On Being an Enemy

Talk for Inner Wheel Bayside, Victoria, 2nd April 2014

On Being an Enemy

Silke Beinssen-Hesse

This year it will be 70 years since my family and I were released from the Tatura 3 Internment Camp, one year before the end of the war. I was then a precocious eight-year-old. But the first time I talked publicly about internment was in February last year when I was asked to speak at the opening of the The Enemy Within exhibition at the Shrine of Remembrance. It is my incautious mention of this at a Wenona Old Girls’ meeting at which Jennie and Margaret were present that led to today’s invitation. Though family friends and most of my colleagues in the German Department at Monash probably knew about our internment, they were too tactful ever to bring up the subject. Two or three times over the years mention of internment surfaced unexpectedly in conversations. The startled Australians had usually had no idea that children, or anyone for that matter, had been interned and were not sure whether to express horror and regret or to defend the government of the day. A journalist friend of mine recently commented: ‘Of course amnesia is Australia’s chief attitude to history; what an unserious adolescent nation it is – most of its charm lies in this characteristic.’

When I was enrolled in Wenona in 1946 the headmistress and my mother agreed that I must never talk about our internment. This was probably a good decision; the topic of war and war guilt was far too fraught and complex and in those years, often also too personal for us school children to make sense of. My parents too had always handled the whole war issue mainly with silence. It meant that I had early become the world’s most determined eavesdropper .(Later, at university, I then specialized in German Studies to fill in the gaps.) The rule of silence about my past had the side effect that I could really make no friends at school. That did not mean that people were not nice to me; they were always perfectly civil. But everyone knew there was something wrong with me, my un-Australian accent was one obvious marker, and this could not be explained or discussed. Consequently I used school for study and did well at that. Though I did not really have class-mates, I did have two very faithful friends at various times whose families had some out-of-school contact with ours. Early in the war my brothers and I had got used to children being told by their parents that they were not allowed to play with us, usually just as we had started to get on really well. And when I was four and my brother three, all the parents of the kindergarten in which we were newly enrolled had withdrawn their children in protest so that we were alone for the first fortnight. Eventually everyone came back; the compromise reached was for us to work at a different table. (I have to add that we also encountered some extraordinarily supportive and helpful people during those years.) As a result of such experiences, I had decided never to make friends without being quite sure that their parents approved. I then also ended up adopting my mother’s war-time habit of never greeting anyone unless they had greeted me first. It became a habit hard to shake. I was quite adult when I shocked a friend by saying that I thought the most important thing in life was to learn to do without other people. She could not understand what made me think like that. Fortunately I had a close and functional family with many family friends to make up for not feeling part of wider society. 

For me and my brothers, internment was at the time actually more like a rescue than a punishment. It meant among other things that we could be reunited with my father and my mother’s sister, our second mother, who had both been taken away from us. In the camp our family was together once more and with barbed wire all around, no one was likely to go missing again. As I later found out, my mother had actually arranged our internment, by somewhat illegal means, for German women and children were not considered a national threat by the Australian government and they had to be fed if they were interned. Apart from being non-dangerous, we were of course actually also all British subjects and Australian citizens.

So why did I agree to talk about internment after so many years of not talking? When I was contacted about the exhibition at the Shrine I was interested to find out what had awakened this belated interest. I was also a little concerned about the title of the exhibition. I myself had used the phrase ‘the enemy within’ to refer to the Germans’ paranoid perception of the Jews in their midst. So when I was asked to speak, I welcomed the opportunity to introduce some of these supposed ‘enemies’ of Australia. And as Australia’s asylum seeker problem was looming ever larger, it also seemed a good idea to let people have a look at how Australia had dealt with ‘alien’ and ‘unwanted’ civilians in earlier times. (Yuriko Nagata’s excellent book on Japanese internment is entitled Unwanted Aliens.) I have to say here that the exhibition, curated by Jenna Blythe, gave a well researched, well documented, balanced and sympathetic account of this episode in Australia’s history and could not be faulted.

At a recent conference a woman commented: 'Australia, once the destination of convict transports, then a place where Aboriginal people were concentrated and confined in reservations, later the site of large WWI and WWII internment camps, now imprisons asylum seekers. There’s a pattern.' - In WWII Australia took in a total of 7877 foreign internees sent by Britain and its allies and managed to find 8921 ethnically or racially suspicious people on its own shores. Sometimes put together with prisoners of war (there were eventually about 25,000 of these),  internees were then housed in 16 major internment camps that held on average 1000 people each. In the case of the Japanese, the arrest order for Northern Command was specifically racial: everyone of Japanese ‘race’ must be interned, men, women and children, even if they were naturalized, even if they were first, second or third generation Australian-born or married to British or 'white' Australians, and even if they had only some Japanese blood. It was a nationalistic and a racist age. With the help of the United Nations the confusion between ethnic identity and citizenship has since been sorted out, hopefully for good. Nowadays both those born in Australia and those naturalized are legally Australians, and presumed to be loyal unless proven otherwise.

Three weeks ago I participated in a symposium on internment in Cowra. (This year is the 70^th anniversary of the Cowra breakout in which 231 Japanese prisoners of war successfully committed Hara-kiri for their Emperor, more than a hundred were injured and four Australian soldiers lost their lives). Here we heard mainly the stories of Japanese, Italian and Indonesian internees. Their experiences were usually very much worse than those of most Germans, due presumably to the degree of ‘racial inferiority’ attributed to them. In particular, the transport ships crewed by the Dutch, the French and the British, the Dunera is a well-known example, were often hell-ships. For the prisoners arriving in Australia to the friendly smiles and the tea and fresh sandwiches proffered by the soldiers running the Australian operation, this country was like a glimpse of heaven. While there are stories of callously over-zealous Australian police, and of people who denounced and looted their neighbors, and while the bureaucrats from Victoria Barracks were certainly not popular with internees, it seems that nobody could fault the commandants and guards of the Australian camps who cared for the almost 17,000 civilian internees for up to seven years.

I’ll now say a few words about our family background. My grandfather came from the German free city of Bremen on the North Sea. He learnt wool-classing and joined an Antwerp firm that sent him to Australia in 1893. There his business did very well. Three years later he married and brought out my grandmother who had spent childhood years in Philadelphia. Their three children were born between 1897 and 1901 in Sydney. Both parents insisted on speaking English at home; they employed a Scottish governess, and later sent their son to Tudor House, which eventually became the preparatory school for King's College. In 1911 the family moved to Germany for my father’s secondary and tertiary education. Since my grandfather traveled between the two countries with his bails of wool each year, it did not matter much where the family lived. They wanted my father, Ekke, the intended heir to the business, to feel completely at home in both cultures. Since he was born in Australia of German parents, Ekke was Australian by Australian law and German by German law. Because he happened to be in Germany when WWI started in 1914, he had to fight on the German side. Thus in mid 1917 he joined an elite light horse regiment that was then deployed as storm troopers, and ended up fighting opposite Australians in his first battle at Passchendaele. There he was decorated for his bravery in retrieving wounded. On that battlefield he found a fallen Australian captain and when he examined a letter the man was carrying discovered they had almost been neighbors in Sydney. A name mentioned in this letter was of a man who later became my grandfather’s best friend. My father Ekke’s many letters from the front line show that the Australians in the ‘other team’ were constantly on his mind, even though his ‘German blood’ was supposed to be what mattered. 

Ekke then experienced the Versailles Treaty as disappointingly vindictive and not conducive to a peaceful future. The ideal of being bi-cultural with which he had grown up was no longer realistic. My father then spent much of his time as a student trying to work out what being a ‘German’ was supposed to entail. After gaining his doctorate in Economics, he traveled widely. He lived and worked in Arabia and Persia, for a time joined his father in Sydney but was there shocked at the virulent anti-German attitudes now part of the culture. He then moved to New Guinea where he was again confronted with German-Australian problems; he ended up in charge of the native carriers on a lengthy exploratory expedition into the unexplored interior, contracted amoebic dysentery in the jungle, survived that and a resulting abscess of the liver and was back in Germany in 1931 on the advice of his doctors. There he rewrote and eventually published a literary account of his time in New Guinea. He also observed the deepening of the Depression in Berlin where politics were becoming more radical and chaotic. Ekke eventually joined an anti-Hitler group that hoped to split Hitler’s party by providing a genuinely socialist and unaggressive alternative for Germany. Once Hitler came to power, my father spent some months in hiding before giving himself up; with the help of a friend turned Nazi, he was then allowed to leave Germany for Los Angeles in late 1933. My mother came over and married him there. Those were the Depression years and Ekke’s business ventures and attempts at writing for Hollywood were financially unsuccessful. So in late 1935 he joined his father’s office in Sydney. There a competent person was needed to conduct the barter or later Aski business without which trade with Germany was not possible in those days. One of the items imported in this context was a Junkers plane. By the time the war broke out, my parents had three Australian-born children, I being the oldest. 

Ekke’s various experiences had caused him to become more and more pacifist. He believed war to be the greatest of all evils. The CIB obviously found it hard to assess his sympathies, which now tended to be with people rather than with political doctrines or parties. His friends were often chosen irrespective of their politics. Ekke was interned in mid 1940; at his appeal hearing he reiterated that he wished to retain both his nationalities and to remain neutral. Asked what he would do if a ship-wrecked German sailor demanded his help he said that he would ask to be interned, which gave the Tribunal its cue. But he also gave the Tribunal his word of honor that he would never do anything detrimental to Australia and said he would forfeit his entire fortune if he was ever found guilty of a treasonous act. In the camps, and I remember visiting him in Long Bay, Orange and Liverpool camps before he ended up in Tatura Camp I, he initially concentrated on creating a functional community among the internees. But he also spent time on his own scientific studies and his writing and on producing plays. I have translated or copied most of the large volume of Ekke’s uncensored and censored letters from the camps.     

My mother and we three children were interned on 12^th May 1942. From Wentworth Falls we were driven to Liverpool camp in a police car and about a fortnight later taken by train to Tatura Camp 3. This was a family camp, mainly for the German Templers who had settled in the Holy Land in the 1860s and were moved when the war in the Middle East spread. They had been a close, Christian-minded community for decades, had also had the experience of being interned in WWI,  and as camp life was run by the internees, we had the benefit of their experience. The camp had four compounds; ours held Germans, including the New Guinea missionaries, Italians mainly from Palestine and Singapore, and some Arabs who had been deported with the Templers. There were many interesting, well educated and gifted people in the camp and cultural activities and the school benefited from their expertise. Since only every second year level could be taught, I was accelerated and started year four at the age of seven. The camp school gave me and others an excellent education. Through the Red Cross, senior students could there do the German matriculation which was recognized by Melbourne University and there have been quite a few outstanding graduates. 

The camp resembled a crowded and somewhat primitive camping ground, more fun for the children than the adults. I would like to quote from a letter my mother wrote after the war to her one remaining brother because it gives a good impression of the conditions. It is in my translation.

[...] 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 drafty 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)

In spite of the discomforts, my mother perceived the camp experience as, all in all, positive:

On the whole, the time of internment enriched both adults and children. By living together so closely in the camp, you became acquainted with people in ways that would never have been possible otherwise. And putting up with discomfort strengthens your resilience and makes you grateful for what you have. It would have seemed almost unethical not to have carried some of the burden, even though our lives behind barbed wire could not be of help to anyone. For the children, the years of German schooling were important. Silke and Uwe learnt to read and write German and we will make sure that they do not forget it again. (26.7.46)

People sometimes ask whether there were Nazis in our camp. There were and some of the activities like the pretty folk-dances were conducted within a Nazi framework. But their Nazism was pretty pointless and naive, and could fairly easily be ignored by what was presumably the majority. My parents certainly ignored it. Though our greeting at school was "Heil Hitler", I for one had no idea who that was. In other words, we were not indoctrinated.

Finally, I would like to tell you of an encounter I had in 1958. Shortly after I arrived in Germany to take up a scholarship, I was invited to a party for the new arrivals. Amazingly, the host was a former inmate of the camp whom I remembered. He told me he had invited a former scholarship holder who really wanted to tell me his story so that I could pass it on to his friends. The man was called Brack, I have forgotten his first name, and I will tell his story as I remember it. Just before the war began, he had come to England as  a student to take up his scholarship and had immediately been interned. Along with other internees he was put onto the Arandora Star headed for Canada. When the ship was torpedoed he was among the approximately 50% of passengers that were rescued. He was then put onto the hell ship Dunera bound for Australia; officers of that ship were later court-marshaled for their appalling behavior. Brack was then interned in Tatura Camp 1 and there studied medical science along with my father under Professor Henry Brose. (Brose was a former Rhodes scholar from Adelaide whose German ‘blood’ – his parents had been German migrants - had now caught up with him; in WWI, he had been interned as a British subject at Ruhleben near Berlin.) Brack received permission to do a medical orderly’s course with some practical hospital training and got his certification. At the end of the war he asked to be repatriated to West Germany, though he came from just across the border in the East. When he arrived in Germany he heard that his mother had just died. He tried to get a pass to go to her funeral and when that did not work crossed the border illegally. He was arrested by the Russians and for the next seven years he was sent from one former Nazi prison or concentration camp to the other without ever being charged; I remember him mentioning Bautzen and Buchenwald. When Buchenwald became a museum, the prisoners were moved on. Brack said he survived because he was always the only medically trained person and had much more freedom and purpose to his life than the others. Again and again the camps were decimated by typhoid fever, with charcoal the only medicine ever available; so he was never short of work. Brack was then suddenly freed on the condition he would never speak of his experiences. His wife was at the time quite worried that he was speaking to me at all. When I met Brack he had completed his teacher training, was married with a baby daughter and had a job as a teacher. He was one of the most radiant people I have met. In his extraordinary life story the period in Australian internment had the rosiest sheen by far.

To conclude, I would like to mention Cowra again. For fifty years now this small NSW town, that was the innocent site of the world’s most lethal prisoner breakout, has hosted a festival of international understanding for which a different nation is invited and celebrated each year. This year the fiftieth guest to ring the Australian replica of the World Peace Bell that hangs there was the United Nations. Cowra also has superb Japanese designed memorial Gardens that local people have nursed through periods of drought. In the same way the people of Cowra have cared devotedly for the graves of internees and prisoners on their war cemetery; these are still important to descendants who visit. Some of the flag-bearers struggling with Cowra’s fifty flags this year seemed to be kindergarten children; you can never start too early. In this way a country town that has almost no migrant population keeps itself open to the world, its variety and its needs, inspired by the prisoners of war and the internees that were housed there more than seventy years ago.

I might leave it at that. Thank you for inviting me and showing an interest today.