Internment at Tatura Camp 3 Between 1942 and 1944.
Talk
at the opening of the exhibition The
Enemy Within at the Shrine of Remembrance, Melbourne, February 2013.
Silke
Hesse, Monash University
Thank you for
inviting me. And thank you to the curators for all their work and to the
audience for coming to hear an unpopular story.
I have found
that few Australians know much about this episode of Australian history. When
they happen to hear you were interned as a child their reaction tends to be
nervous: either “you ought to be grateful” or “how were you treated?”. I’d like
to say at the start that I am grateful and the guards who had contact with us
were almost without exception respectful and helpful. The bureaucrats were
sometimes a bit harder to like.
I should say a
few words about our family. My father was born in Sydney of German parents and
consequently he was Australian by Australian law and German by German law. His
father was a wool-buyer who travelled to Europe and America with his wools each
year. My father did his primary schooling in Australia where he and his sisters
felt very much at home. In 1911 when he was almost 12, the family moved to
Germany for his secondary education. When the war broke out in 1914, my father
was of course a German for the Germans and had to fight the last two years on
the German side. His first big battle was Passchendaele, opposite Australians.
He was extremely conscious of that and I think half attributed his unlikely
survival to the fact that the Australians were also his people. His regiment
was deployed as storm troopers and had enormous casualties in each battle.
My mother’s
family was German and in WWII her four brothers were of military age. It was
important for my father not to have to fight them and that was one more reason
not to give up his dual nationality. As it turned out, three of my mother’s
brothers fell in this war, the fourth was 80% wounded, her father and
stepmother committed suicide to avoid capture by the Russians and my
grandmother died, as we were told, of a broken heart: a large family almost
wiped out. It was good my father didn’t have to feel guilty in connection with
their deaths.
My brothers and
I were brought up bilingual following the family tradition. We spoke German in
the house and finished the sentence in English when we stepped out of the door.
It worked well and we didn’t mix the languages. But it was an uncomfortable
position to have in those years and made us vulnerable to anti-German
sentiments. When my mother put my brother and me into kindergarten, to give an
example, all other parents withdrew their children in protest. They came back
after a fortnight when the directress refused to fight a war against children.
The deal was that we work at a separate table. There were of course always also
Australians who were extraordinarily lovely to us. (But I would like to say, in
passing, that it is hard for children, be they Jews, Germans or refugees of any
kind, to get the feeling that they are everyone’s enemy completely out of their
system again.) For our family, internment meant that we could all be together,
including my mother’s German sister, who had been living with us for the last
four years and who was interned two months before us. My father didn’t have to
fight the Germans and my mother and we children didn’t have to cope with the
Australians for those years. War is no fun for anyone but internment was definitely
the best of the available options for us.
My father was
interned in July 1940. I remember visiting him in Long Bay Penitentiary. A
section of it had been renamed Malabar Internment Camp and surrounded by a
symbolic strand of barbed wire. I remember the guard allowing me to come round
to the prisoner’s room and give him a hug. I also visited him at Orange on my 4th
birthday. There the internees and visitors sat casually together on the
showground grandstand and I distributed the marzipan bacon and eggs I had just
been given.
My mother, my
two younger brothers and I were arrested on 12th May 1942 when I was
still five. (I’m probably not allowed to say this, but I think it was at her
request.) We then had ten days in transit at Liverpool camp which was almost
empty at the time. I remember the soldier on guard calling my brothers and me
over and telling us we could play on the other side of the gate, where the dust
was actually not all that much more attractive. Children were not officially
internees and I think the young soldier might have wanted to make that point.
We arrived in Camp 3, Tatura, in
winter. The camp consisted of four compounds surrounded by fences and rolls of
barbed wire and guard towers with machine guns at the four corners. In those
early days the camp was still a relatively primitive place. The huts had
unlined corrugated iron walls with a large gap between wall and ceiling through
which the wind and the red dust it carried howled. We slept on palliasses and
each of us had a pile of grey army blankets. Food was more than plentiful, a
soldier’s ration for each child, though there was a bit too much white bread.
Sanitary conditions were very poor and we children came down with one illness
after another: first gastro, then chickenpox, finally whooping cough which in
my case was quite serious But things improved . The walls of the huts were
lined with plywood (unfortunately that had very hardy bedbugs in it), pit
toilets were dug, more showers (there had been three for 150 women) built, also
more huts for the newly arrived missionaries from New Guinea, and eventually a
recreation hall for meetings and performances. People planted beautiful flower
gardens in front of their huts and it became a delight to walk through some
sections of the camp. Vegetable gardens were established outside the camp and the
food became much better. In accordance with international law, internal camp
matters were always organized by the internees themselves who did this
extremely well, and cooperation between guards and inmates was on the whole
very good. Women and children had only one roll-call a day, men three.
Camp life for
children had its good sides. It was a bit like living on a crowded camping
ground, with plenty of kids around if you wanted to play. The school was
excellent, even though the textbooks and materials were improvised and many of
the teachers untrained. But for us Beinssen children the best thing about the
camp, particularly in such worrying times, was that our parents were always
with us. They couldn’t escape. They did the few chores assigned to them but
beyond that they had the leisure to read to us and the other children and they also wrote stories and plays
for us. On my birthdays there was always a new puppet play for all the camp
children instead of a party. We had quality parenting in those two camp years.
For adults like
my parents, who always made the best of things, camp life had many good sides.
You didn’t have to earn a living, or do the shopping, and though washing and
housework were quite cumbersome, you really had all the leisure you wanted to
pursue interests and hobbies. It was a back to basics lifestyle without power
points and with virtually no room for possessions and that too had a certain
charm. You were also with a whole lot of people you might never have met
otherwise who came from many parts of the world (in our A compound: Palestine,
Iran, Singapore, New Guinea among other places) and who could tell you their
often amazing stories. My mother and aunt learned Italian and my father learned
Russian. My aunt sang. My father produced Lessing’s “Minna von Barnhelm” with
my aunt in the title role.
“The Merchant of
Venice” was under way when we were unexpectedly released back into the hostile
world and the care of the bureaucrats in September 1944, many months before the
end of the war. That presumably saved the government some money but
particularly my mother would have much preferred to remain interned till
hostilities ceased. We children, who had pretty well forgotten our English by
then, were lucky that the Sisters of Mercy and the De La Salle Brothers at
Orange allowed us to go to their schools as the only Protestant children. And
though the pace of learning slowed down considerably, we were all treated very
kindly there.
I might stop at
this point. Thank you all very much for listening. If you have questions, I’d
be happy to answer them later.
From
Irmhild Beinssen’s letter to her brother Arnold von Koch describing internment from
1942 to 1944 in the Tatura 3 family camp.
Written
28th January 1947
[...] the first year was a nightmare and I
often asked myself whether it was the right thing to expose [the children] to
these conditions. They came down with one illness after the other, eventually
severe whooping cough that affected Silke particularly badly. The food was
quite unsuitable for children as they were used to carefully prepared diet food
and the sanitary conditions were appalling. It is only thanks to the healthy
climate that no really bad diseases broke out. On top of that, there was the
crampedness of the huts into which you were squashed. The corrugated iron
became scorchingly hot in summer [...] in winter it was icy, terribly draughty
and cold. There was no way of heating the rooms. The closest water tap was a
walk away and the toilet a journey. There were three showers for about 150
women, the same for men. The toilets were too unsanitary for children to use so
that they always had to do their business in the huts which meant that one of
the adults was always out emptying potties. We had to lug all water for washing
across a big yard. There were only two coppers for the entire population. From
them to the washing lines was again a lengthy trek. In summer we suffered from
terrible dust storms. You then had to close windows and doors in spite of the
burning heat and could still hardly breathe. In winter there was ankle deep mud
everywhere and you never had dry shoes. There were no shade trees and the
children could only play right in the dirt and always looked as was to be
expected. That meant that Gisela and I had a huge amount of washing every day.
The dining halls were terribly overcrowded because the camp had originally been
intended for fewer people. In time, two more barracks were built. [...] Nearly
all these things improved after a time. I was the front-line fighter for a
children’s cuisine which I managed to get going for a while till a more
far-reaching reform of the kitchen could be achieved and the Germans separated
from the Italians and Arabs. After that the food became much better and by then
the children had also got used to the new conditions. Soon gardens were laid
out in front of the huts which decreased the amount of loose dust and gave a
more friendly appearance. The paths were stabilized with gravel, and drains
were dug so that it was, on the whole, no longer necessary to wade through the
mud. A large grass-covered oval, on which at first only the school children had
occasionally been allowed to do sport, was made accessible to the general
public and included in the confines of the camp throughout the day, though it
was closed at night because there was only a fence and no barbed wire around
it. But that was just marvelous. Then a large hall was also built for plays,
concerts and the like and equipped with a great deal of care and good taste.
Gardens outside the camp, in which men and women could work during the day,
supplied us with fresh vegetables which had been very rare at the start. Our
huts were lined with plywood and the layer of air between it and the corrugated
iron created quite good insulation. The considerable disadvantage was, however,
that bed-bugs had nested in it and could not be exterminated in spite of the
enormous efforts made to smoke them out. (28.1.47)
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