1940s refugees tell their story

By MARGIE THOMSON

The November sun was glaring off the tarmac that day in 1948 as Fred Silberstein emerged from the aeroplane at Whenuapai into his new life. His sister - the only surviving member of his family and whom he had not seen since the day in 1942 when he was abducted from school and taken to a Nazi prison camp before being transferred to Auschwitz - was waiting for him with an old family friend they knew as aunty and uncle.

When Silberstein, joyful, kissed his uncle on each cheek in the European fashion the older man drew away, embarrassed. "Men don't do that here," he said, and Silberstein, eager for this new life, accepted the advice.

From that first day, what he mainly remembers is the sense of the miraculous: sunshine (his education had been so foreshortened he didn't realise that as the northern hemisphere froze, we in the south begin to melt in early-summer temperatures), fresh air, food and the chance to work, save and rebuild.

Today, Silberstein lives in a modestly comfortable home in Blockhouse Bay. "Little houses, each with a section" - in 1948 he thought that was strange, so different from the apartment blocks he'd grown up in in Berlin, but he wanted one, and within six years he'd saved enough for a deposit. "Work makes you free," he says, wryly quoting Hitler.

More miracles: his home is adorned with the photos of family - his New Zealand wife Billie, their three children, grandchildren. Life goes on, these photos say. Silberstein's incredibly clear blue eyes belie the hideousness of his years in Auschwitz, and there is a calmness about this envoy from a past so terrible - starvation, fear, disease, multitudinous deaths, medical experimentation at the hands of Dr Mengele, of which his body still bears the scars - that points to the key to Silberstein's existence, and that is forgiveness.

"Hate breeds hate and you can't go on doing it," he says, "so to make a stop to it I said enough is enough. I forgive but I don't forget." For him, forgiveness is about being open to others, and, crucially, about "the most important word in the English language: tolerance. We don't have to love each other. Whatever we have - different religion, colour - if we were more tolerant our lives would be so much easier."

Silberstein is one of the people whose stories are told in an extraordinary new book, The Voyage of their Life, by Australian journalist Diane Armstrong. More than just the story of the 545 passengers who, in August 1948, said goodbye to war-ravaged Europe and boarded the Derna, a clapped-out cargo-hulk-turned-migrant-ship bound for far-off Australia, it is also the story of their lives after the Derna finally docked in Melbourne.

Armstrong's deft weaving of their wartime experiences, their time on the Derna, and their struggles to fit into Australian and New Zealand society has produced a remarkably topical account, a kaleidoscopic representation of the immigrant experience at a time when Australia is once again riven with debate about whether or not the flood of mostly Asian refugees known as boat people should be allowed to enter the country.

While we might expect that the European immigrants of the 1940s would have received a more enthusiastic welcome than do the Asian would-be immigrants of today, in fact the Europeans ran the gauntlet of similar suspicion, fear and dislike.

The Derna's passengers were a mix of types the most imaginative scriptwriter would have had trouble dreaming up. They came, like Fred Silberstein, from the death camps of Poland, displaced persons' camps in Germany, labour camps in Hungary. They included those persecuted by the Nazis and those sympathetic to them, those who had followed the Communists and those who had fled from them. They included a Russian princess, a Polish ghetto fighter and 61 Jewish orphans.

Yet they were all lumped together on the one rusty ship, and when they got to their destination after a voyage not surprisingly marked by tension and violence as well as by romance and friendship, the reaction of the existing population, politicians and press was a precursor to the suspicious and fearful "welcome" by modern-day Australia to the boat people.

Armstrong herself came to Australia on that long-ago voyage. Nine years old at the time, she was travelling with her parents, Bronia and Henek Boguslawski, Polish Jews who had waited months to be allowed passage to Australia and who had finally lied about their identity and migrated on the non-Jewish list.

"My father chose Australia because it promised tolerance and was far from the ethnic and religious hatreds of Europe," Armstrong says.

They overlooked as best they could that country's overwhelming reluctance to accept Jewish refugees (according to a 1948 poll only 17 per cent of the population favoured Jewish migration), the cartoons in the media depicting Jews "laden with gold and diamonds walking off the ships", and the articles describing them as capitalists and exploiters, and simply got on with creating new lives for themselves in this "blessed haven".

One of the many success stories embodied in the lives of these migrants, Armstrong has had a stellar career as an independent journalist, winning Australian and international awards and, in 1998, published her acclaimed Mosaic: A Chronicle of Five Generations, her own family's story.

Armed only with the Derna's passenger list, Armstrong began the daunting task of tracking down those 500-odd immigrants. Fifty years had passed, people had died, married, changed their names, scattered around Australia and to New Zealand, yet astoundingly Armstrong has through advertisements and telephone directories found 150 of the former passengers, who were nearly all happy to share their stories with her.

What she hadn't anticipated, as she began this enormous project, was its topicality.

"The more I thought back, the more parallels I could see between 1948 and today's situation. The big difference was that we had permits and didn't just appear out of the blue. But the attitude of New Zealand and Australia to this influx of foreigners who came from alien cultures was hostile. People felt very threatened. They weren't used to people not speaking English, and who they feared were going to take their jobs."

It is a human characteristic to feel threatened by the unfamiliar, Armstrong says, and it is only conquered by familiarity - "by becoming acquainted".

Despite his background, in many ways Silberstein was a classic immigrant. Driven to make it, determined not to "bludge", he found a job two weeks after his arrival and since then has held up to three jobs at a time (including running his own restaurant, Barbecue, in Dominion Rd) as well as undertaking voluntary work at Citizens Advice Bureau, family counselling and bereavement support in an effort to give something back to the country he is so grateful to.

In many ways, Armstrong comments, it is not surprising that so many immigrants work so hard and do so well.

"People who migrate are already a self-selected sample. To uproot yourself requires a lot of courage and drive, and they are going to show that drive wherever they are. People with these inbuilt qualities are going to succeed where a lot of other people will cave in."

Across town from Silberstein, in Beach Haven, lives another man who also arrived in New Zealand in August 1948, having travelled on the Derna to Australia and then on a flying boat to Auckland. Nick Matussevich was 12 when his family was met here by representatives of the Red Cross, and a photographer from the New Zealand Herald. "My giddy aunt!" was his response when, 50 years later, he was phoned out of the blue by Armstrong who had tracked him down using the Auckland phone book.

The Matussevich family's background was quite different from Silberstein's - they were White Russians, fleeing the Communists and then roped in as voluntary labour for the Germans through the war. Nevertheless, many aspects of their experiences since arriving here are similar: the years of hard work, the strong desire to fit in, to not be different from the mainstream.

What can we learn from their experiences? Regrettably, one lesson seems to be that we don't learn well from the past, Armstrong agrees.

"The boat people today are spoken about in an anonymous way: they have no face, and so it is an 'us and them' phenomenon. I can only extrapolate from what I know, and that is that no one leaves their homeland in the circumstances that today's immigrants have done unless they're desperate to leave. No one leaves the familiar for the unfamiliar unless they have to. No one leaves without a strong sense of toughness to overcome adversity which, I imagine, will be translated into hard work and the determination to succeed.

"These people have transformed the Australian landscape in ethnic, cultural and economic ways. I see no reason why any group of migrants would be any different. We just need a little compassion and understanding."

Silberstein, now in his 70s, is a comfortable, friendly man who used to find it impossible to speak about his time in the concentration camp, but for some years now has dealt with his ghosts by becoming increasingly vocal about his experiences. He undertakes many speaking engagements, especially to schools, spreading his message of tolerance.

He also loves to talk about his feelings for New Zealand, the country that took him in and gave him, as he sees it, life in its most positive sense.

Does he love New Zealand? "Yes!" he says adamantly. Does he feel like a New Zealander? "Absolutely!"

* The Voyage of their Life, Diane Armstrong, Harper Collins, $34.95.