The Voyage of Their Life

by Diane Armstrong

  They married at St John’s Church in Darlinghurst in 1950, followed by a reception at Cahill’s in Elizabeth Street, an elegant Australian restaurant which served toasted sandwiches, roast lamb with mint sauce, and blackberry flummery on silver platters and fine china. About ninety people came to the wedding, from both sides of the family. The only shipboard friend Dorothea invited was her German friend Gilda, but she was living in Melbourne and didn’t come.

  Looking fondly at her husband who has joined us for tea, Dorothea says, ‘We’ve been married for fifty years and I’ve never regretted marrying him for one single moment.’ Don’s hair has turned white but he is still lanky and has a dry sense of humour. When I ask what appealed to him about Dorothea, he doesn’t miss a beat.

  ‘She was the right shape,’ he laughs.

  ‘Oh, come on!’ Dorothea protests.

  ‘It’s true!’ he insists. ‘She was a bit plump, but everything was in the right place. She reminded me of my favourite film star, Madeleine Carroll. She was a great talker, got on with everyone, knew everyone’s name and everyone liked her.’

  ‘And we had lots of mutual interests,’ Dorothea adds. ‘I even got on well with his mother, though at first the idea of her son marrying a German girl horrified her.’ Don’s mother was fascinated to hear about Dorothea’s experiences in Germany on the rare occasions she talked about those dark times. ‘I tried to put the past behind me to such an extent that I ripped up my German work permit, which I should have kept because it was a historical document,’ she says.

  Having worked as a dental nurse in Berlin, she obtained a job with an orthodontist in Macquarie Street. Outfitted in her white shoes and starched white uniform, she liked chatting with the patients, but making appointments over the phone was difficult. She couldn’t understand the Australian accent and to make things worse her employer would rebuke her in front of the patients, which mortified her. When she came home in tears one evening, Fridl was indignant. ‘He can’t treat you like that! You’re not going back there,’ she said.

  ‘But I’ve left my shoes there,’ Dorothea lamented.

  ‘Doesn’t matter,’ Fridl insisted. ‘I’ll pick up your shoes and the money he owes you, and we’ll find you another job.’

  She was much luckier with her next employer. Jack Mantheim was a dentist from Frankfurt with whom Dorothea had such a good rapport that a few years later when her father, also a dentist, came out from Germany the two men became close friends. When her father celebrated his ninetieth birthday in Sydney, it was Jack who proposed the toast.

  Dorothea was very close to her father. In 1952 when the Australian Women’s Weekly ran an essay contest to celebrate the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, the topic was ‘The Happiest Day in my Life’. Tapping on her old Triumph typewriter, Dorothea described that miraculous day in Berlin in 1944 when she heard a knock on the door and there stood her father with a blanket over his arm and a piece of bread in his hand.

  In 1952, the year she wrote that essay, tragedy struck Dorothea. Her first baby was born prematurely and died three days later. ‘I wasn’t so young any more and I wanted a baby so much. She only weighed one and a half pounds. They put her in a humidicrib in the Crown Street Women’s Hospital and kept telling me not to worry, that she would be all right. I just had to drink lots of water so I’d have plenty of milk for her. Then on the third day a nurse told me the baby was dead. They whisked her away and buried her in the hospital grounds. I don’t even know where. Do you know, I only saw her once, a few seconds after she was born when they held up this tiny doll who was crying. I never even held her. When I think of it now, it makes me so angry, but we didn’t know any better in those days. We just did what we were told and didn’t question it.’

  Two years later, when Dorothea became pregnant again, she was very careful to make sure she didn’t go into labour prematurely. Evelyn grew into a quiet, shy child. Although she became a teacher, her sensitive nature found it difficult to cope with the impudent children who tugged her long plaits and answered back. She gave up teaching, married, had three children and has now launched into a new career: remedial massage, Dorothea says proudly.

  As we talk, it strikes me that a number of children from the Derna have suffered from depression, drugs, eating disorders and alcoholism. Perhaps the traumas and uncertainties of the migrants have affected the next generation who acted out the grief and displacement that their parents suppressed in their drive to get established. Were these children deprived of empathy by parents who focused on making a living? Or did they rebel against the high expectations to achieve the academic success of which their parents had been deprived? Did the past create a chasm between them, or did it become a burden?

  Dorothea says she started to put down roots in Australia after she got married. ‘I really blossomed in Australia,’ she says. ‘In Germany I was made to feel inferior because my father was born a Jew, but here I was accepted and for the first time in my life I felt valued for who I was. When I started dreaming in English, I knew I had made it!’ she laughs. ‘But I didn’t feel Australian until I went back to Berlin in 1956 with Evelyn. I didn’t have any problem with the young Germans but felt very suspicious of the older ones, especially when they told me that they had helped Jews and didn’t know anything about concentration camps.’

  While Don studied for his PhD in Australian history after retiring as an engineer, Dorothea typed his thesis on the same Triumph typewriter that she had used to type newsletters and correspondence for Ogden Hershaw. She uses it to this day. Its black leather case is worn now, but the machine is still in perfect working order, she assures me, as she points to the pound and dollar keys she had put in before she sailed on the Derna. These days Don lectures at the University of the Third Age, a voluntary educational organisation for retirees. He is the past president of the Sydney branch while Dorothea runs discussion groups in German, learns French and takes courses in drama and music.

  Several weeks after our meeting, Dorothea calls me. ‘You’ll never believe what I just found! I was going through an old drawer and found the letter that I typed about Ogden Hershaw, the one Dr Frant sent to the IRO!’ While we’re on the subject of the Derna , the conversation turns to her friend Gilda who had flown with her on the American transport plane from Berlin. ‘I haven’t seen her since the day we arrived in Australia,’ she says. ‘I invited her to our wedding but she didn’t come.’

  On a crisp winter’s morning a few months later, a sprightly old lady with hair as white as the daisies sprinkled all over the lawn is waiting for me at the Roseville Retirement Village in the Melbourne suburb of Doncaster. Gilda tells me in her chirpy manner that she has lived here ever since being widowed in 1996, and leads me to her neat cottage.

  It turns out that her real name is Gisa, but she called herself Gilda during the voyage because it sounded more artistic, more consistent with the image of the diva she hoped to become. When I mention her poem, ‘The Ballad of the Derna ’, Gisa frowns and shakes her head. She can’t remember writing it. ‘Don’t forget, I’m eighty-five now and my memory isn’t so good any more,’ she laughs. As we talk about the past, however, the memories come flooding back, and she recalls Fred Silberstein who flew out of Berlin with her and Dorothea on the American transport plane.

  ‘A very handsome fellow he was, blond and quite Aryan-looking, with a wonderful sense of humour. I wonder what happened to him. And the two German sisters in my cabin, Elfriede and Ilse, we had such fun together, we played card games and sang. The three of us sang the aria from The Magic Flute together,’ she reminisces and proceeds to hum it in a voice that quavers but is still melodious.

  Gisa’s dreams of becoming a singer were destroyed by the Nazis because her grandparents were Jewish, but after the war she sang for the Allied soldiers in Berlin. ‘After one concert, an American colonel drove me home in his jeep and as we bumped through the ruined streets, he looked almost upset,’ she recalls.

  Although Gisa hoped to continue
her musical career in Australia, it didn’t take her long to realise that this was an impossible dream. ‘I gave a few concerts for the ABC when I arrived, but there was no possibility of making a living as a singer here,’ she says. She shows me a photograph of herself at the time, her brown hair swept back into wings on either side of a parting, pulled back behind her ears and rolled on the nape of her neck. ‘I gave up my dreams of singing and became a radiographer instead,’ she says.

  It was through her new profession that she met her husband. ‘I was almost forty when I married Austin Jedick who was also from Berlin. My relatives had introduced us while I was studying radiography, but nothing came of it until a few years later, when I ran into him at the hospital where I was working. We were very happy together,’ she says. She’s animated and down-to-earth, and I can see that she accepts whatever life deals out and moves forward. At the moment she’s writing a book about Berlin.

  Inevitably we return to the Derna and Colonel Hershaw. ‘He was an unpleasant character and tried to seduce all the young girls. He propositioned me as well,’ she recalls. ‘Very blunt he was too. Just came out with it and asked me to sleep with him. And then there was that business with the Italian girl. It was terrible, she was so young and sweet. Everyone knew about it. I used to speak Italian with her. She was terribly upset, poor thing, so ashamed and worried about becoming pregnant. And she wasn’t the last one he seduced either. Not long after we arrived I was very pleased to read in the Argus that he had been dismissed from his post and would never be employed as an escort officer again.’

  And Dorothea?

  ‘Oh, she was attractive, vibrant and had a good figure, but she was flighty and flirtatious,’ Gisa smiles. ‘We were very different. A short time after we arrived she wrote to tell me that she had met THE man in her life.’ When I say that Dorothea is married, Gisa blurts out in an incredulous voice, ‘To the same man?’

  Now that I’ve stirred up the past, she would love to contact her old friend again, and on my return to Sydney, I give Dorothea her address.

  The way they describe it, their first meeting after fifty-two years was pleasant but not emotional. They had both changed, their lives had moved along different paths and too much time had elapsed for any real connection to be re-established, apart from superficial reminiscences of a journey shared long ago. But although neither of them thought they would continue the contact, the reunion brought them a sense of completion.

  30

  When I called him from Australia, Fred Silberstein’s reaction was so ebullient that I almost expected him to burst into my study through the telephone receiver. ‘Oh my godfathers! How did you find me? How did you know I was in Auckland?’ The popular young man who flew out of Berlin with Dorothea and Gisa was so friendly and eager to help that I felt I’d known him all my life. And when he gave me a brief outline of his extraordinary life story, and told me that he had photographs from the Derna , I could hardly wait to get there.

  Several weeks later I fly to Auckland. Fred comes to the hotel to welcome me as soon as I arrive. I’m delighted to find that he is a great talker who remembers details and needs very little prompting. In his cosy timber home in Blockhouse Bay, where he lives with his wife Billie, we sit on a small patio overlooking the garden. When I ask the name of a shrub I’ve never seen before, he shakes his head. ‘Don’t ask me about plants,’ he says and there’s a shudder in his voice. ‘After my experience at Gross Am Wannsee, I lost my taste for gardening.’ As it turns out, gardening is the only topic he refuses to discuss in the eight hours we spend talking about his excessively eventful life.

  Although Fred’s fair hair has turned silver, and his slim figure has thickened around the middle, his eyes are still the startling shade of blue that prompted an SS officer to suggest he should try to save his life by joining the Hitler Youth movement. In his understated way, Fred does not flinch from describing the medical experiments they performed on his unanaesthetised body at Auschwitz, the cannibalism he witnessed at Nordhausen, or the agony of staggering on the Death March with nothing to eat but snow.

  His voice sounds flatly matter-of-fact but there’s a wounded look in his eyes. This is a macabre dance we are engaged in. He is trying to distance himself from the pain while I pursue him so that I can smell the blood. I know that no matter what I ask and what he replies, he can never recreate and I can never recapture the terror and agony that he suffered when he was fifteen. At times I lack the words, or perhaps the courage, to ask the questions that his descriptions provoke. As he was able to live through it, the least I can do is listen, but listening is harrowing. So is talking, and occasionally Fred utters a sound somewhere between a cough and a sob, falls silent, and then says in a hoarse voice that it’s time for a break.

  Two years after the war ended, he found out that his sister Hansi, whom he had not seen since the day the Gestapo abducted him in 1942, was still alive. ‘Our reunion wasn’t as emotional as you might expect,’ he says. ‘I think by then she felt closer to the friends she’d made in the camps who had shared the same experiences. It probably sounds odd to you, but we didn’t hug and kiss or cry.’ I imagine that their experiences distanced them like a hundred years of unbridgeable sorrows. ‘I don’t get emotional with people even now,’ he adds, and I wonder whether this lack of emotion is the façade that has protected him from his deepest feelings and prevented him from grieving, breaking down and, what he probably dreads most of all, losing control.

  When Hansi told him that she was migrating to Auckland, where they had relatives, he decided to follow her. ‘I didn’t think ahead or plan in those days,’ he says. ‘I knew nothing about New Zealand, but somehow I felt it would all work out. I was quite content on the ship, I had enough to eat, a place to sleep, lovely girls like Magda to dance with, and no enemy wanting to kill me.’

  It was a sunny summer’s day in 1948 when the plane touched down at the small airport in West Auckland and the captain, in the immaculate uniform of the New Zealand Air Force, said, ‘Welcome to New Zealand.’ Hansi was waiting to meet him with their aunt and uncle, but when Fred kissed his uncle on each cheek, European style, he drew away in embarrassment.

  ‘Men don’t do that here,’ he said.

  On his first Friday in Auckland, Fred went to the synagogue service, something he had not done for many years. As a boy he had resented the religious observances imposed by his father, and after the war, he felt too disillusioned to pray. Knowing that millions had been butchered on account of their faith did not engender gratitude towards the Almighty. But now, some emotion he could not explain urged him to return to his roots and pray. At the start of a new chapter in his life, ancestral spirits were stirring in his soul and he felt a yearning to reconnect with his parents and his past, to cheat Hitler of victory.

  Soon after his arrival, Fred felt overwhelmed when his relatives organised a party in honour of his twenty-first birthday. Everyone else took this celebration for granted, but it was a long time since he had celebrated a birthday and to him it seemed miraculous. Wherever he went, the kindness of people in Auckland astonished him. Complete strangers would greet him in the street and ask how he was getting on. Sometimes they even brought him gifts, a comb or a handkerchief.

  Although his aunt and uncle wanted to help him financially, Fred was determined to be independent as soon as possible. Ten days after arriving, he started work at a hosiery factory. Until then, New Zealand had imported women’s stockings and socks from England, but had now begun manufacturing them. When Fred mentioned that he sometimes lost his way home because he had to change trams, every night his workmates would take turns to accompany him on the pretext that they were going that way themselves. He didn’t find out until much later that they had gone out of their way to escort him.

  Although Christmas was approaching and the radio stations continually played Bing Crosby’s hit song ‘I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas’, the sun was shining and the beaches were crowded. Towards the end of Decembe
r when Fred’s boss handed him an envelope with a bonus for the Christmas holidays, he couldn’t get over it. What a marvellous country this was, where you were paid not to work!

  Whenever Fred told his aunt and uncle that he wanted to become a chef, they would shake their heads. Not a suitable job for a Jewish boy, they said. Eventually his uncle persuaded him to go into a carpet-cleaning business with a local businessman, but after persevering for five years, he quit and started an apprenticeship with a cabinet-maker.

  As often as he could manage it, sometimes five nights a week, he went dancing. Ballroom dancing was sensual and sociable, and combined his love of music and meeting girls. At his favourite night club, the Wintergarten on the corner of Queen and Wellesley Streets, the jazzy décor with its glass floor transported him to a sophisticated world where all that mattered was elegance and grace. He appreciated the decorum that banned jitterbugging as too wild and insisted on formal dress. Men were required to wear suits while women wore formal gowns or cocktail dresses and gloves on the hands that rested lightly on his shoulder. Here he was no longer an impoverished refugee with too much past and not enough future, but a sought-after dance partner who spun his partner around the dance floor while the band wove ribbons of golden sound.

  With his handsome looks, fastidious appearance and impeccable manners, Fred was popular with the girls, but their parents were less impressed. As many of the Jewish orphans were to discover, they were not regarded as good husband material. Fred found out that as far as the parents were concerned, a big question mark hung over every aspect of his life. He had appeared out of the ruins of Europe with no money, profession or prospects. Some people said he was irresponsible for spending too much on girls and dancing and advised him to start saving money, but Fred had no intention of settling down. For the first time in his life he was carefree and having fun.