Personal Glimpses

By Kate Sten

1994

I am about six and a half years old. It is winter and we have visitors – parents and children. It is my name day. In the large family room the children are playing ‘cars’; they all have some kind of push toys. My three year old sister is running around with a box that Papa had painted to look like a car.
I am standing inside a cot with very high drop sides so that I cannot get out at will. I am calling to different children my comments but they pay little attention to me. The big room is warm and the old pot belly is humming its fire song.
In the next room the chatter and tea drinking is in full swing. Mama comes in to check on us, and I beg her to let me join in the games. Lovingly but firmly she repeats that I have not yet fully recovered from pleurisy and that everybody, including Papa, would be very grieved if I had a relapse.
Arguing is useless, crying unthinkable. I slip under the coverlet, my face to the wall and tell myself a fairy story: I am Clara Bow in a sunshine yellow shining dress, sparkling with beads, and I am driven in my magenta limousine to my castle in the hills, where it is always warm springtime.
I am beginning to learn to cope with restrictions of space and activity.
***
I was sixteen and in the senior high school when World War II engulfed Yugoslavia. Papa was taken P.O.W. Somebody had denounced Mama, Olga and me as partisan sympathizers.
Nothing was proved against us but to save us from possible prison incarceration in Kiln, Mama applied for the three of us to go Germany as ‘voluntary’ workers. We were sent to Berlin because we had some relatives there who could house us for the beginning. Mama tried to keep us together but in the end we were 3 ways split and I ended at Siemens Electrical Works with a berth at the nearby ‘foreign workers’ camp.
People there were not incarcerated or beaten, but the conditions were in every way absolutely Spartan. Strict curfews, meager food, communal sleeping and ablutions quarters, ten hour working days in three shifts, no privacy and absolute minimum of personal time and space threw me into a sort of disjointed vortex in which I bobbed down and up, up and sown without finding any hold, any sense, any reason to the unending stream of duties pressing on me.
After a few months this unslackening rhythm exerted a mesmerizing effect on me, so that it seemed that it was from the beginning of time and could never end since it was pre-ordained.
Allied bombing raids segmented this stream of existence and brought both, realization of possible imminent death and hope for an end of the war and deliverance from this drudgery. In retrospect, the five years of war were an invaluable lesson in frugality and endurance.
After the war, the D.P[1] camps in Insbruck, Salzburg were places of restoration of inner equilibrium; renewed joy in simple things like sunshine, going for walks in the countryside, being able to read books and brush up on languages.
I married and bore my first child, but all the time I was conscious of this being an interim phase. Real life was waiting somewhere, ‘out there’ – USA, Canada, Venezuela, Argentina, Australia…
***
Just before Christmas 1949 we embarked from Naples, Italy on the US troop ship, Gen. M.B. Stewart, bound for Australia. I have never, not ever, even in the darkest hours of war, felt so constricted, so hemmed in, so depersonified.
Then[2] there was the change from dormitory to workshop, from one shift to another, from bombing raids to Sunday masses. Individual people and recognizable faces.
Here[3] there were 7000 of us crammed in a liberty ship that carried normally 3000 troops. Deep, dark and airless holds had the vertical bunks spaced about 15” apart.[4] The ablutions blocks held unending queues of squirming clients.
Each hold had only two hours a day access to the open decks. If everybody were allowed indiscriminately up, people in their throng would have pushed each other overboard for lack of space.
Meals were a strange concoction of sugared meats, flabby vegetables and salty biscuits with coffee, and they served at breakneck speed on compartmented trays. The only respite from this 35 days nightmare were four days of storms in the Indian Ocean when more than 90% of the people on board were seasick, and a few of us, who were not affected, had total freedom of decks and mess halls.
***
We tied up at Princes Pier, Melbourne in the early morning of Australia Day[5], 1950. By 6 o’clock in the evening, the train that brought us from Melbourne was pulled up at Bonnegilla Siding. We had arrived.
The impact of the contrast between what went on before and what presented itself to me on that hot, Sunday afternoon is still beyond detailed analysis and description.
Sparkling quartz gravel under my feet like a milky way of pink stars. Fields of dry grass, that instead of shriveling into tawny mulch underfoot, stood straight and strong, chest high to a man, and gleamed pale gold in the sun.
Blue-blue azure skies like an immense inverted cup. Deeper blue, lilac and purple mountains encircling the horizon. Straight in front, curving outlines of a lake, deep aquamarine; with tracery of black, and silver lace of tree branches emerging in scattered groves mirrored in its glassy surface.
And to the right, a long line of grey-green trees bearing masses of fiery torches of bloom…The earth proclaiming the glory of God. I was reborn. I had received a gift of new life and I gave myself and all of mine in that instant – like in marriage – to my new land.
***
Starting from scratch is never easy. After two years indentured services in Bonnegilla we moved to Melbourne and my husband found work in State Government establishments. He was not happy in his lot.
He was nearly 40 years old when we arrived, with university education and successful careers both in teaching and administration, and of all this was completely invalidated by existing government policies. For all intents and purposes he was on par with the 15-16 year old school leavers.
Through the bestial laws of the Soviet Union, he was completely cut off from his homeland and family and he dared not contact them even through the Red Cross, for fear of causing them harm.
Emotionally he was divorced from any possible spiritual base. He was a conscientious worker, a responsible husband and father. But above all he was a sorry and sore lost soul. I did not for a long time understand his perpetual crisis.
I too had to go to work to sustain the family now counting two school age children. I had to do all the household chores, take care of the children and all finances and official matters on my own, and then, to be an amalgam of mother, confessor, counselor and whipping-boy to my man. The restrictions that this round of duties imposed on me were not so much of physical space as of mental and social freedom.
It took us many years of groping in the murkiness of misunderstanding, our simultaneous retirement and move to Daylesford, to return to mutual trust and respect that were highlights of our early years.
Our sphere of activity was shrinking but the compensation was found in better contact and deeper understanding.

__________
[1] Displaced Peersons.
[2] During wartime.
[3] Aboard ship.
[4] 40 cm
[5] 26th January.