How a Lithuanian Boy Became a Refugee in Australia

The Melbourne Catholic newspaper, the Advocate, published on 12 February 1948 an article from a Bonegilla camp staff member written on 21 January that year.  Since the Second Transport, the General MB Stewart, did not reach Fremantle until the date of publication, "Robertas Luas" in the article below clearly is someone who came to Australia on the First Transport.

The Advocate's introduction read, "The following account of the experiences in Lithuania of one of the D.P.'s in the Bonegilla camp has been forwarded to us with the accompanying photograph taken in the European concentration (sic) camp. The Monstrance was made in the camp from wood. The names, for obvious reasons, are fictitious."

This evening, when I walked past the "Kinohalle" I heard piano playing and Lithuanian singing.  I entered and saw what I had expected: the young Lithuanian lad again played what he had picked up without any tuition and a few of his friends (were) singing into the microphone. 

I played a few German folk songs for them, showed them views of "beautiful Tasmania", and then asked him what he intended to do here in Australia. He said he would like to go back into a technical school to become an architect, and also take evening lessons in art and music. 

Then I asked him to tell me the story (of) how he got away, from his home so young. And this is what he told me in as good a German as he could command.  "My family name is Luas, and my Christian name Robertas.  I come from (Kalvarija), a place in Lithuania. I am a Catholic and eighteen years of age. My father died when I was three years old.  My mother, sister, and two brothers are still in Lithuania, I believe. 

"It was in 1944, I was at school.  German soldiers came into the schoolroom and asked all over fourteen years to volunteer for making road obstacles against the Russians, who were approaching the village.  But these men had guns and showed them, so we did not go freely, we just had to go.  They told us that when the work was finished we could come back to school. 

"We worked for a whole week, but could not finish; the Russians came too quickly.  We wanted to go home, but the soldiers brought us to the next village to make there a 'Panzergraben'.  We were fifty boys. 

"Soon we started to run away in small groups, but the soldiers shot at us and killed four.  Then we stayed, and were treated as prisoners of war.  They sent us to Istenburg in East Prussia into a camp of the "Arbeitsdient."  In my hut were fifteen men: Poles, Italians and Frenchmen.  Our daily food was 1½ kilo bread and vegetable soup for the whole fifteen.  I stayed about six weeks.

 

"Then I was sent to a farmer in Gustrow.  I had to work hard, and got very little to eat.  Many worked for that cruel man.  We were foreigners.  Everything was forbidden for us.  One day he hanged two Poles, because they had gone with German girls.  He told us the same would happen to us if we did not keep the rules. 

"But then I ran away towards Lithuania, to get home to my mother.  But I had no papers.  When the police caught me they put me in gaol for two weeks.  Then, I think they intended to shoot me.  At the last moment the sergeant asked me my age.  I said I was fourteen.  And my name?  I said Robert.  He said: 'that sounds German, we will let him go!' 

"I was sent to Bonn on the Rhine where it was horrible.  First the work at the railway station, loading cases of ammunition into trucks was not so bad.  But then we had to fill in bomb holes in the city streets, and they gave us rubber gloves to pull out the dead from shelters days after the bombings had taken place.  This lasted for six weeks.  I never knew what day of the week it was.

"Then I went to Essen to work in the factory where they made spare parts for the ME109 fighter aircraft.  The American Army surrounded us there, but I escaped to Haltern, where I worked again loading trains with ammunition.  All the time since I was in Isemburg a guard stood by as I worked. 

"After four weeks I went, partly walking, to Hamburg-Altona, constructing road obstacles against the oncoming British Panzer units.  Later I went to Lubeck, and there the British came on May 17, 1945, and put me in a D.P. Camp at Nuestatt, a fisher village on the Baltic Sea. 

"Soon I went to Buxtehude, to attend the Baltic Technical High School. From there I came to Australia last year." 

This is the story of a Catholic boy who was driven from his home at the age of fourteen.  I asked him what moved him to come to Australia.  And he gave me some more interesting information.

Last year he wrote to his mother asking whether he should go home.  She did not answer in a letter.  But she sent him a picture of St. John baptizing Our Lord, and wrote on the back, "Into the wide world." 

For young Robert this was leave to go anywhere in the world.  He was glad. He did not want to go home, nobody did.  Questioned by the British Occupation authorities, they all answered, 'No, we do not want to go where the Russians are, we prefer to die here in Germany.' 

Robert wanted to go somewhere else, anywhere, because of hunger. He showed me a picture of himself when he was fifteen, and it is a sad reality, hunger impressed on every face in the group.  Robert himself unrecognisable, more like a man of forty.

Lithuanians playing basketball in the Bonegilla camp
show how thin they still were nearly three years after the end of WWII

Source:  Pix, 31 January 1948

He also showed me a picture of Corpus Christi procession in a D.P. Camp of Lithuanians in Germany, which gives a similar impression. Robert weighed only 62 kilo in Germany.  Now he looks strong and sturdy again.  The sun of Bonegilla and the waters of the Hume Weir have tanned his Nordic skin. 

The Advocate's photograph of a monstrance procession, said to have been in a European camp.

Next week he goes fruit picking.  He hopes to save some money to continue his studies later in Melbourne or Perth.

Robertas' story could belong to any one of eleven 18-year-old Lithuanian males on the First Transport.  To whom it belongs doesn't matter much though, as the details are generic for many, if not most, of the Baltic men on the First Transport. Women were conscripted like this too but were more likely, from what I have heard, to be working in factories.

The person who wrote Robertas' story is highly likely to have been Dr Ralph Crossley, the Senior Lecturer in German at the University of Sydney who organised the first English classes at Bonegilla camp.  Not only was his PhD on the German language but he had spent time in Germany in the late 1930s.  I think that he would have been the only English-speaker in the camp in January 1948 whose German was so fluent that he could write 'as good a German as he could command' of someone who had spent the previous 3 years operating in German as well as Lithuanian.  And play German folk tunes for the assembled Lithuanians.  Ralph Crossley has an interesting life story, which I should blog sometime soon ...