The Voyage of Their Life

by Diane Armstrong

  But that experience did not diminish his admiration for Australians. ‘It seemed to me that they were a completely different calibre to Europeans,’ he says in his slow Hungarian accent. ‘Helpful, courteous, down-to-earth, open. Maybe they didn’t love us, but they didn’t hate us either. I had Catholic workmates who knew I went to synagogue and respected me for it. If I had an abscess or a cold, next day Mary McKenzie would bring me some remedy. I’m not saying that all Europeans were bad, but when the crunch came they didn’t stand with us. We couldn’t rely on them. But here I didn’t feel like an outsider.’

  One thing that puzzled him was hearing Australians talk about the hard times during the Depression. ‘It didn’t make sense to me,’ he says. ‘With such a huge country, so much sunshine, a garden for every house and so much land everywhere, how could people go hungry? In Czechoslovakia, every little yard was productive and even in the ghetto we managed to grow a few vegetables.’

  Bill has never returned to Czechoslovakia. ‘Too many painful memories, no family left,’ he says. ‘I don’t want to go back and dig up the sad past. But I can tell you this much: I never spoke about the past at all until recently. That’s when I woke up that if we don’t talk about the Holocaust, soon there will be no one left who can.’ When he does talk about his experiences at Auschwitz, however, he breaks down and his fiercely protective wife Emi bursts in to suggest we change the subject.

  Bill’s son, whom he describes as a ‘dinky-di Aussie’, works with him in his busy panelbeating business. ‘I can tell you this much,’ he says, ‘if anyone had asked me what I hoped for in Australia, I wouldn’t have written half of what I did achieve. I know I owe it all to Mrs Freiberger, and I feel bad that I don’t go and see her as often as I used to.’

  Several months later I meet the woman whose tireless efforts on behalf of the orphans enabled them to leave Communist Czechoslovakia and start a new life here. Anita Freiberger, whose surname now is Glass, is old and frail and moves slowly with the aid of a walking frame.

  ‘Would you believe it?’ She turns to her devoted friend Greta Silvers, who has picked her up from the Montefiore Home on the other side of Sydney and brought her to her apartment for the day, as she does every two weeks. ‘I’ve lived in the Montefiore Home for ten years now,’ she says. ‘I hate it. I don’t have anything in common with the others. My daughter is buried in Israel and that’s where I want to be.’

  Greta is one of the orphans whom Anita Glass helped bring out to Australia.

  ‘I can’t forget how fantastic she was to us all,’ Greta says. ‘She put some of us up in her own flat in Prague for weeks and looked after us like a mother.’

  Mrs Glass demurs. ‘I did it because I felt sorry for the poor children,’ she says. ‘They had no home, no parents, nothing to hold on to. I wanted them to have a new life and a new family that cared about them. I remember them all, especially André Wayne.’ Her face lights up when she mentions him. ‘He is like my own son and comes to visit me to this day, but not many of the others do. They are too busy with their own lives.’

  41

  As she takes visitors around the Sydney Jewish Museum, the elderly volunteer guide with crinkly reddish hair introduces herself as Yvonne. In between explaining the exhibits, she describes her own experiences: how she felt when at fifteen she was deported to Auschwitz, where the rest of her family were killed; what went through her mind when she was pushed into a gas chamber and waited for the lethal gas to be pumped in; and then how she felt when she was pushed outside again, because on this unique occasion the efficient machinery of the death factory had broken down.

  Most of the visitors are awed at meeting an actual survivor, but it’s Yvonne’s spirit that makes the most profound impression, because she speaks without self-pity and has rebuilt her life without bitterness. ‘While I’m talking to the schoolchildren who come to the museum, I sometimes catch myself wondering whether I dreamed it all,’ she tells me as we talk in her Maroubra home. ‘Only last week after I finished telling my story, one of the students asked me how I could still believe in God after everything that happened to me and my family. I told her that every life has its ups and downs and believing in God makes it easier to cope with the bad times, because you don’t feel you’re alone. “I wouldn’t be here talking to you today if I didn’t believe, ” I told her. The girl was in tears. “You know, Yvonne, when I’m older I’ll believe, like you, ” she told me.’

  Like most of the orphans from the Derna, Yvonne Engelman did not talk about her experiences for over forty years. ‘I didn’t want to burden my children; I wanted them to grow up normally without hangups, and I didn’t want them to feel upset and be sorry for me,’ she says. ‘When I first volunteered to be a guide at the museum, it was very hard. I would cry, become very emotional and have nightmares afterwards. But now I can talk to groups without breaking down. Inwardly I’m still very upset, but at least I can talk about it instead of bottling it all up. In a way it’s like therapy.’

  Yvonne’s gift for making friends was already apparent on the Derna. Soft and affectionate without being flirtatious, she was popular with boys and girls alike. ‘I wasn’t a threat to anyone because my fiancé was waiting for me in Sydney,’ she laughs. ‘Knowing that I wouldn’t be alone in Australia made the voyage much easier for me than it was for some of the others.’

  While we talk about the voyage, Yvonne mentions my parents. ‘Your mother was a very pretty blonde, and your father was distinguished-looking with grey hair. He walked with a limp,’ she recalls. ‘They spent most of their time with the Frants.’ I’m surprised that she even remembers me. ‘You were a well-behaved little girl with plaits.’

  When she arrived in Sydney, the Jewish Welfare Society found her a room in the home of an Englishwoman in Darling Point. ‘I couldn’t communicate with her at all. That was bad enough, but I dreaded when the phone rang because she would tell me to answer it, but I couldn’t speak English.’ After six weeks of English lessons organised by the Welfare Society, Yvonne’s English improved sufficiently for her to start working in a photographic studio in Kings Cross. ‘The Jewish community here were very hospitable. People took us out on Sundays and Rabbi Porush’s home was always open so we could come and talk over any problems.’

  Yvonne and Johnny married the following year. ‘It was a lonely life in the suburbs, because Johnny had two jobs so I was on my own a lot,’ she says. ‘Some of our group from the boat, including Sam and Esther, kept in touch, but I didn’t feel I belonged because the Australians were suspicious of newcomers and didn’t open their doors to us, but I didn’t trust strangers either. After our son Michael was born though, I started to feel more at home.’

  Thinking back about her life in Australia, she says, ‘I’ve been very lucky here. Michael has a PhD in applied maths, my other son is a gastroenterologist, my daughter is a teacher and we have eight grandchildren.’ Her eyes mist over. ‘For a Holocaust survivor to get married and have children and grandchildren is a miracle, something I never even dared to dream about.’

  One of Yvonne’s friends on the Derna was petite dark-haired Kitty Lebovics, whose feline prettiness appealed to many of the boys. She is still petite, although the hair that frames her small features has now turned to pepper and salt. When she greets me in her white mansion in Bellevue Hill, she is stylish in a grey dress with a long burgundy cardigan and fine stockings with black dots.

  Speaking in her girlish voice, softening ‘r’s to ‘w’s, Kitty seems more eager to tell me about her husband than about herself. ‘Erwin is an architect and developer. He has changed the skyline of Sydney,’ she says proudly. She seems to be a very private person, ill at ease talking about her own life, especially the tragic war years. After we’ve been talking for over an hour, flitting from one subject to another, she asks whether I mind if she smokes. As soon as she inhales, she relaxes visibly.

  ‘I cried all night before we docked in Melbourne,’ she says. ‘I was sixteen, didn’t know wh
ere I was going, couldn’t speak English and didn’t know anyone here. But by the time I disembarked, I dried my eyes and calmed down. I told myself to take life as it comes, work hard, and do whatever I had to do to live honestly and support myself. One door closes but another one opens. After all, I’d lived through so much, what more could happen to me? You know, I’ve never had any counselling—I’ve always worked through problems on my own.’

  Listening to her I am struck by the difference in attitudes since we arrived. When I witnessed a fatal road accident several years ago, two sympathetic policemen came to my home later that week to ask whether I needed counselling. In 1948, however, the refugees who landed here after witnessing countless atrocities, losing their loved ones and enduring years of persecution, received no psychological help. In fact they were encouraged to keep their memories and feelings to themselves because it was considered bad taste to air personal problems in public. Everyone was expected to put a smile on their lips, keep their troubles to themselves and get on with life. And, like Kitty, that’s what most migrants did.

  Although she was not aware of it until she arrived, she did have a relative in Sydney. Her great-uncle had fled from Czechoslovakia in 1938, anglicised his name to Selby and opened a handbag factory called Gold Seal. Having noticed his niece’s name on the Derna’s passenger list, he was waiting for her when she arrived. For the first two years she worked in his factory, and occasionally baby-sat Yvonne and Johnny’s little boy Michael at weekends.

  In 1950, Kitty married Eugene Grunstein, another Czech orphan who had come out on the Derna. Shortly after their wedding they moved to the Snowy Mountains at the instigation of their ship-mate, Bill Singer. Bill’s connection with the Snowy River Hydro-Electric Scheme had begun as a result of a business he had started with a Czech tailor. Construction of the dam using an army of migrant labour had begun the previous year, and the labourers often came to Sydney when they had a few days off to stock up on items that were not available in the camps. Without having any premises, Bill and his partner hit on the idea of outfitting them. Bill, stationed outside Sydney Town Hall, would measure them up for suits right there in the street and the following week, when the suits were ready, he delivered them to the migrant camps.

  From his frequent visits to the Snowy Mountains, Bill found out that they were looking for someone to run the canteen. After winning the tender, he suggested that Kitty and Eugene should manage it for him. His offer came when they were trying to save up to buy a flat and as the money was good, they accepted. ‘We sold soap, beer, soda water, toothpaste, all the necessities,’ Kitty recalls. ‘The work was all right and we got on well with the workers, but conditions were very primitive. Whenever I had a shower, Eugene had to stand guard outside because there were hardly any women there. We lived in huts and used communal bathrooms. It was like the Derna all over again!’

  Their marriage didn’t work out and they divorced a few years later. ‘It turned out that we had different ideas about what we wanted out of life, but we parted friends,’ she says. In 1962 she married Erwin Graf, an architect who migrated from Hungary and formed a company called Stocks & Holdings. Their daughter Nicky is a pathologist and their son Michael works for IBM. Talking about her children, Kitty says, ‘When I think about how I coped during the Holocaust, and afterwards when I arrived here, I wonder if my children would manage in those circumstances. But come to think of it, I was a spoiled little girl at home and I survived.’

  She waves her small hand to indicate her luxurious surroundings. ‘All I really wanted when I arrived was a simple, secure life where I wouldn’t have to live in terror or hide under the bed so I wouldn’t be killed. Life is give and take, but I never expected it would give me so much after taking so much away.’

  42

  Bronia and Heniek Glassman arrived in Melbourne on a Friday and by the following Monday, Bronia was already working in a dress shop. During the long days she spent on her aching feet serving capricious customers, she sometimes wondered why she hadn’t accepted the offer made by an American millionaire to sponsor her to the United States and pay her university fees. But she knew the reason. By the time the American permit arrived, she had fallen in love with Heniek who was set on migrating to Australia.

  Having worked in textiles in the Polish city of Lodz before the war, Heniek had no trouble obtaining a job in a Melbourne textile factory. He hadn’t been there very long when he looked up from his machine one morning and saw a strangely familiar face at the other end of the workroom.

  ‘Who’s that?’ he asked the foreman. ‘I think I know him.’

  ‘You’re crazy, you can’t possibly know him,’ the foreman argued. ‘That’s Mr Fink, the boss. He just got back from overseas.’ Heniek slapped his forehead with his hand. Now he knew where he had seen the man before. It was the textile manufacturer he had met in Lodz back in 1936 who had offered him a job in Australia, and whose signature, by sheer coincidence, was scrawled on the bottom of his landing permit twelve years later.

  ‘Tell Mr Fink that Glassman from Lodz is here,’ he told the incredulous foreman, who went off shaking his head but ran back a few moments later, more amazed than before.

  ‘The boss wants to see you!’ he said.

  Mottel Fink shook Heniek’s hand and showed him around the factory. ‘Remember I told you one day you’d be a partner in this factory?’

  ‘One day I’ll have my own factory,’ Heniek retorted. Mottel Fink couldn’t help smiling at the chutzpah of this refugee who had just arrived with his wife and mother-in-law without a penny to his name.

  Not only did the Glassmans have no money, but they were already in debt because of the Derna’s late arrival. Bronia’s cousin had found them a room in a weatherboard cottage in Acland Street, but the Czech landlord who had kept the room vacant for six weeks demanded rent for that period. As the rent was three pounds—half of Heniek’s weekly wage—they owed eighteen pounds before they received their first pay packet.

  By saving Bronia’s wages each week, they managed to repay the landlord and as soon as they could afford it, they rented a separate room for Bronia’s mother. After being forced to sleep in different cabins on the ship for almost three months, the young couple were desperate for a room of their own.

  In the cosmopolitan atmosphere of St Kilda, with its babble of foreign tongues, bustling streets and busy cafés, Europe did not seem so far away, but it didn’t take long for them to appreciate the advantages that Australia offered.

  ‘From the moment I went out into Acland Street I knew this was the country for me,’ Heniek says in a Yiddish-Polish accent. ‘By me, a place where you can earn enough to eat and pay your rent is a beautiful country. I can tell you, in Lodz people used to work their guts out, but at the end of the month they had to borrow from everyone they knew just to pay the rent. After I worked here a few weeks it was Christmas and they gave me holiday pay. I couldn’t believe it. Ten pounds in my pocket! I never changed my mind about Australia or Australians, and believe you me, we’ve had some hard times here.’

  For Bronia, the hardest time began with her pregnancy the following year. The nausea which is usually confined to mornings persisted throughout the day. Unable to stop retching and vomiting, she had to give up her job at the dress salon.

  ‘It was even worse than being on the Derna,’ she shudders. ‘The only thing that cheered me up was knowing that if I hung on for a few more months, until the baby was born, everything would be all right.’

  But after Judy was born, the nausea was replaced by depression. Now that she had a baby of her own, the scenes she had witnessed at the hospital in the Krakow Ghetto began to haunt her. She was unable to erase those memories of German guards tearing warm babies out of their mothers’ arms and tossing them out of the window as though they were bundles of rags. In her head she could still hear the mothers’ demented screams.

  Now, as we talk in their bright bungalow in Caulfield, she looks at me with a sad expression. ‘The things I
saw during the war changed me. In the camp I started hating myself because I became a different person. Before the war, whenever I saw a pauper, I always stopped to give him money. When a schoolfriend had no lunch, I would share mine with her. Kindness was second nature to me, a reflex. But in the camps I became numb; I didn’t feel anything any more. When they took my best friend away after one of their selections, it made as much impact on me as if she’d gone on holidays to Krynica. On the Death March, we had to lie in the snow at nights and by morning many people lay dead. When I saw that the woman lying next to me didn’t get up because she was frozen stiff, I just stepped over her and kept going.’ There’s an air of desperation in Bronia’s voice. She is blaming herself for behaving in a way that people behave when starvation and exhaustion dulls their finer feelings and the instinct to survive takes over. ‘Do you understand what I’m saying?’ she continues, ‘I was stepping over dead bodies. And I didn’t feel anything. So what kind of person am I? That’s the worst thing the Nazis did to us, they dehumanised us.’

  With harrowing wartime newsreels screening in her head in Melbourne while she tried to look after the baby, Bronia became paralysed with anxiety. ‘I longed to be a normal mother and to enjoy my baby, but ever since that episode at the Krakow Ghetto, everything connected with the baby terrified me. I was even petrified of bathing her because I was sure I’d drown her.’ Her nervousness transmitted itself to little Judy who cried so much that the sound reverberated in Bronia’s head day and night.