When I was a child, it was my father who always told me my bedtime stories, just as it was my mother who did all the DIY around the house. I did not learn until much later that this was an unusual arrangement.
Most of my father’s stories were about himself. He had led a most adventurous life. In Vienna, between the wars, he had held a variety of jobs but had never stuck at any of them for long. In Austria at that time, primary education was free, but secondary education was not unless you were clever enough to win a scholarship. My father was an orphan and was raised by a series of uncles, who all had children of their own to support financially, so he had little option but to leave school early. Poorly educated, single and fancy-free, he had no real motivation to settle down.
He told me that he had been for a while a student at an agricultural college where he had learned to ride bulls, controlling them via the rings in their noses. The cows had identification numbers, with gaps in the sequence where some had died. When my father asked why the cows could not simply be renumbered, he was told that they regarded their numbers as names; they would come to be milked when their number was called but would not answer to a different number. In another period of his youth, he worked nights in a mechanical knitting factory but was sacked for organising a strike for higher wages among the mainly female staff.
After the anschluss with Germany, he realised that he was now in great danger and would have to leave at once. He walked across what had previously been the German-Austrian border with a rucksack on his back. He told me that Jews who carried suitcases were apprehended but he was taken to be just a hiker out for a weekend. From Germany he was smuggled into Switzerland by a resistance group led (so he claimed) by the brother of the local gauleiter, who was a Christian and very much ashamed of his brother’s involvement with the Nazi party.
The Swiss usually sent back refugees from Austria and Germany and many died as a result, but my father explained to them that he had no intention of trying to stay in their country but was making for France where he had family. So they allowed him to cross Switzerland to the French border. Some professional people-smugglers then took him across into France for a small sum. He made for Paris, where his two sisters lived, and immediately signed up for the French Foreign Legion. He wanted to fight Hitler and this, he hoped, was his chance to do so.
He was shipped to North Africa, to a place in Algeria called Siddi Bel Abbes, where he was given basic military training. He told me many humorous stories about this. The training included mock battles between the Legion and the locals but they were not very realistic because it was a basic rule that the Legion always had to win. And then, just as his training finished, France collapsed and the Foreign Legion was disbanded. He spent most of the rest of the war in a labour camp in the middle of the Sahara, helping to build the Trans-Sahara Railway.
In my father’s accounts, all this was treated as a great adventure but actually his situation was pretty grim. The prisoners were overworked and underfed. They slept in holes in the ground. At night they could hear jackals calling, and in the morning they had to shake out their shoes before putting them on because scorpions and snakes liked to use them as sleeping quarters. He told me one particularly nasty story about scorpions: when the prisoners succeeded in catching one, they would surround it with a circle of Halfa, which was a kind of coarse desert grass. They would set light to this and the trapped and terrified scorpion would sting itself to death. I have often wondered if this was true.
In 1943, their camp was liberated by the Americans, who sent my father to Casablanca. There a doctor told him that the desert sands had badly damaged his corneas and that if he did not leave Africa within a year, he would go blind. The Americans were collecting Polish men to send to the UK, since Poland was an ally and Poles were known to be brave fighters. There was even a separate Polish RAF contingent consisting of men who had served with the Polish Air Force and had managed to get out of Poland before it fell. My father had been born in Lviv, now in Ukraine, which at that time was called Lwow and was in Poland. When he was born there, it was called Lemburg and was in the Kingdom of Galicia, part of the Austro-Hungarian Empir/e. He was desperate to get out of Africa, so he told them that he was Polish and was allowed to board. He did not speak Polish but that was true of many of the men on the ship!
They were landed in Glasgow and interrogated by British anti-espionage investigators, since it was well known that the Germans often smuggled spies into refugee groups. The men who had lied and continued to lie about being Polish were quickly unmasked and imprisoned. However my father told them the truth about himself and why he was on the ship. They realised that he was an honest man so they sent him on to their London office which my father always called “Patriotic School”. Much later, I googled it and found out that it was in fact the Royal Victoria Patriotic School for Girls, which had been taken over by the government when the war started. They told my father to state in future that he was of uncertain nationality (which was not far off the truth).
He initially tried to get into the British army. He was thin as a stick and half blind but he still wanted to fight Hitler. Of course when he turned up for his medical, they laughed at him and sent him back to the Patriotic School.
In those days, refugees were treated very differently from the self-styled refugees who turn up on our shores today. They were not given money or accommodation at public expense. They were expected to be self-supporting from the beginning. The Jewish community (which meant Marks and Spencer in practice) gave my father a suit and the government gave him a job. There was plenty of work to be done as so many British men were in the army. My father was sent to cut out plastic parts in a handbag factory. He had never done such work before but he turned out to be good at it. He had a natural flair for geometry which allowed him to interleave the various shapes and get the maximum number of useful parts out of the roll of plastic or lining material.
As soon as he was out on the street, he went into a telephone box and looked up Austria in the A-D directory. He knew that this was the English name for his country. He found an Austrian Centre in Swiss Cottage and went there. It turned out to be a social club with a theatre and dance group and a small restaurant. And there he met my mother again. He had known her in Vienna as they had belonged to the same Wandervogel troop, but they had never been close. As my mother put it, “He had his friends and I had mine”. But as strangers in a strange land, they naturally gravitated to each other. She was living in a rented flat with a woman friend, also a refugee, and they took him in as a lodger.
My mother was an important person in the Austrian Centre Group. She was their leading lady, lead dancer and choreographer. They toured London, performing in town halls, air raid shelters and local cinemas, collecting money for the war effort. The performance consisted of folk dances choreographed by my mother, one for each of the occupied and enslaved nations of Europe, followed by a play called Hope for Tomorrow. In this, my mother played a fanatical Nazi secretary and got so into the spirit of the thing that my father said it made his blood run cold to see and hear her. He himself was no use on a stage so he became their stage manager. His first job in any new locale was to find out where the toilets were as my mother always suffered from nerves before a performance.
Both my parents by this time had been married and divorced. My mother’s first marriage had been a love match. Her husband was handsome, charming and spoilt. He ran out on her soon after the birth of their son, the brother I never knew. My father’s marriage was a very different matter. It was a marriage of convenience followed by a quick divorce, undertaken to give a woman friend Austrian citizenship so that she could get a visa to escape to a safe country. This may well have saved her life. It always struck me as a heroic thing for him to have done and I saw my father very much as a knight in shining armour. My mother said he had actually done it for the sake of the lady’s sister because he was sweet on her at the time. I got to meet the sister much later and she confirmed the story.
Before I was conceived, my parents had already decided to marry. The problem was that, while my mother could prove that she was legally divorced, my father initially couldn’t. By the time they finally were able to marry I was well on the way.
My father did not live a long life. He died just before his sixtieth birthday with a secondary cancer in his shoulder blade. The doctors never found out where the primary was. My mother always believed that the hardships he had suffered in Africa had shortened his life, but I suspect that smoking had a lot to do with it too. He was still a smoker when I knew him and he told me that in his youth he had smoked so heavily that he actually lost his colour vision for a while.
He was one of the kindest, sweetest-natured men I ever knew. And undoubtedly the best storyteller!
| Up | Home |