Open Writing

During the last few months two of my close woman friends have died, and in their passing, I have lost two women, who in their own small and quietly unremarkable ways, represented all that is good and fine in a cultivated person of deep humanity, together with an European appreciation of the arts and music as it is commonly recognised.

Both these ladies came from large, prosperous and cultivated “Mittle Europa” families; one was Polish, the other a Viennese Jewess. Both enjoyed and appreciated fine music and art, literature and the best of political thought, and both suffered severe loss and great trauma during the Second World war resulting in each case, in them having to leave war-devastated Europe to seek a safer life in South Africa.

Stephania – of whom I have written earlier in “The Bride Wore a Blanket” and it’s sequel – and Eva had the terrifying experience of having to escape from countries overrun by an occupying power and transplant themselves to completely foreign countries and thence to remake their lives. In doing this, they showed amazing resilience and fortitude and an adaptability which must have taken enormous self-control in the early years, so far from their now destroyed homes, and “disappeared” families. My admiration for these two cool, calm and always collected women will never die.

In Stephania’s case, she was forced to leave Poland at only a few hours notice when she was told by friends and advisors that she was on the “wanted” list of the Russian occupying powers. As I wrote in my sequel to “The Bride Wore a Blanket” she was packed into a container only just large enough to contain her seated figure with the spaces around her filled with vodka bottles which her saviours thought she could use to barter for future favours. Thus she left all she had known and attempted to start a new life with no personal possessions or assets apart from a few bottles of vodka.

Once the box was sealed, it was lifted onto the deck of a small ship sailing regularly to Sweden and when they reached that country, knowing that the Customs officials would search the ship for contraband, the crew quickly stuffed her, exhausted and dehydrated as she was, into a small clothes locker in their cramped and stuffy mess-room while they sat at the table drinking her contraband vodka with the Customs men. Hours later, overcome by the lack of oxygen, she collapsed inside the locker and her inert body fell against the door which fortunately for her, burst open depositing her unconscious onto the floor. The assembled group got such a fright that the Customs men departed with unusual speed without taking their search any further while the crew set about reviving her as quickly as they could. After many vicissitudes she and husband Micky were reunited and eventually emigrated to Argentina where they lived for some years until the Peronista regime forced them out.

Again, they made an attempt to recreate a new life in the then Rhodesia where one of Stephania’s married sisters had taken up residence some years earlier. When Ian Smith declared UDI in that country, Stephania and her husband moved to Johannesburg which was where I met her a few months after Micky had died.

Eva’s story, while perhaps less dramatic, is no less admirable, as it took the fortitude and sheer guts of a very young girl, hardly out of childhood, to adapt to life in a Catholic convent in Zagreb where her mother had placed her after the father had been taken away in the middle of the night, presumably for subversive activities, and was never heard of again. Eva’s mother took the enormous risk of appealing to the Mother Superior to shelter her small daughter, fearing that in time, the same fate would await them both. This the equally brave Mother Superior was prepared to do on the proviso that, as a Jewish child, Eva would not be able to enter the convent school as her papers would show her nationality and put them all at risk. Instead, she would remain in the convent as a maid of all work, getting an education as and when circumstances allowed.

At the end of the war, Eva, then in her late teens or early twenties, returned to Vienna in search of her mother’s family, only to realise that they, like her mother, had vanished without trace, and she was alone in the world. With the help of the Red Cross and a small inheritance held in trust for her in England since the end of the First World war, she was able to get a passage on a ship to South Africa where she had a few remaining distant relatives. Arriving in that country, amazingly, she found a job working in the office of an agricultural machinery distributor in the tiny town of Kokstad in the Eastern Cape.

The extraordinary juxtaposition of this young woman who had grown up in a Catholic convent in Zagreb in the then Yugoslavia, daughter of a cultured Viennese family leaving that war-torn city in the centre of Europe to find herself in a small, unsophisticated farming community of mainly English and Afrikaans farmers surrounded by rural Xhosa tribes has never ceased to amaze me. With enormous fortitude she made up her mind to conquer this challenge, and some years later when her employers moved their offices to Vereeniging in the iron and steel manufacturing triangle of the Transvaal where the agricultural machinery company had their head office, she opted to move as well. Her later years were spent working as a senior private secretary for SA Phillips, the electrical engineering company.

The astonishing factor which united the two women was their determination to survive despite all the odds, and I was always amazed at the quiet dignity of how they had integrated their lives into a society so different from that they had known as children. Their gracious acceptance of Fate’s unexpected twists and turns was an object lesson in adaptability. No hankering for the past, no recriminations, no breast beating or unhappiness… It seemed that they had both accepted “that what was, was” and there was no getting away from it, and the only way to find happiness was to look forward and not look back. Through it all they retained their charm and individuality, their tolerance and balanced outlook on life and their sense of fair play. Neither harboured bitterness or hatred despite the enormous material and personal losses they had suffered.

Knowing them was a privilege and I will always remember and treasure their friendship. I hope that perhaps from their example I may have also learnt the same tolerance and understanding and that perhaps somehow, in my personal relationships with friends I know personally and through the internet, I may show the same wonderful hand of friendship and warmth. I salute you both, my dear friends and will never forget your wonderful example.