfriede who never married. She is a forthright no-nonsense woman with a hearty laugh and a strong voice in which I detect a German accent. With her jolly manner, lively interest in everything and her check shirt and sensible shoes, she reminds me of a hearty gym teacher. Her sister Ilse is quieter and less extroverted, but has a delightful sense of humour and a twinkle in her eye.

  As we talk, Elfriede takes out her thick morocco-bound diary whose pages are filled with neat German writing and reads out the names of the other young women in her cabin: Elsie, Lusia, Gilda and Dorothea. She quotes from the witty poem that Gilda composed about the voyage, but when I ask whether I could borrow the diary, she shakes her springy grey hair. ‘It’s too personal!’ she says, so while she is translating some of the entries, I can’t help wondering what she’s leaving out. In her systematic way, she has even recorded the menus. ‘Mutton, mutton, mutton. Outlandish—strong smell. Got sick of it. If I ever land I’ll never eat mutton again,’ she reads, and then looks up with a laugh. ‘And I never have!’

  29

  As the road sweeps down towards Sydney’s Middle Harbour with its red and blue spinnakers billowing in the breeze, I feel a surge of joy at the light-hearted beauty of this city. I’m particularly elated on this fresh spring morning because I’m on my way to meet Dorothea, whom I never expected to find.

  Elfriede had mentioned that Dorothea was in her cabin before moving in with the escort officer. Some of the male passengers, who had obviously eyed her with lustful thoughts, recalled her sunbaking on the deck outside Colonel Hershaw’s cabin while the breeze lifted her skirt over her suntanned legs. Emanuel Darin and Uno Mardus ran into her in Sydney some years later, but no one remembered her surname until I spoke to Elsie Pataky’s friend Kurt Herzog. ‘Ritter,’ he said with a reminiscent smile. ‘Dorothea Ritter.’

  Armed with the name of the girl who had inflamed the imaginations of so many men during the voyage, I scoured telephone directories in every capital city, but without success. Not that I was surprised. It wasn’t likely that such an appealing young woman had remained single. Scanning the passenger lists yet again, I noticed something that my previous search had missed. Alongside her name was the name of the Sydney relative who had sponsored her.

  Fortunately the sponsor’s surname was unusual and there were only three listings in the Sydney telephone book, although my excitement was tempered by the thought that Fridl was probably no longer alive. The young man who answered the phone said he didn’t know such a person, but a few moments later he exclaimed, ‘Fridl! She was my grandmother, but she’s been dead for years!’ He knew nothing about the young woman whom Fridl had sponsored from Germany.

  At the next number I dialled, the woman said, ‘Fridl was my mother-in-law!’ but went on to explain that since her divorce she had lost touch with the rest of the family. I was about to hang up when she added, ‘Come to think of it, there was a young refugee who was related to my mother-in-law. Give me a minute and I’ll try to remember her married name.’ I crossed my fingers hoping that she had a good memory. She did.

  As I dialled Dorothea’s number with trembling fingers, I wondered how to tackle this interview with the young woman who had been so notorious on the Derna. I would obviously need to be tactful and not frighten her off by asking indiscreet questions about her private life. Perhaps the opportunity to discuss this delicate matter would arise during our conversation.

  The woman who picked up the phone had a faint German accent and a youthful voice.

  ‘The Derna !’ she exclaimed, clearly astonished that I had tracked her down. ‘I can tell you an interesting story about that voyage,’ she said without any prompting on my part. ‘Have you heard about the escort officer from the IRO, our famous Colonel Hershaw? I was his secretary on the voyage! I can show you a photo we had taken in Port Said!’

  Dorothea’s house stands on the edge of a leafy escarpment surrounded by tall eucalypts, some of which have been blackened by recent bushfires. The moment she opens the door, I feel that the air around her is charged with vivacity and enthusiasm. Still pretty in her seventies, she has large blue eyes brimming with fun, a youthful face with a creamy European complexion and a neat figure. Her manner is disarmingly frank with that no-nonsense German directness which makes her an interviewer’s dream.

  ‘All I knew of Australia was that there were lots of sheep,’ she laughs. ‘I had no concept of what it was like and I didn’t really care. I just wanted to be free of memories of Germany and start a new life.’

  When Dorothea arrived in Sydney by train, her cousin Fridl, who had sponsored her, was waiting at the station with her daughter. They recognised each other straightaway, even though it was ten years since they’d last met. That had been in 1938, just after Kristallnacht, and their parting had not been cordial. ‘Fridl had come to visit my parents in Berlin but when she walked into my room she practically froze on the spot,’ Dorothea recalls. ‘Pasted on the wall was a picture of Hitler. I don’t really know why I had it there, because I’d already been expelled from school and from the youth group for having Jewish blood, so I certainly had no reason to like Hitler. Probably I got caught up in all the hysteria. I don’t know why my father didn’t make me take it down either, but when Fridl saw that picture she walked out of the house and never spoke to my parents again. Shortly after that she left for Australia.’

  Fridl didn’t hold that incident against Dorothea and when she heard that her cousin wanted to migrate, she sent her a permit. ‘I was very lucky to have a warm family here when I arrived,’ Dorothea says. ‘Fridl was much older than me and treated me like a daughter. I think she was surprised that the quiet withdrawn little girl she had known in Berlin had grown into a lively, confident young woman. I certainly started feeling a lot more confident when my suitcases turned up with all my clothes,’ she recalls. ‘They came on the next ship, just as The Honourable had said.’ She says Hershaw’s title with a sarcastic inflection and a mischievous smile, arousing my interest in her story.

  The true nature of her relationship with the man she facetiously refers to as The Honourable intrigues me, because sharing a cabin with a strange man in 1948 flouted the standards of acceptable behaviour of the time. Unfazed by my comment, Dorothea looks at me with that wide-eyed innocent expression of hers. ‘When he suggested I should move in, I thought, Why not? It’s better than sleeping in a crowded cabin in the hold. Anyway, I knew I could look after myself. Don’t forget, I’d been through a lot in Berlin with the Russians. I was almost raped twice but I got away, so I wasn’t frightened of Ogden Hershaw. He struck me as being honourable and trustworthy and anyway, he was old enough to be my father, so I saw no harm in it. Besides, he told me he’d notified the captain of our arrangement, so it was all above board. I know that people used to gossip but that didn’t worry me because I knew I wasn’t doing anything wrong. Everyone thought I was sleeping with him,’ she says cheerfully.

  ‘Were you?’ I ask.

  ‘No!’ she exclaims at once. ‘No! Maybe I would have if he’d been younger and I had been attracted to him, but I wasn’t! Once he tried to kiss me, but when I made it clear I wasn’t interested, he left me alone.’

  She shows me the photograph they had taken in Port Said. Ogden Hershaw is sprawled in his chair, leaning towards her, a long cigarette holder in his mouth, a fez on his head and one hand in his pocket.

  ‘See his pose? That shows you what he was like. Full of himself. After I heard what he did with that young Italian girl, I moved out and didn’t have anything more to do with him. I didn’t even say goodbye when we got to Melbourne.’ She still sounds angry with him after all these years.

  Finding suitable men to go out with in Sydney proved unexpectedly difficult. ‘I was often invited out, but the ones I met weren’t my type,’ she says. ‘They were too materialistic for my taste, too focused on their future, and I didn’t have much in common with them. I wondered if I’d ever meet my s
oulmate.’ Her unsettled state of mind must have shown on her face because when she sent her parents a photograph of herself from Sydney, they wrote back: ‘You don’t look happy. Sell your ring and come back to Germany.’

  One evening Dorothea was mulling over an invitation to attend a musical evening held at a private home in Strathfield. ‘Do come with us,’ Fridl urged. ‘You might meet someone new.’ Dorothea agreed to go although she didn’t expect much from this soirée which usually attracted much older people. Around fifty music-lovers, mostly German refugees, had already gathered when she arrived at the home of Harold and Ellen Brent, who happened to be the guardians of one of the orphans from the Derna.

  It was during that musical evening, somewhere between the Mozart and the Beethoven, that Dorothea met a lanky Australian with a craggy nose and an understated Anglo-Saxon sense of humour that made her laugh. She thought that he might be a Russian Jew, but in fact Don and his brother were the only non-Jewish visitors there that night. By a strange coincidence, this was the first time that Don had attended one of the Brents’ musical evenings, and he too had gone under duress, dragged along by his brother. To make conversation, Dorothea asked where he came from but when he said Kensington, she had no idea where that was. As the evening progressed, however, she found him interesting, attractive and refreshingly different from the other men she had met in Sydney.

  Her relatives had a European sense of propriety, didn’t want their young ward to be touched by scandal and did not approve of Don coming to visit her while they were out. Decent young women did not receive male visitors when they were alone at night, Fridl lectured her. When Fridl had finished, Dorothea smiled demurely. ‘Don came to propose,’ she said. ‘We’re going to get married.’