The Voyage of Their Life Read online

  To the passengers of the Derna,

  and all those who have crossed rough seas

  to reach this place in the sun

  Table of Contents

  Cover Page

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  Epigraph

  PART I THE VOYAGE

  PROLOGUE THE POSTCARD FROM MARSEILLES

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  PART II THEIR LIFE

  PROLOGUE A LETTER FROM BRISBANE

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  EPILOGUE

  PASSENGER LIST

  INDEX OF NAMES

  SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Winter Journey

  P.S.

  About the Author

  Meet the author

  Life at a glance

  Top ten favourite books

  About the book

  The inspiration

  Behind the scenes

  A critical eye

  Read on

  Have you read?

  Find out more

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Praise

  Also by Diane Armstrong

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Because of the large cast of characters, to avoid confusion the women who were unmarried during the voyage have been referred to by their maiden names throughout the book. Married names have been included in the index.

  Although the endings of many Polish surnames change in the feminine form—e.g. Mr Kalowski but Mrs Kalowska—for the sake of simplicity I have used the masculine form of the names in the text and index. However, both forms appear in the transcript of the Derna’s passenger list.

  There is a tide in the affairs of men

  Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;

  Omitted, all the voyage of their life

  Is bound in shallows and in miseries.

  WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE,

  Julius Caesar, Act IV, Scene ii

  PART I

  THE VOYAGE

  PROLOGUE

  THE POSTCARD FROM MARSEILLES

  A postcard of Marseilles’s Vieux Port, saturated with dark colours like an old painting, fell out of a letter that Aunty Slawa sent me from Poland several months ago. ‘I thought this card would interest you,’ she wrote.

  As I turned it over, I caught my breath. I was looking at my mother’s handwriting, which on its own is enough to evoke a rush of nostalgia and regret, but it was the date that made me stare with disbelief: 30 August 1948; the day we set sail for Australia.

  In a hurried Polish scrawl she had written to her sister-in-law: ‘We arrived in Marseilles today and sail this evening. The ship is big and comfortable. Danusia* and I are together but Henek is on his own, because they’ve separated the men and women. There is chaos everywhere and everyone is rushing to unpack but the calm ones like me are writing postcards.’

  Across the front of the card, above the picture of the port, my father added, almost as though he had known that one day I’d want to know this: ‘I’m posting the card from the ship.’

  As I hold this card in my hands and read their words, I feel as though I am watching my parents at the very moment when we are about to leave Europe forever and begin our new life. They have stepped through the magic mirror of time and stand before me with all their hopes and dreams for themselves and, above all, for me.

  Ever since I began researching the voyage, I have felt the spirit of my parents comfortingly close. And now, like a brush of angels’ wings, this card which documents the day of our departure materialises to encourage and empower me precisely at the moment I am writing about the voyage of our life.

  Several times in the past, at significant crossroads of my life, something inexplicable has occurred to light up my path with meaning. The postcard from Marseilles is a sign that my parents who brought me to Australia are still watching over me, and that they have blessed my project.

  1

  In the oppressive August heat, the seeping drains and garlicsaturated kitchens around Marseilles’s Vieux Port exuded an overripe stench that lingered over the waterfront. Down by the harbour, fish heads rotted on the cobblestones as fishermen in striped jerseys and navy berets threw their catch on the scales. The salty smell of fish and seaweed mingled with the reek of sump oil, and the water’s surface gleamed with the iridescent colours of petrol spills.

  Moored to the wharf, solidly white in the stupefying glare of a Provençal summer, the SS Derna looked handsome, proud and new. But Captain Stavros Papalas knew only too well that her appearance was deceptive. So did the stevedores who hadn’t finished loading even though the ship was due to sail within the hour. They weren’t fooled by the smell of fresh paint as they half-ran along the wharf, propelled by the cabin trunks strapped to their powerful backs. Stocky and broad-shouldered, with short tempers and foul tongues, they left behind them a trail of curses, gobs of spit, the biting smoke of Gauloises and the musky odour of male sweat that has hung over this port for centuries.

  From the bridge, the captain could hear the carpenters and plumbers banging and hammering inside the ship, racing against time to complete a refit that needed at least another week’s work. The communal washrooms that would soon be shared by over five hundred passengers were primitive, offered little privacy and were barely half-finished. The toilet doors were not attached and there were problems with the plumbing. Worse still, there were no laundry facilities of any kind. How the mothers of all those small children down on the wharf were going to manage in these conditions didn’t bear thinking about. But any minute now the owner would turn up and tell him that everything was ready, and he would have to give the order to sail.

  A stream of juicy curses rose to his lips when he thought about the owner of the Derna. If only he could convince him to delay the departure. The knowledge that he was responsible for the safety of over five hundred souls on a ship that wasn’t seaworthy weighed him down. He lifted the cap off his balding head to wipe his brow and shifted his plump shoulders in his ill-fitting white jacket.

  Squinting into the sunlight he gazed at the frenzied activity in the busiest port of the Mediterranean. Founded by Greek mariners at the time Homer had immortalised the epic voyage of his mythical hero Ulysses, Marseilles has seen ships and mariners come and go for twenty-six centuries. Two thousand years ago, proud Athenian triremes and stately Phoenician quinqueremes with pagan goddesses on their wooden prows sailed into this port, laden with grain, salt, silks, spices and purple dyes that they traded for metal from Provence. Later the Romans conquered it, erected docks and built the drains that stank as though they hadn’t been flushed out for two thousand years. After the Roman Empire ended, while artisans were carving their religious faith into the stone portals of the great cathedral of Notre Dame, the ship builders of Marseilles were carving wooden saints on their galleys,
and manning the vessels with Saracen or Senegalese slaves captured in battles far away.

  Now, in 1948, it was the turn of migrant ships, clapped-out coal-powered hulks, to carry the dispossessed on new odysseys to far-off lands. Like this one, tarted up and converted at breakneck speed to carry passengers under the Panamanian flag of convenience. Blisters of rust and the scars of a thousand cargo voyages to Africa, the Seychelles and the Caribbean, showed through the fresh paint that, like a thick layer of make-up, attempted to conceal the ravages of old age.

  The captain looked down at the porters shouting and cursing in a flattened Provençal accent while they loaded up. They jostled past the crowd to dump yet another load of crates, suitcases, cabin trunks, valises, boxes and bundles into the net which the creaking crane hoisted up and lowered into the hold.

  As the voices floated up from the wharf, he watched the passengers who spoke more languages than the occupants of the Tower of Babel. Where did they come from, these dispossessed, despairing people, with their bundles, shabby bags and silent children? Even from this height the cacophony was deafening. People were shouting to each other, calling their children, running after porters to make sure their bags weren’t left behind, and saying a last goodbye with the sadness of those who knew that this parting would last forever. Above the assertive sounds of German, a descant of Yiddish voices hovered between a joke, a question and an argument. Over the musical inflections of Russian came the penetrating staccato of Hungarian voices, the precise polite sounds of Polish, the lilt of Estonian and the hubbub of the ship’s crew shouting in Greek and Italian.

  The captain looked pensive. This mixed crew was another contentious issue. Even before the war, many Greeks had resented the Italians who had colonised their islands, but after Mussolini’s alliance with Hitler, most of the captain’s Greek compatriots loathed the Fascists, and he suspected that it wouldn’t take much to inflame them. He’d have his job cut out keeping order between these two hostile groups who would be living in close proximity for the next five weeks. His jowls drooped. He was fifty-four and suddenly felt his age.

  To add to his problems, he could already tell that the passengers weren’t going to be easy to handle either. Down on the wharf he spotted that pushy young fellow Sam Fiszman who had come to see him the previous day. Fiszman, who was about to sail on the Derna with his wife and baby, had wanted to interview him for some Polish or Russian newspaper that he’d never heard of. He’d sent him packing. Having the defects of his ship aired all over the world wouldn’t make him popular with the owner. But recalling the way the young man’s eyes had blazed when he’d refused the interview, he sensed that he hadn’t heard the last of Mr Fiszman.

  Sam Fiszman was about to step onto the gangplank, a khaki Soviet army jacket draped over his shoulders. A row of Russian medals on his chest glinted in the sun as he grappled with bags and baskets in one hand, and helped his wife Esther with the other. In her arms she cradled a baby but looked like a child herself, with her huge doe-like eyes and delicate face.

  ‘Just look at this chaos,’ Sam was grumbling. ‘That crew is hopeless. They can’t organise anything properly. Not that I’m surprised, after meeting that boorish old bastard of a captain.’ As little Maria whimpered and Esther shifted from one foot to the other, he added, ‘You shouldn’t have to stand in this heat for so long.’ Turning around, he caught sight of a couple with two fair-haired sons who looked back at him with impassive faces. ‘Probably bloody Nazis,’ he muttered.

  As usual, Esther tried to calm him down. ‘I’m sure it won’t be long now,’ she said in her silken way, and looked adoringly at her husband, so dashing in his army jacket.

  The erect man standing nearby with his wife and two fair-haired sons clearly did not share her admiration. Verner Puurand’s eyes hardened as he looked at the hated Russian uniform. He had fled from Estonia to get away from the infernal Communists who had ruined his country and would probably kill him if he returned. They and their accomplices were responsible for all the catastrophes that had befallen Estonia. Why did Australia allow this brazen Communist to migrate?

  Captain Papalas knew that many of the passengers had gone through experiences he could never imagine. With his cargo of Latvians, Estonians, Russians, Germans, French, Poles, Hungarians, Czechoslovakians, Greeks, Romanians and God knew what other nationalities, he was in charge of a floating United Nations. They came from concentration camps in Czechoslovakia, death camps in Poland, gulags in Siberia, forced labour camps in Latvia and displaced persons camps in Germany and Austria.

  A haze of apprehension hung all around them. It rose from the worried voices of the mothers as they pulled their exhausted children up the gangplank, and seeped from the fathers whose heavy woollen coats with padded shoulders were the most valuable item some of them possessed. All of them had the tightly clenched faces of those who were leaving their familiar world behind to embark on a new life in an unknown land. Some stood forlornly waiting to board, guarding all they had left in the world: a battered suitcase fastened with a fraying strap or a box tied and retied with string.

  A boisterous group of high-spirited youngsters, all talking at once, milled around a tall greying man with a neatly clipped moustache and dark eyes that seemed to pierce the young woman he was talking to. This was the doctor accompanying the sixty-one Jewish orphans. Their passage had been paid for by the American Jewish Distribution Committee, JOINT, which together with the International Refugee Organisation (IRO), had chartered this ship. The captain knew that the shipping company was under strict instructions from the Australian government that no more than twenty-five percent of the passengers were to be Jewish, but looking around, he doubted whether this quota had been observed.

  As the boys and girls stepped onto the gangplank, the doctor ticked them off his list one by one, as if on a school outing. Dr Henryk Frant and his wife Zofia were already wondering whether they had taken on too much in accepting the job of chaperoning this large, unwieldy group whose ages ranged from six to twenty. In the short time they had spent together in Paris, there had been romances, broken hearts, arguments and intrigues amongst the youngsters. On the train from Paris, even the kindly Mrs Frant had become exasperated when that little livewire Alice Zalcberg lost her ticket, and she’d had to argue with the inspector to let the girl stay on the train. Most of the girls seemed amenable and well-behaved, but everyone knew that shipboard life loosened moral standards and they’d have to watch carefully to make sure their charges behaved themselves.

  Dr Frant’s penetrating gaze softened as it rested on a young woman who had gathered the younger girls around her. Too old to qualify for a free passage as an orphan, twenty-one-year-old Topka Barasz had been included in the group along with her three younger sisters in return for helping the Frants look after the younger children.

  ‘Keep close to me, don’t wander away,’ she instructed them in her brisk way, hardly stopping for breath. ‘Hold onto your bags, don’t get lost, follow me down to the cabin.’

  As they trundled along the gangway, Topka looked at her sisters with her usual mixture of indulgence and concern. Although the sisters had been separated in Poland during the war, she had found them all and managed to support them amid the chaos and privations of post-war Europe. If it had been possible, she would have wrapped them in cotton wool so that the sun would not burn their delicate faces or the wind make them shiver. There was sixteen-year-old Miriam, eleven-year-old Ruth and nine-year-old Bella, as pretty as dolls in the lovely outfits she had bought them before leaving. Topka looked around like a proud mother. She had to get them safely to Australia. She could still see her mother looking into her eyes before the war as she said, ‘Topka, if anything happens to me, promise me you’ll always look after the children.’ She blinked away the tears. No matter what happened, she would keep that promise.

  The captain looked at his watch and shook his head. They were due to sail very soon, but the loading was still in progress. He craned forward. Thr
ee knitting machines were being hoisted from the dock and winched into the hold. Beside them stood a good-looking young man with curly hair and an expensive Leica camera hanging around his neck. Eyes narrowed with concentration, he was watching every move of the stevedores as the machines swayed in the air and were lowered into the hold. With his well-cut suit and air of confidence, he stood out from the rest. Unlike most of the other passengers, who had no idea how they were going to make a living in Australia, Abie Goldberg had his future mapped out. His family came from Lodz, the textile centre of Poland, and he was bringing these knitting machines to Australia so that he could continue the family business in a country which, he had been told, offered great opportunities for textile manufacturers.

  Standing close to Abie, a little girl in a white rabbit fur coat and matching bonnet had a face blotched from crying. As she looked up at the huge ship, tears rolled down Ginette Wajs’s cheeks. Her aunt in Paris had told her that she was going to America to live with relatives, but she wanted to stay in France with the foster-father she adored. Her aunt’s last words, hissed at her as the train for Marseilles pulled out of the Gare du Sud, reverberated in her ears like a curse: ‘Tell your aunty in America what a bad girl you were and how much trouble you caused me.’

  When the machines had been loaded, Abie turned to the little girl he’d befriended in the train earlier that day. Huddled against the worn plush seat, the child had sobbed from the moment the train chugged out of the station. Touched by her loneliness and distress, he had comforted her. ‘Don’t cry. I’m going on the Derna too, I’ll stay with you until we board,’ he promised.

  Almost all the passengers were aboard when suddenly there was a screech of brakes, a shriek of laughter and all heads, including the captain’s, swivelled around to see the cause of the commotion. A jeep pulled up on the wharf and two American sailors, snappy in their navy and white uniforms, jumped out and helped a young woman scramble out with her bags. Dorothea Ritter, whose thick brown hair curled around her laughing face, was saying goodbye to her escorts. ‘I’ll write soon, I promise!’ she called out gaily and turned to wave one last time from the top of the gangplank.