The Testimony    (11 page)

The passengers huddled within their national groups. Centuries-old historical conflicts simmered under the surface and started to erupt as discomforts, tribulations and fatigue increased. Jewish Holocaust survivors complained about anti-Semitic slurs by the Ukrainians and Estonians, who in turn alleged that the Jews were Communists conspiring to infiltrate Australia. The Polish and Czech migrants got on well.

The dormitories were segregated into male and female, thus breaking up families at night. They were very overcrowded, poorly ventilated and soon infested with bedbugs—and very dirty. Washing facilities were inadequate for the number of people. Along with many others I was soon spending the nights on deck.

Moving with calm dignity through this bedlam was the striking figure of Archbishop Rafalsky, long-bearded and in the full ecclesiastical regalia of the Russian Orthodox Church. He conducted prayers for the group of White Russians, befriended other passengers, intervened in fights and mediated disputes.

One member of the crew spoke English, and I befriended him with the ulterior motive of hearing and learning this language being spoken. My
Teach Yourself
English
book taught me quite a bit, but soundlessly. His name was Charlie. He was seventy-one or two, by his own reckoning, and a specialist in mending torn tarpaulins. The
Derna
had an endless supply of these, so Charlie often sat in a corner on the deck lacing up the shredded covers of lifeboats, or whatever needed shelter from the rain. His pipe was wedged between his few remaining teeth so securely that he could talk and puff simultaneously.

And talk he did. A great raconteur, he was pleased to have an audience in me—and a bit of help with his sewing. We spent many hours together on this long and crazy voyage. Today Charlie would be described as an African-American; but in those days he was called a Negro by the polite and a nigger by the not very couth. In his teens he had worked on the Panama Canal, and it seemed to me he had built it almost single-handedly. There had been myriad adventures in his peripatetic life as a sailor, and he claimed a knowledge of Spanish, French, Greek and other languages learned on the way. I regarded the various colourful embellishments of his yarns as a bonus. I noted several expressions and phrases Charlie used often, but could not find them in any of my dictionaries or books on English. Were they perhaps too colourful?

From the outset my friendship with Charlie upset some passengers, most of all the leader of the Estonians. He conducted daily singing sessions, and all their songs had a military character. It made me uneasy. This grim chap used to hiss ‘
Schande!
’ (shame!) at me whenever he saw me with Charlie. I used to smile sweetly at him, hoping to anger him more; perchance into apoplexy. Charlie had a word for him that he refused to translate for me. The commandant took his revenge later.

The incidents that made this journey eventful, and also prolonged it from the scheduled four weeks to eleven, were unusual. Three days after departure the cook died, and we returned to the port of Marseilles to find a replacement. Then one of the three engines broke down and reduced the boat’s progress considerably. The breakdown also deprived us of refrigeration in that very hot part of the world. A few days later we witnessed the spectacle of many carcasses of sheep and cows, covered with a greenish mould, being dumped overboard. Our meat supply for the journey floated alongside the ship for a while, bumping against its hull.

Later, one of the stokers in the engine room died and there was a brief ceremony for his burial at sea. Then a fire broke out and took such a long time to be put out that chaos and panic broke out. Food and water were rationed until we limped into Colombo. I am not sure what was done there to revive the dead engine, but it soon expired again and a second engine faltered. We were drifting slowly in the Indian Ocean towards Fremantle, weeks after our scheduled arrival date.

When we finally got there police and Immigration Department officials boarded the ship, barred selected passengers from disembarking and interviewed the captain, the IRO escorting officer and the Estonian commander. All sorts of rumours started circulating among the startled passengers.

It emerged later that, as the ship was docking, the port authorities were notified by the escorting officer that a group of Jewish Communist activists were on board. A list of names was handed in. Its author was the Estonian commander, and my name was on it. Two days of investigations resulted in permission to continue to Melbourne with the now-repaired engines.

A day out of Fremantle the chief stoker died and the ship returned to port, where the body was taken to the morgue under police escort. We speculated on the two possible causes of his death: alcohol or the diabolical heat in the engine room.

In the Great Australian Bight we ran into an almighty storm. The boat was tossed fiercely, and much damage was done to unsecured bodies and chattels. A pregnant woman went into labour two months prematurely, and Dr Frant delivered a minute baby girl. We were two days from Melbourne.

An ambulance awaited the
Derna
at the dock in Melbourne to rush the tiny baby to hospital. This heightened the dramatic arrival of an already notorious ship, and delighted the awaiting reporters and photographers. It was 5 November 1948.

In Melbourne we learned from the many press reports about the
Derna
that investigations had found the two individuals involved in the allegations—the IRO escorting officer and the Estonian guy—to be most unsavoury characters, with murky pasts and Nazi connections. Someone said that the man who was escorting the orphans from Czechoslovakia had advised the police to check out the informer by looking under his arm. A blood group tattoo would prove him to be former SS or Gestapo. This was so, and he was discredited. The two men were not able to prove any of their claims. The Minister for Immigration, Mr Calwell, reported this to parliament during the ongoing debate about our arrival. Conditions and management on the boat, for passengers and crew, were described as appalling.

Thus the
Derna
secured a place in Australia’s post– World War II migration history. Fifty years after its arrival, the ship, its voyage and its
dramatis personae
were thoroughly researched by the noted journalist and novelist Diane Armstrong, who tells the story in her book
The Voyage of Their Life.

MELBOURNE

For a while we huddled with distant relatives of one chap in our group. They had arrived two years earlier, and were a valuable source of information about the basic regulations and requirements of life in our new country. Very few aspects resembled those of our previous life. I had arrived full of hope for starting a peaceful life, but anxious about my ability to cope with so many adjustments. I did feel some homesickness, mainly for familiar things and ways.

Jobs were plentiful, and we soon worked as cleaners, car washers, storeroom assistants and at various factories. Six of us became a ‘family by acceptance’ and shared accommodation, meals and our particular lessons and observations of each day. A lady in her fifties, Dr Golab a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, acted as the ‘mother’. She had arrived here two years before us, and knew the language and the ‘ropes’. This arrangement was a great help in coping with the culture shock—a period of bewilderment and intense learning. Unlearning previous social etiquette and manners was necessary too, in view of the many raised eyebrows we often received.

Queen Victoria’s code of behaviour still loomed large in Melbourne of the 1940s and 1950s: stiff, unemotional upper lips; anti-tactile Anglo-Saxon reserve; no handshakes, no hugs—and a friendly kiss unthinkable. The response to ‘Thank you’ was ‘Don’t mention it’; today’s ‘My pleasure’ or ‘You’re welcome’ would be seen as gushing. And there was the puzzling ‘How do you do?’ on introduction. Do what? And it was always asked, in spite of the fact that nobody was willing to answer this question.

Many of these aloof strangers came out of the woodwork to help us. Observant neighbours in our street noticed that most of the furniture in the house we rented was constructed by us, using wooden vegetable boxes covered with newspaper. They gave us a kitchen table and several chairs, and said they were sorry that another chair from this set was broken and the table had a scratch on it. They gave us two tablecloths, which were a great luxury for us. I was moved, and recall making a rather sweeping and grandiose statement to the others: ‘We have seen the worst of human actions, now we see the best.’

They said, ‘Don’t mention it,’ when I thanked them, so I promised not to tell anybody about it, and wondered at what a secretive lot the Australians were. There were a few occasions when I promised secrecy—and no one ever laughed at this—before someone explained that it is not meant literally but was just a turn of phrase.

Others gave us furniture, clothes and kitchen utensils. Perhaps my obvious bewilderment with freedom in general, and this new world in particular, stirred their parental instincts. When I asked one older couple how I could ever repay them, the answer was quite memorable: ‘Don’t repay us; we are now well provided. When you become well-off, help those who are not and that will repay us.’ That sort of thing restores your faith in humans, counteracts the effects of evil in the past. It rehabilitates.

The Anglo-Saxon reserve was a marvel to me, and so was the Aussie unflappability at a time when we were still quite flappable. I recall an anecdote on this subject. It tells of a soldier returning home from his war years in the army. Walking towards the family homestead on the farm he notices much neglect: the gate hangs on one hinge, weeds dominate the paddocks, strips of paint peel off the walls of the house. His father is sitting on the verandah, busy whittling a stick of wood with his penknife. He says, ‘Hi, Son; it’s good to see you back.’ The son asks why everything is in such disrepair, why the gate, the weeds, the paint and other things have not been fixed. To each the father replies, ‘Your Ma and I reckoned you’d fix it when you got back.’ The son’s anger rises at each response. He points to the dunny (a wooden shack housing a toilet), which is leaning over, ready to fall, and gets the same response.

He snaps ‘I’ll fix it now!’ and lops a hand grenade into it. The dunny explodes into smithereens. Continuing his whittling the father says, ‘You shouldn’t have done that, Son. Your Ma was in there.’ The son goes and finds his mother under the pile of debris, helps her up and asks: ‘You all right, Ma?’ She replies, ‘I’m all right, Son. Must have eaten something that disagreed with me.’

To improve my English expression I took evening classes at Taylor’s College in Little Collins Street. They were into Shakespearean English—miles above my limitations. This was soon noticed by the kind teacher, who lent me her copy of
The Fortunes of Richard Mahony
by Henry Handel Richardson. She said it should help both my knowledge of English and Australian history. With this book in one hand and the
Oxford Dictionary
in the other, and often long past midnight, I enhanced my vocabulary, improved my syntax and grieved over the tragic figure of Dr Mahony in colonial Australia.

Some idiomatic expression puzzled me for a while: ‘You are up the pole, Halina!’ I asked what my nationality had to do with the subject. When I twigged that it must be another non-literal expression, and asked what it meant, I was told that it was like being up the creek without a paddle. The use of one idiom to explain another does not make one ‘a fat lot wiser’.

In addition, the factual terms foreigner and ‘refugee’, which described our status, gradually acquired negative connotations by their frequent coupling with ‘bloody’ and other derogatory adjectives. This was also the case with ‘Pom’, which could have been a term of endearment but for the prefixed ‘whingeing’. Later on, politeness removed the terms ‘refugee’ and ‘foreigner’, and we became New Australians until we became naturalised—now there’s a word!—Australians.

Puzzling words and idioms were not a serious barrier to communication, though, and we soon made friends with people tolerant of our foreign ways and even interested in our cultural background and wartime experiences.

I talk about my memories of war only when asked about them, and prefer to answer specific questions. There were many such questions after my arrival here, but my answers were met with disbelief—verbal and nonverbal. This offended me. I felt I should have been believed, because I was telling the truth. So I refused to talk about the wartime, and that could be a bit of a barrier to communication.

This problem was soon resolved by two factors: first, enough filmed and documented accounts of Nazi atrocities entered the public arena to verify stories like mine; and second, after observing the sheltered life of the white population on this island, I began to understand some people’s initial disbelief. They had no concept of invasion or persecution.

Amazement was the dominant feeling of my early months in Australia. I became aware of the freedom of the media, of people’s open and frequent criticism of authorities, of the minimal presence of police and army in the streets, of the—to our refugee eyes—high level of prosperity, and of the egalitarianism and ambience of security and permanence.