The Voyage of Their Life

by Diane Armstrong

  On Monday Bob started working on the steam machines that stretched the fabric. His workmate was a young Australian called Wally. Clicking his heels and bowing from the waist as he’d learned to do in Germany after the war, Bob said in his careful English, ‘How do you do?’ The factory hand gave him a peculiar look and muttered, ‘Get fucked’. In the days that followed, whenever Bob greeted him, Wally’s response never varied. When the boss returned and asked, ‘How are you, Bob?’ without hesitating Bob replied with a big smile, ‘Get fucked, Mr Theemann!’ He wanted the ground to open up and swallow him when the boss explained what that meant.

  When Bob collected his pay packet at the end of the week, he was disappointed to find only three pounds inside. Nobody had told him that to receive the full award wage you had to be twenty-one, and at nineteen he didn’t qualify. Upset about the misunderstanding, he was complaining to his cousin when a man nearby overheard the conversation and offered him a job in his engineering firm, picking up off-cuts of steel and iron which the machine shop cut into washers. This time when asked his age, he said twenty-two.

  The money stopped six months later, however, when along with tens of thousands of other labourers, Bob lost his job during the long coal strike in the winter of 1949. He was living with his father in a room in Kings Cross, a cosmopolitan area of cafés, bistros and jazz clubs popular with European émigrés. Bob and other unemployed migrants would meet every day in the Arabia Coffee Lounge, where the sympathetic waitress obligingly filled up their coffee cups for one shilling and didn’t mind how long they stayed. With its coffee houses frequented by artists, gypsies, poets and garrulous intellectuals, Kings Cross had a bohemian ambience that appealed to the Europeans far more than the Anglo-Saxon tearooms which served raisin toast in a hushed atmosphere. Hungarians, Czechs, Russians and Poles, jackets draped around their shoulders and cigarettes hanging out of their mouths, would sit around the small tables for hours arguing about the excess of politics in Europe and the lack of culture in Australia.

  When the strike ended, work resumed and so did Bob’s distress at being unable to speak English. The only time he relaxed was on weekends, when he met friends from the Derna on the steps at Bondi Beach. Some evenings he went dancing at the Trocadero, a glittering ballroom in George Street where hundreds of young people whirled around the floor to the music of a live band. It was thrilling to see the pretty girls in their full skirts and well-brushed hair, but nerve-wracking to gather the courage to approach them because the response was often a rejection. Bob felt hurt when the girl of his choice would say that she didn’t feel like dancing, but a moment later stepped onto the dance floor with someone else. Being a refugee meant losing not only your home, your country and your family, but also your self-esteem. Many Australian girls mistrusted ‘the reffos’ because their manner was too intense, their taste in clothes was too flamboyant and their English too hard to understand.

  Bob’s penthouse apartment gives sweeping views of the ocean across Bondi’s red tile roofs. His walls are a gallery of Australian paintings. A solitary Aboriginal boy standing in an empty landscape, looking as lonely as Bob must have felt back in 1948, a nineteenth-century painting depicting soldiers and squatters, and a bush scene reminiscent of Heysen. His quick brown eyes follow my gaze. ‘Well, after all, I am an Australian,’ he says when I comment on his choice of art. ‘I may not sound it, but that’s what I am.’

  On the bookshelf, the photograph of the bald man with a moustache and a bony face is of his father who also came out on the Derna. Moishe Grunschlag had never wanted to come to Australia. His first choice was America, where his sister had migrated, and on his first Monday in Sydney, he was already at the United States consulate applying for a visa which was never granted. ‘My father was miserable in Australia,’ Bob recalls. ‘He’d had a heart attack in Germany and the doctors advised him not to do any manual work, so he stayed home all day with nothing to do, brooded and became depressed.’

  In an effort to make his father feel useful, Bob would hand him his pay envelope each week and let him run the household, but that failed to dispel the gloom. Bob found it wearing to live with a demoralised man. It is difficult for children to cope with the role reversal when parents lose confidence and need parenting themselves, especially a man like Bob’s father whose energy and strength had buoyed them up and helped them to survive during the time he continued to relive in his nightmares.

  After his mother had been brutally murdered by the Nazis in their home town Bolechow, Bob with his father and older brother hid in a bunker in the forest where they lived like rats squeezed into a tiny lice-infested hole in the ground. Crazed from the itching and the claustrophobic conditions, Bob and his brother had been on the point of running away many times. Taking their chances with the Ukrainian Nazis who roamed the woods was preferable to this ceaseless torment, but each time their father had managed to persuade them to stay in the bunker. It was tragic to see him now, slumped in his chair, unable to make any decisions.

  Eventually anger aroused Moishe Grunschlag to action. When the German government refused his application for a pension, he accused the solicitor in charge of the case of working against him, packed his bags and returned to Germany to fight for his rights. ‘That’s when he stopped being depressed,’ Bob says. ‘In Germany he could speak the language so he wasn’t cut off from everything as he was here. And he had an aim in life again.’

  Unlike his father, however, Bob had no desire to leave and as time went on, he came to appreciate the easy-going attitude of Australians. ‘I can tell you the exact moment when I realised what a wonderful country this was!’ he exclaims. ‘I was working at Standard Telephones at the time and one of the guys said, “In company you never discuss religion or politics in case you offend people. ” That was the best news I’d ever heard. Coming from a country where I was discriminated against because of my religion, I thought it was marvellous that here the topic of religion was taboo.’

  Bob came to appreciate other Australian traits as well. ‘Before long I learned to be a real Aussie and drink beer, especially when I got a job as a store manager in Broken Hill,’ he says. ‘I liked the place and the pay was terrific, but after two years I thought I’d better get back to Sydney. I was becoming a real piss-pot!’

  Back in Sydney he became the manager of a menswear shop in Park Street. At about that time he fell in love with Moyna Draper, a nurse who was third generation Australian. After becoming engaged in 1959, they were driving to Parkes to visit her family for Christmas when she turned to him and said, ‘You know, if you were Catholic, I couldn’t bring you home.’ What an incredible country, Bob thought. You could bring a Jew home but not a Catholic!

  When their car broke down outside Young, every driver along the road stopped to try and help, but the motor was dead and eventually Bob and Moyna fell asleep in the car. In the morning, a smiling face peered in through the window. ‘I’m Tom,’ the man said. ‘Come in and have some breakfast. My son-in-law will be here soon and he’ll know what the problem is.’ When the son-in-law said the car needed a new starter, Tom went round to ask the garage owner to open up. Bob marvels about it to this day.

  ‘Can you imagine? It was Christmas Day! He fixed the car and wouldn’t take a penny from us. A few years later when I was driving through Young again, I bought a case of beer, dropped in to see Tom and we cracked a few bottles together.’

  Bob looks thoughtful. ‘That’s what was so loveable about this country: the people. Unfortunately the Australian of today isn’t like that. Maybe we brought about the change, the Europeans and the others, with our own ways and our prejudices. The Depression here bonded people together—they suffered and helped each other, but the young generation has no community spirit any more.’

  Bob and Moyna’s families were both opposed to them marrying on account of their different backgrounds. ‘But Moyna and I weren’t put off by what anyone thought, and went ahead. I only had one request,’ he recalls. ‘Although I wasn’
t religious, I asked if our children could be brought up Jewish, and she agreed.’

  After trying a variety of jobs, Bob became a traveller for ladies dresses for Salezy Potok, whose daughter Alina he had befriended at the DP camp in Munich before they boarded the Derna. Recalling the miserable voyage with the arrogant chief purser, Bob mentions that his friend Alina had a romance with one of the officers.

  When I ask Alina about this several weeks later, however, she shakes her head.

  ‘There was no romance whatsoever,’ she insists with a dismissive wave of her hand. ‘Michael let me do my washing and ironing in his cabin, but that was all. I don’t even know how we communicated because I couldn’t speak English or Greek.’ Then she shows me a photograph of Michael Sikoutris, the handsome young Greek officer, and turns it over. On the back he has written: ‘For remembrance to Alina with love. Derna 2. 11. 48.’

  Alina Jarvin is a tall woman with an air of sophistication. Her short hair is well-cut and her linen slacks are not creased, even when she stands up. At the age of thirteen she fended for herself for three years during the Holocaust, and managed to survive alone and on the run. She crossed borders without documents, constantly searching for a safe hiding place, as one by one, nannies, chauffeurs, cousins, peasants and strangers offered a reluctant refuge and then betrayed or abandoned her.

  Alina narrates this succession of terrifying incidents in a flat, unemotional voice as though all this happened to someone else. And in a sense that’s true. Most of us who lived through traumatic times have distanced ourselves from them emotionally. Detachment was a survival strategy which became a way of life.

  ‘I don’t know where I found the strength to do all the things I did, or how I sensed what to do and what not to do,’ she shrugs. ‘I didn’t talk about these things for years because it just seemed too unbelievable that a thirteen-year-old girl had done all that.’

  The only time she shows any emotion is while recalling her return to Poland from Austria after the war. ‘I was skinny and sick and thought that all the Jews had been killed. Suddenly on the tram, I heard two women speaking Yiddish and knew I wasn’t alone after all.’ Tears well in her eyes.

  Having come to Australia with her father under duress, because like Helle Nittim she had fallen in love at the DP camp in Germany and didn’t want to be parted from her sweetheart, Alina was miserable in Sydney. ‘Our sponsors disapproved of me from the moment I arrived,’ she shrugs. ‘It seems I never did the right things, didn’t keep the right company and didn’t dress right. They were scandalised when a postcard arrived from Michael, my friend from the Derna, saying he could still see me sitting on his bed! They were appalled when I started going out with a Greek guy I’d met on the ship whose family had a milk bar. On top of that, I’m no good at languages and it took me two years to feel confident enough to speak English. All I wanted to do was run away and join my boyfriend in Israel.’

  Alina’s father, who had a degree in economics, started working in a shirt factory when he arrived, and later went into business with his ship-mates Emanuel and Raisa Darin, making shirts to measure in the Royal Arcade. By the time Alina married Marcel Jarvin in 1951, she was still working with her father who was manufacturing dresses under the ‘Maxwell’ label.

  ‘Bob Grunschlag worked for my father as a salesman, and I often saw him and his wife Moyna who was a lovely, genuine person,’ she recalls. When Alina’s father became ill, he asked Bob to run the dress factory.

  Ten years later when business slumped, Bob called another friend from the Derna to discuss what he should do. Abe Goldberg, whose opinion he often sought, had just acquired Sydney Woollen Mills at the time and suggested that Bob should take over the dyehouse.

  The new enterprise took off like a rocket. Their partnership worked well for three years, until Abe’s oldest daughter got married and he made his son-in-law manager of the dyehouse. ‘That’s when my problems started,’ Bob says. ‘We didn’t see eye-to-eye about running the business and had a big row. Naturally Abe stood up for his son-in-law so we fell out, which was a shame because we’d been friends since the Derna. Much later Abe went bankrupt and moved to Poland to avoid being arrested by the Australian government for fraud. When I was in Poland a few years ago and tried to see him, I got a message from an intermediary to leave the name of my hotel and he’d get in touch. I said, if he doesn’t trust me with his address, he needn’t bother.’

  Moyna was diagnosed with cancer in 1978 and died two years later. ‘In spite of all the dire warnings and predictions about mixed marriages, we had twenty happy years together until she left me for good,’ he sighs. Meanwhile in Germany, his father had become blind. As he couldn’t look after himself any more, Bob brought him back to Australia so that he could look after him. ‘He had become totally paranoid and accused everyone, including me, of trying to cheat him. You can imagine how distressing that was, but by then he was so irrational that you couldn’t convince him. He died two years later.’

  Throughout the years, Bob never spoke about his war experiences. ‘Whenever I started talking, I would get so choked up I couldn’t go on and then the nightmares would start. But in 1985 when my eldest daughter Caron was visiting a friend of mine, she broke down and said that I never told her anything about myself, that she didn’t know anything about my past. My friend warned me that if I didn’t start talking, I would lose my daughter.

  ‘So I started talking. Caron was a very sensitive girl. She was already upset with me because I hadn’t told her that her mother was dying when she was eleven, and now she felt I was keeping the story of my survival from her as well. Perhaps she thought I didn’t trust her or wanted to exclude her from my life.’

  Ten years later, when Bob and his brother Jack returned to Bolechow with a group of survivors and television crews from SBS and Germany, Caron went with him. By that time, Petro Ilnitsky, the Ukrainian farmer who had saved their lives by supplying them with food, was dead, but they had kept in touch with his family and helped them financially over the years. ‘It was very emotional to see Ilnitsky’s daughter Kasia again. I remembered her as a little girl with blonde plaits, but now she was a grey-haired woman,’ he says. He had made the journey to his birthplace to find the bunker where he had spent the worst year of his life. The locals led them to the site of the mass grave where their mother’s body had been hurriedly covered by quicklime and soil, but no matter how hard they tried, they could not find the bunker.

  ‘I should have known I wouldn’t find it, because a forest doesn’t stay the same for fifty years,’ Bob says. ‘It’s strange, because the thought of finding that bunker haunted me for so many years. But in the end just being in that forest was enough. When I stood in the shade of those birch trees and smelled the undergrowth, the need to see the bunker just melted away. It was no longer necessary to see it to validate the whole experience. The most positive result of the trip was that it gave Caron a better understanding of me and cemented our relationship. I had a sense of closure.’

  Several months later, when Bob came to my talk at the Museum of Sydney about the Derna, Caron was sitting beside him.

  Shortly afterwards, it was Bob’s turn to speak to a gathering at a museum. There wasn’t a murmur in the hall at the Museum of Newcastle in the year 2000 while he told a group of high school students about the courage and compassion of the Ilnitsky family. ‘When I was thirteen, about your age, I had to hide in a small cave in the Carpathian Mountains for a whole year in 1943,’ he began. ‘Sixteen of us were squashed together in a bunker barely big enough for six. We couldn’t even stand up and slept in shifts. We had to cook at three in the morning so that the smell of food and smoke from the wood fire wouldn’t give us away. The lice were so bad that there were times I thought I wouldn’t be able to stand it. If a Ukrainian farmer hadn’t risked his life and that of his family to feed us, I wouldn’t have survived.’

  It’s taken Bob almost fifty years to be able to talk about the terror and humiliation he suffere
d during the Holocaust. ‘I’m not used to speaking in public, and talking about those times brings it all back, but I decided to tell my story as part of the Courage to Care project because schoolchildren are our future. It’s important to show them what hatred and discrimination can lead to, and that even an ordinary person can make a difference,’ he says.

  Like Bob, Alina also started talking about the past in recent years. By then she had divorced her husband and wound up the Astronaut travel agency she had opened in Double Bay twenty years earlier. ‘The travel business has completely changed,’ she says. ‘The margin of profit is minimal, and people don’t come for advice any more: all they want is the cheapest prices.’

  Reflecting on her life in Australia, she says, ‘I feel Australian but there’s no emotion attached. It’s the only place I could live in, the best place to be, but I don’t feel any affinity with the country. Somehow life here doesn’t seem to have any purpose. No matter how hard I try, I can’t get passionate about Aborigines, Mr Howard’s preamble to the constitution, or the republic. I’m interested but it doesn’t touch me. My heart isn’t here, but it isn’t anywhere else either.’

  It was only after she had been interviewed for Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation about her Holocaust experiences that Alina began to talk about the past.

  ‘At first I found it very hard. A lot of anger came out,’ she says. Like Bob, she has taken part in the Courage to Care project. ‘When I spoke to schoolchildren in Armidale, their comments made me feel I’d done something worthwhile. I got involved in that project because it doesn’t focus solely on the Holocaust. Other terrible things are happening in the world. It’s time to move on and see the Holocaust in a wider context.’