There were at least two sets of twins on the First Transport, the USAT General Stuart Heintzelman. They probably were glad to get out of post-War Germany together to another country where they could settle down. In both cases, however, the twins went their separate ways in Australia.
Let’s look first at the Arlionis boys, Jurgis and Valentinas, born on 3 November 1922. We don’t have access to their birth record because the family was Orthodox and the Orthodox Church records in Lithuania have not been digitised yet. From various other records though, we can piece together the information that their mother was Natalija, formerly Garškovaitė, while their father was variously Nikolai, Nikolojaus, Mykolas, Mikalojaus or Mikalojus Arlauskas.
During the 1930s in Lithuania, Estonia and probably Latvia, Governments encouraged their citizens to change their surnames from something which might have had a Slavic or German origin to something from the local language. In 1939, this family chose to change from Arlauskas, a name derived from “Orlov” (Russian for “of the eagle” or “son of the eagle”) or “oryol” and “orel”, meaning "eagle". They changed to the unique Arlionis, which was likely to have been developed from with the same concept, “erelis“ for “eagle” in Lithuanian, with the inclusion of a common -ionis ending.
We don’t know who was the older of these twins, but the first on the public record was Valentinas. That’s because he was a Scout and the EAIS, the Lithuanian digital archives, contains a Scout census from 23 November 1937. Having just turned 15, he was still a schoolboy, supported by his parents, while he could speak Russian, Polish, and German in addition to Lithuanian. He was living at 77a Žemaičių Street in Kaunas. He had joined the Scouts on 17 March 1935.
This was a country which wanted its citizens to carry passports even as they moved about internally. From the 1939 passports for the twins, we can tell that both were still at school, that they were due to perform compulsory military service in 1943, after their 20th birthday, and that they came from an Orthodox family.
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| Valentinas Arlionis' photograph in his 1939 passport Source: EAIS |
By 1940, Jurgis was on the student roll for Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas. The report of his 1947 interview for resettlement in Australia says that he had studied for 4 years in primary school, 8 years in secondary school and one year in the University’s Department of Chemistry.
Jurgis Arlionis' photograph in his 1939 passport
His twin told the Australian interviewers that he had studied 4 years in primary school, 6 years in secondary school and had attended bookkeeping school for 7 months.
The one record card for the 2 of them in the Arolsen Archives noted that they were living at the Baltic Trade School, Buxtehude, on an unknown date. Butxtehude was in the British Zone of occupied Germany. It looks as if the British authorities already had encouraged the twins to forget their professional ambitions.
Initially, they worked together after 7 weeks in the Bonegilla camp. They were sent to Mr H Hick’s orchard at Grahamvale, near Shepparton in Victoria on 29 January 1948. Jurgis returned to the camp on 1 April, so after 2 months of fruit-picking, but Valentinas did not return until 6 April.
Presumably they told the Commonwealth Employment Service officials at the camp that sending them to another job together was not important. The former chemistry student was sent, along with a former medical student, Voldemars Briedis, and others like that, to work as an orderly in the Concord Repatriation Hospital, Sydney. Jurgis departed on 7 April, so there perhaps had been one evening to catch up with Valentinas on his return to Bonegilla.
One week later, Valentinas left for his next placement, in the Melbourne metropolis. It was with the City Brick Works Company Proprietory Limited of Tooronga Road, Tooronga. Tooronga Road survives in the Hawthorn-Glen Iris-Ringwood area, but Tooronga itself survives only as the name of a shopping centre.
VALENTINAS IN MELBOURNE
Valentinas became an Australian citizen on 30 May 1966, when he was living on Muir Street, in the pleasant Melbourne suburb of Hawthorn. His address has been replaced by something more modern but adjacent houses give an idea of the suburb in the 1960s, with private homes built early in the 20th century. He possibly was a boarder or, at least, someone who rented a room and shared other facilities.
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| By 1947 in Germany, Valentinas was wearing glasses Source: Bonegilla Migrant Experience |
On the other hand, he was giving generous donations to Lithuanian causes. If he had continued with accountancy training, as at least 6 others on the First Transport did, he might have been making a good income and have been buying his own home. Instead, his first appearance on an electoral roll in 1967 shows him working as a Metal Machinist.
This address and occupation continued through digitised electoral rolls for the next 10 years. A 1980 roll, though, shows that he had moved further away from the city centre, to Oakleigh, and was working as an Assembler – we don’t know what he was assembling, however.
The public acknowledgements start with £3 to a parish house, listed in the Catholic newspaper, Tėviškės Aidai (The Echo of Homeland), in July 1956. Ten years later, it was £5 for a Lithuanian House for the community, in January 1966. In August 1969, it was $10 (£5 converted to decimal currency) to the Lithuanian House cause.
In April 1988, it was $100 towards a monument proposed by ALB, the Australian Lithuanian Community, and one year later, in April 1989, it was $25 for the Australian Lithuanian newspaper, Mūsų Pastogė (Our Haven).
Darbininkas (The Worker) was founded in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1915 and was being published from Brooklyn, New York, in 1988 when Valentinas was welcomed as a new subscriber. He included a $50 donation with his subscription renewal later that year, leading to sincere thanks from the newspaper’s administration. He was thanked also for his patience, given the very long time it took for the newspaper to arrive on the other side of the world. Those were the days when seamail was still available.
Mūsų Pastogė again thanked Valentinas for his $25 donation in April 1992, but this time gave his address as being in New South Wales. Did the twins mark their 70th birthday with a desire to be in proximity?
Valentinas died on 21 April 1995, so aged 72. While the Web has no information about what happened to Jurgis’ remains, his twin was buried in the Russian Orthodox Section of Rookwood General Cemetery in Sydney. Jurgis lived another 23 years, to the age of nearly 96, so he possibly was responsible for the burial of Valentinas.
JURGIS IN SYDNEY
When naturalised on 10 November 1961, Jurgis was living at the start of what is now a heritage route, on the Great North Road in Five Dock, inner Sydney.
Ancestry has managed to digitise only one electoral roll showing Jurgis Arlionis, from 1963, when he was at the same address and working as a gardener. This is because he had changed his first name to the English version of Jurgis, that is, George. It may have been George on more than the electoral rolls if it was a legal change by deed poll.
The electoral roll entries for George Arlionis show that he had moved a little west to Woodside Avenue, Strathfield, 5 years later, in 1968. Gardening would have been far better for his enquiring mind than his new occupation of Process Worker. This means that he was paid to perform a repetitive task in a factory. In 1972, he was at the same address and in the same occupation.
In 1977, he had moved back towards Five Dock but stopped at Victoria Street, Burwood, and become a Tube Operator, whatever that involved. His 1980 electoral roll details are the same. His new occupation does not sound any more challenging to a clever person than that of Process Worker.
The digitisation of electoral rolls ends there, but digitisation of global Lithuanian-language newspapers in the Spauda project reveals donations to the Australian Mūsų Pastogė of $35 each in 2003 and 2005.
We have no other evidence that Jurgis/George had married but a “Mrs” G. Arlionis donated $200 to Mūsų Pastogė in 2006.
There is nothing more in the public domain about George until the online publication of a notice of Intended Application for Probate on 20/11/2018 and a notice of Intended Distribution of an Estate on 3/4/2019. Both of these legal notices relating to a deceased estate give George‘s date of death as 28 October 2018. That is to say, George was 95 years old when he died – just 6 days short of his 96th birthday.
He was living in the suburb of Lidcombe at the time of his death, so he had moved further west again but still was in inner Sydney. He was quite close to his twin brother’s grave in the Rookwood Cemetery.
IN SHORT
Both the twins were bright young men who could have contributed far more to Australia than repetitive factory work, had it not been for WWII interrupting their education and the need to become skilled in a new language.
THE FAMILY BACKGROUND
Rasa points out that both the twins received a good education, as was customary for that time if the family could afford it. This was due to their circumstances: their grandfather held a good position, as did their father. They grew up in an environment where the exact sciences — involving measurements and calculations — were part of their daily family life.
On a passport for their father, here Mykolas, digitised in the Kaunas regional archives, his occupation was recorded as land surveyor. A passport for their mother, Natalija, in the same archives records her occupation as homemaker.
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| The twins' parents from their 1939 passports |
A 1927 issue, number 1(4) of Matininkas (Surveyor), the publication of the Lithuanian Professional Union of Surveyors, reported that a drafting office of the Land Management Department had been established in the State Printing House in Kaunas, where 15 surveyors worked. The head of this drafting office was surveyor M. Arlauskas.
Their father’s position in the Kaunas Land Management office ensured that the family did not have to choose which son to send for further education and which to keep at work; there were sufficient funds to support both chemistry studies at Vytautas Magnus University and training in accounting.
We also know from the Kaunas archives that Jurgis Gorškovas, Natalija’s father and the boys’ grandfather was a veterinarian. He had been born in Belarus but, like anyone at that time from the Baltic states or the neighbouring countries which later became part of the Soviet Union before finding independence again, his nationality at birth was Russian.
The Arlionis twins' maternal grandfather,
veterinarian Jurgis Gorškovas
He had been born on 28 January 1863, in the village and rural municipality of Chufarovo, Saransk District, in the Penza Governorate of Russia. He moved to Lithuania in 1885.
He is listed among the Founders and Volunteers of the Lithuanian Armed Forces (1918–1923) as having served as a senior non-commissioned officer in the veterinary service from 1 December 1918 to 16 February 1927.
A personal recollection from J Levinskas recalls him as a founder of the Lithuanian Armed Forces in 1919 and a Veterinary Sergeant Major in the Hussar Regiment. Given that Hussars are horsemen, he was a vital part of this regiment — while it lasted.
A daughter, Marija Botscharow, along with her husband, settled in Newton, Massachusetts, in the United States after WWII. Their daughter, Tatjana Kochs, also lived in Newton Upper Falls, Massachusetts, at the time of Levinskas’s recollection. These, of course, were an aunt and cousin of our twins.
It is intriguing to note that when Darbininskas acknowledged Valentinas as a new reader, the name just ahead of his in the list was M. Botscharow, of Newton, MA. It looks very much like the aunt, or a cousin with the same first initial, was in contact with Valentinas, and maybe even finding the US dollars for his subscription.
SOURCES
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