The Voyage of Their Life Read online

  In the eight days she had spent in Marseilles, she had been besieged by eager American servicemen in uniform. She hadn’t been able to have a cup of coffee without those Yanks, with their funny crew-cut hair and unlimited cash, offering to take her on a boat trip to the Château d’If, a drive to the church on the hilltop, or for dinner to sample the famous bouillabaisse which she decided was distinctly overrated.

  A fun-loving girl with a bubbly personality and a generously proportioned figure, Dorothea knew that if a man appealed to her, she could always get him interested. Stopping for breath, she glanced up at the ship. What an ugly big tub, she thought. But no matter how it looked, it would take her a long way from Germany. Although she wasn’t Jewish, she couldn’t stand living among those hypocrites any more.

  Those Nazis who had so scrupulously adhered to the Nuremburg Laws, but now pretended that they had hated Hitler and helped the Jews. She could still remember how her heart had pounded on Kristallnacht when glass had shattered all over the street where she lived, synagogues had gone up in flames and terrified old people were dragged out into the street, tormented and beaten.

  Dorothea’s mother was Catholic, her Jewish father had converted to Catholicism, and she herself had been brought up as a Catholic, but that had not prevented her from being stigmatised as a mischling or half-caste and rejected by the society to which she had always believed she belonged. In a nation where mass hysteria ruled, and young Aryans were seduced by camaraderie, camp fires and racist songs into worshipping a demonic leader, there was no room for the racially ‘impure’. Dorothea could not forget her shock when the headmistress had told her that she had to leave school, just before she was due to matriculate. She still winced whenever she recalled the disdainful look on the handsome face of the officer she was dating when he found out that she had Jewish blood. ‘Then I am sorry, but I cannot see you again,’ he had said in the stiff voice that used to heil Hitler.

  But dwelling on the past was not in her nature, and she looked eagerly around her, changing hands to lighten the load she was carrying. In one hand she held her red leather handbag and the precious Triumph Durabel typewriter in its black case. The typewriter was twenty years old and had belonged to an older cousin, but was still in perfect working order and might prove useful in Australia if she became a secretary. In the other hand she gripped her bulky hold-all, which she put down every few minutes to wipe away the perspiration streaming down her face. Her mother had insisted on having the brown pinstriped worsted suit made for her in Berlin, and she felt very elegant in it, with its fashionably long New Look skirt, but it certainly wasn’t suitable for summer on the Mediterranean. As soon as they allocated her a cabin, she planned to go into the hold and pull her summer dresses out of the suitcase.

  Her reverie ended as she stepped inside the ship and her eyes began to water from the overpowering smell of fresh paint. To the rousing beat of Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody which blared over the loud-speaker, officers in white uniforms directed passengers to their cabins. Straining to hear instructions spoken in unfamiliar accents above the commotion, most passengers were reassured by the Derna’s welcoming atmosphere. In the foyer, a bouquet of flowers brightened the table, and the maroon leather armchairs smelled invitingly new.

  But excitement soon turned to dismay as couples discovered that they were to spend the voyage in cabins which were segregated dormitories. ‘Surely there must be some mistake?’ some of the newly married couples protested to officers who shrugged and turned away. ‘Why should I spend weeks sharing a cabin with total strangers? Whoever heard of such a thing?’ women repeated to anyone willing to listen. Mothers wondered how they were going to have any rest sharing a bunk with infants or toddlers, while childless women wondered how they were going to have any sleep with all those children in the cabin. Wandering around the ship in search of their cabins, they pushed and shoved, choking the companionways and crowding the stairs, eyeing each other with the barely disguised resentment of captives forced to make room in their cramped cell for new arrivals.

  Watching the passengers board, the captain was alarmed that some of the women were noticeably pregnant. A moment later, the music stopped and a strongly accented voice was heard throughout the ship: ‘Would all the pregnant women come to the purser’s office straightaway?’

  Coming out of the cabin with her six-year-old son Stefan, Halina Kalowski looked perturbed. She and her husband were thrilled to board the Derna, and not even the overcrowded cabins or the fact that they had to be separated had dampened their enthusiasm. After six anxious months in Paris, they were on their way to Australia at last.

  ‘Why are they calling the pregnant women? What can they possibly want?’ she wondered.

  ‘They probably want to give you a better cabin and special food,’ her husband Mietek speculated as they tried to find their way to the purser’s office.

  When Halina joined the other pregnant women, she was horrified to hear the captain say, ‘You must leave the ship at once because we don’t have any facilities for confinement.’ She was in despair. They had waited so long in Paris for a passage that their money had almost run out. And if it hadn’t been for the kind intervention of Abbé Glasberg, the Jewish-born priest who had speeded up their application, they’d still be waiting. To leave the ship now and have the baby in France was unthinkable.

  ‘I want my baby to be born in Australia,’ Halina said in a quiet but determined voice.

  Some of the women who were in advanced stages of pregnancy had already begun to disembark but Halina started calculating. ‘We’re due to arrive in Melbourne on the 12th of October. That’s only five weeks from now. Why shouldn’t I stay on board? I’ll only be six months pregnant when we arrive.’ Then she grimaced in dismay, remembering that she had come forward with the other pregnant women. ‘But I can’t stay now that they’ve seen me and know I’m pregnant.’

  Mietek looked around to make sure they hadn’t been overheard. ‘Don’t worry,’ he whispered. ‘Run down to the cabin, change your dress and put your hair up. They won’t recognise you. Just keep out of the way for a day or so and they’ll forget all about you.’

  She took little Stefan’s hand and ran down to their cabin, feeling buoyant once more. Mietek was so smart. She felt almost guilty to think how lucky she was to have this second chance at happiness.

  As the crew prepared to weigh anchor, Captain Papalas and some of his officers were on deck, straining to catch the words of a stocky man with a swarthy complexion, heavy-lidded eyes and tufts of cotton wool stuck in both ears, who was striding up and down the wharf, shouting and gesticulating. From his rumpled suit and unpolished manner, he could have been mistaken for an ordinary seaman if not for the white, well-shaped hands that he waved around to emphasise a point. It was Stavros Livanos, the millionaire owner of the Derna, shouting last-minute instructions. Even at this late stage, he was still trying to convince the captain that the ship was fit to sail.

  Like the captain and most of the Greek crew, Stavros Livanos had been born on the lush island of Chios which for centuries has supplied Greece with sailors, ship-builders and shipping dynasties. Chios was the birthplace of Homer, and it was there that he had written The Odyssey. Livanos was ten years old when his father bought a steamship; from then on the boy had dreamed of nothing but ships. With the single-minded dedication that was to become his trademark, he surpassed his own dreams. After becoming the youngest chief engineer in the Greek merchant navy, four years later, at the age of twenty-one, he became the youngest ship’s captain in Greece.

  By 1948, when he was fifty-eight, Stavros Livanos had become a shipping tycoon and was still obsessed with ships: what they cost, where they sailed, why they were for sale and how he could raise the cash to buy them. Wealth gravitates to wealth, and as a result of the recent marriage of his daughters—Tina to Aristotle Onassis, and Eugenia to Stavros Niarchos—Livanos was part of the most powerful shipping triumvirate in the world.

  Those who knew
him said that Livanos achieved prominence by being determined, shrewd and miserly. From his father he had learned always to pay cash and never waste a cent. In shipping circles they used to say that Stavros would cross the Sahara on foot to save the camel-fare, and the term ‘running a tight ship’ might have been invented to describe the way he conducted his business. He bought old ships at cheap prices and it was said that he paid his crews the most miserable wages in Greece.

  That’s how he had come to buy this clapped-out vessel of 5751 tonnes which had been built in 1917 and should have been broken up for scrap metal long ago. The Derna’s history reflected the changing political realities of Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. In its first incarnation, as the Kagera, it had been built for the German East Africa Line as a cargo ship and accommodated only nine passengers. After World War I, it was seized by the Allies and ceded to France as part of the spoils of war. Several years later, in 1922, the French Line bought it, renamed it Indiana and employed it to ply between French ports and the Gulf of Mexico. After the fall of France in 1940, it was taken over by the United States War Shipping Administration as a transport vessel, but when the war ended, it was returned to the French Line.

  Aware of the world-wide shortage of ships to transport migrants from Europe to Australia and America after World War II, Livanos seized his opportunity. In 1948 the Dos Oceanos Cia de Navigaçion, a Livanos enterprise registered in Panama, bought the SS Indiana and proceeded to recondition her as quickly and cheaply as possible. In a remarkably short time, two decks of the cargo ship were converted to cabins into which over five hundred passengers would be crammed.

  With the change of character came a change of name and the SS Derna was born, although why its new owner chose to name his ship after a port in Tunisia is not known. Sailors believe that changing a ship’s name is a bad omen, a superstition that Livanos should have heeded. He registered the vessel in Panama whose red and white flag ensured not only tax exemptions and cheap registration fees, but also freedom from the usual regulation of ship standards, crew wages and shipboard safety.

  And now that he had decided the Derna was ready to sail on its maiden voyage, his captain was urging him to delay departure. Stavros Livanos was an attentive listener, almost as sparing with words as he was with money, but when he spoke, it was with steely determination. After spending so much on the refit, taking the risk of engaging a mixed crew of Greeks and Italians and filling the cabins with 545 passengers, there would be no delay. Succinct and forceful, he countered all the captain’s objections. The ship must sail and the passengers would manage. But from the captain’s worried face and sagging shoulders, it was obvious that he saw trouble ahead.

  The Derna was pulling away from the wharf and excitement on the ship reached fever pitch as the passengers rushed to find a space against the taff-rail for their last view of Europe. How do you say goodbye to the land that has been your home and the home of your ancestors for centuries, where your sweat made the wheat grow and your hands made the roses bloom? How do you say goodbye to your ancestral spirits and the memory of loved ones you are leaving behind forever? How do you reconcile nostalgia with pain, longing with hope?

  Some chattered nervously to their neighbours, while others stood in silence, their throats so tightly knotted with emotion that their necks ached. On the salty Mediterranean breeze they smelled the juniper forests of Estonia, heard the murmur of Polish wheatfields in the breeze and saw the swaying birch trees of Russia. Some thought of romantic rendezvous in Prague cafés or stolen kisses in the Vienna Woods that would never come again. Others wept for loved ones who lay in unmarked graves in blood-soaked forests. Parents held their children up on a rung of the rail and tried to instil some sense of the significance of this final parting.

  Having written their postcard to my father’s sister in Poland, whom they would never see again, my parents joined the other passengers on deck. I wonder how they felt at that poignant moment when, like Janus, the twin-headed god of the Romans, they looked simultaneously to the past and to the future. Like so many passengers, they had chosen Australia because it was as far as they could travel from the tragic past without falling off the edge of the world. With the courage of all migrants who abandon terra firma to be tossed upon unknown seas, they had cast themselves into an uncertain future with light suitcases and hearts full of hopes and dreams.

  And what about me, a quiet nine year old with brown plaits and a serious face? Did I also stand against the rail as we sailed away? Did my father urge me to take one last look at the continent that neither he nor my mother was ever to see again? Perhaps I was impatient to unpack the skeins of wool I’d brought in my favourite colours of rose, blue, lemon and apple-green, and longed to unravel the yarn and knit fanciful designs of my own invention.

  The hollow clank of the anchor and the long, lonely hoot of the funnel echoed over the ship and sent a sudden chill through our souls. In the dusk of the summer night, the city lights twinkled as the Derna edged further from the wharf. The elongated triangle of water separating us from the wharf grew larger. The ship ploughed a furrow in the sea, carving up the world into two fields: past and future.

  2

  When Dorothea had fought her way past the passengers blocking the companionways with their baggage and finally reached her cabin, she took one look inside and recoiled. Twenty-four bunks were crammed in from floor to ceiling like shelves in a cheap cupboard. They were arranged in tiers of three, with the bottom one almost touching the floor and the top one so close to the ceiling that if you sat up too fast you would bump your head. She had been allocated the middle bunk, which was so tightly sandwiched by the others that she was sure she’d suffocate.

  She looked around in dismay. There was only one porthole and, wouldn’t you know it, her friend Gilda Brouen with whom she had flown out of Berlin was already lying on the bunk next to it. ‘Lucky pig,’ Dorothea muttered. There was nowhere to put her things, no room to move in this stifling cabin. And where was the bathroom? To her horror, she discovered that the occupants of her cabin, as well as of several others, would have to share the primitive communal washroom at the end of the passageway. There was one bath, several showers rigged up over wooden planks, and a row of toilets with doors hanging unevenly off the hinges. She wrinkled her nose in distaste. How horrible.

  Throwing her hold-all, typewriter and red leather bag onto the bunk, Dorothea mopped her forehead. She was going to die of heat in this worsted suit. Looking around, she noticed two young women smiling down at her. Ilse and Elfriede Hof were sisters who’d also come from Germany, so at least they’d be able to communicate. Elfriede, the more ebullient one, was already organised on the top bunk, recording first impressions in her morocco-bound diary. Dorothea intended to keep a journal of the voyage too, but first she had to find her luggage so that she could get out of this impossible suit.

  While Dorothea sat disconsolately on her bunk, in a nearby cabin Elmars Kuplis and his wife Auguste were delighted to discover that they had been allocated the same cabin. The Latvian couple didn’t realise that because of Auguste’s unusual name, the purser had mistaken her for a man.

  The error wasn’t discovered until the other men in the cabin complained that it wasn’t fair, as their wives had not been accommodated with them. Someone rushed to report the irregularity to the captain who summoned Mrs Kuplis to see him. ‘How come you claimed to have a man’s name?’ he demanded in Greek while one of the officers translated his words into German so that she could understand.

  ‘But Auguste is my name,’ she protested, bewildered by the accusation.

  Her explanation didn’t satisfy him. ‘Show me your documents!’ he barked. She passed across her papers with trembling hands and the captain held them up against the light and scrutinised the photograph on both sides to make sure she hadn’t pasted her own photograph onto a man’s ID. Although he couldn’t see any sign of falsification, he still wasn’t convinced and spoke rapidly to his officer,
glancing mistrustfully at the woman shaking in front of him. Finally, without a word of apology, he said, ‘All right, but you have to move out of that cabin. We’ll put you somewhere else.’ Auguste left the office in tears, upset by his gruff manner, and it took a long time for her husband to calm her down.

  The dinner gong provided a welcome respite from the general turmoil. Among hundreds of hungry, exhausted passengers, Elmars and Auguste, together with his mother and their five-year-old son, were directed to their places at the long refectory-style tables in the dining room. The meal was served surprisingly fast by sallow waiters in tired white jackets who scurried around with plates held high above the tables. Dinner began with a dish of olives which most of us eyed suspiciously, having no idea what they were or how to eat them. My mother and I bit into the peculiar texture, felt sickened by the taste and resolved never to eat them again. Braised beef and potatoes were served next, with bread as white and tasteless as cotton wool, but the chocolate pudding that ended the meal cheered up all the children, even finicky eaters like me.

  The night hours passed slowly in the uncomfortably intimate proximity of strangers whose snoring, sighing and sweating made it difficult to relax. Dorothea tossed in her narrow bunk, irritated by all the bodies, and by the fitful crying and whimpering of the children.

  As soon as the sun shone through the porthole, she jumped out of her bunk, ready to start searching for her suitcase. Down in the hold, she climbed over crates, cases, trunks, chests and boxes, starting at one end and working her way section by section through the mountains of belongings, without success. Perspiring profusely, she continued to search. It must be in here somewhere, she kept telling herself as she tried to suppress a growing sense of panic. She knew she’d brought the two cases from Germany because she remembered sitting on them in the cargo plane with the bucket seats which had airlifted her, Gilda and that nice fellow Fred out of Berlin.