A ship carrying 115 women aged between 14 and 42 plus 728 men of a similar age is bound to breed a few romances. So it was with the First Transport sailing between Bremerhaven in Germany and Fremantle in Australia in November 1947.
Ann has counted 25 marriages between the passengers after arrival in Australia. Some might have been engaged to each other before both parties managed to get selected.
At least one couple got married in Germany just before the ship sailed, then caused headaches for Australian officials when they insisted on being sent to their first work placement together.
Another couple had married in Germany in June 1945, but the Australian selection team had not realised that a -ienė Lithuanian surname ending might be the married version of a male surname ending in -as. If the team’s local support staff knew this, they did not tell the Australians.
This couple’s second marriage in the Bonegilla camp, on 20 December 1947, made their situation just the same as that of another young couple who were the first to marry in the camp, on 16 December. Maybe sending both of the second couple to a tannery for their first employment was some sort of punishment for misleading the selection team, which was looking for Displaced Persons who did not have partners.
Juozas and Helvi's Shipboard Romance
One of the shipboard romances was that between Juozas Jablonskis and Helvi Kald, as recorded first by the Perth Daily News on 28 November 1947, the same day on which the USAT General Stuart Heintzelman passengers disembarked in Western Australia. The Daily News report was repeated by 4 more newspapers around Australia the next day.
Juozas 1947-48 identity photo
Juozas was much older than Helvi, at 35 to her 20. He also was Lithuanian, while she was Estonian. The newspapers reported that they had met when both were appointed to be in charge of policing the ship during the nights, mainly to keep the men separate from the women. Juozas was in charge of the male guards while Helvi was in charge of the women. They had arranged their shifts on duty to coincide and Juozas had proposed marriage at 8.55 pm on 20 November, “under a sickle moon”.
For those of us who have not thought about the significance of a waxing sickle moon, it is said to represent new beginnings, hope, and the journey from darkness into light. It was of religious significance to the ancient Mesopotamians and still plays a role in Islam.
Helvi knew already that she was going to be sent to Canberra to work whereas Juozas, along with all the other men, did not know what his future held apart from a contract to work in Australia for one year. It was Helvi was told a journalist about their plans to marry in Melbourne soon after arrival there.
The Australian Government had different plans for them. There was no stopover in Melbourne. All were sent directly to the Bonegilla camp in rural northern Victoria by train. On 22 December, Helvi was sent to work at the Canberra Community Hospital.
There had been 11 days in which to organise a marriage as well as two other marriages in Bonegilla setting an example. Did one of Helvi or Juozas have second thoughts, cold feet?
Edna Davis, the only Australian on board the Heintzelman, had offered to help Helvi with a suitable dress for the wedding. Although Edna and Elmar Rähn were married in Perth during the short stopover, Edna stayed in Melbourne with her mother while Elmar continued to Bonegilla with the other Displaced Persons. Did the loss of Edna's support upend Helvi's enthusiasm?
While Ann discussed the news articles with Helvi in later life, she never got a direct answer.
Instead, Helvi remembered catching a glimpse of Juozas in Canberra afterwards, perhaps on an escalator in a department store. She thought that maybe he was looking for her but, as we will find out below, a married Juozas actually had moved to Canberra to live and work.
Or did he wonder if Helvi was there still?
Juozas' life in Lithuania
Juozas had been born on 16 April 1912 in Meškalaukis village, Joniškėlis municipality, Biržai district, one of a family of 6 children. After completing his secondary education at the Joniškėlis school, he entered Linkuva gymnasium, later Biržai gymnasium, from which he graduated in 1933. On 15 September 1935, he graduated from Lithuania’s Military School in Kaunas, to be awarded the rank of Second Lieutenant and assigned to the 6th Infantry Regiment.
Young Juozas
Source:
While still with that Regiment in August 1937, he won prizes for the best shooter and other personal prizes in a shooting competition between regiments. One month later, he was appointed to a lectureship in the Military School as well as to the position of platoon commander. One month after that saw his promotion to Lieutenant.
Three months later, just before Christmas 1937, Juozas married Irena Danutė Šernaitė, a teacher 4 years younger than him. During the following year, in August 1938, he was appointed to a position in the Faculty of Law at Vytautas the Great University in Kaunas.
World War II
Initially during the occupation of Lithuania by the Soviet Union from August 1940 to June 1941, he served as the commander of the 1st platoon of the 3rd company of the Military School. When the Lithuanian Army was liquidated on 3 October 1940, he was appointed commander of a platoon of the Red Army in the Military School in Vilnius.
Germany attacked the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941 in Operation Barbarossa, only 8 days after the Communists had deported whoever they could load onto trains to Siberia. Lithuania was part of the invasion that day. Juozas resigned from the Soviet Army. Five weeks later, on 31 July, he was appointed commander of the 4th company of the Vilnius Reconstruction Service, and on the following day, he was appointed commander of the 4th company of the Lithuanian Self-Defence Unit’s 3rd battalion.
Irena and Juozas had a daughter, Nijolė, in December 1942.
In 1944, the battalion was incorporated into the German Army and found itself in Liepaja, and later in Danzig. At this point Juozas resigned from the German Army also. His final military rank was Captain.
After the War
After World War II ended, he enrolled to study at the University of Hamburg. Ramunas Tarvydas, in From Amber Coast to Apple Isle, reported that he was studying medicine, so was known by his fellow Displaced Persons working out their contract with the Australian Government as “doctor”. The October 1947 possibility of migrating to Australia put an end to those studies.
On board the First Transport, the USAT General Stuart Heintzelman, the Lithuanian group celebrated their nation’s Army Day on 23 November. The speaker on that occasion was Captain Juozas Jablonskis.
Juozas told Australian officials that he now was single and his previous occupation was that of masseur. That would have described his situation in Germany well. On that basis, he was accepted into Australia as a labourer. His first workplace was Electrolytic Zinc, supposedly in Burnie, Tasmania, where he was sent on 13 January 1948.
Work in Australia
In reality, he was one of the 12 men sent to clear tracks into the forest around Rosebery, where the EZ Company was mining its zinc and looking for more. His working and living conditions there have been described by Jonas Mockunas in a blog entry posted in May.
Juozas’ application for Australian citizenship in May 1955 claims that he left for Melbourne on the first day that he could, the day that the Minister for Immigration had declared would be the end of the contract for the Displaced Persons from the First Transport, 30 September 1949.
Another file of papers shows that Juozas, in fact, had absconded from Rosebery with 3 others even earlier, probably in January 1949 or the very start of February. The others were Izidorius Smilgevičius, whose story we have looked at already, Juozas Paskevicius and Jonas Rauba. They had been thoughtful enough to let the Commonwealth Employment Service (CES) official in Queenstown know by letter that they were leaving.
The CES thought they were headed for Melbourne, so soon found them there, at the one address. Juozas was their spokesman, telling the CES that they “definitely refused” to return to Tasmania. All 4 were employed by Hume Steel, which wanted to keep them.
After more than 12 months of mismatching talented people with jobs requiring hard labour, those in charge of the CES had decided that if they had found their own employment in areas that were “in the national interest”, they should be left there. This was far easier than trying to force them back to jobs that they hated. Hume Steel still manufactures products required by the building industry and otherwise supports it, so it clearly fitted into the national interest category.
By 10 October that year, Juozas was reporting another job to the Department of Immigration, in order to keep his Alien Registration up to date. It was as a welder with General Motors Holden. Presumably he had acquired this skill while working for Hume Steel.
In that citizenship application, Juozas reported that he was married to Irene Šernaitė in Lithuania in December 1937. He advised that he had divorced her in a Hamburg court in 1947. It looks like he was someone who did not think that he would be returning to Lithuania in the short term. He also could have been clearing the way for his wife to marry someone else. An official has confirmed in a note on the side of the form that he travelled to Australia as a single man.
He certainly was a versatile employee: from military officer and medical student, with a sideline in massage, to welder. At the May 1955 time of the citizenship application, he was working for Johns & Waygood, an engineering firm well known to Australians, if only for its signs in lifts it has installed. It also undertook a wide range of other construction work.
During 1950, he was advertising in Mūsų Pastogė that he was an agent for the Mutual Life & Citizens Assurance Company, commonly known even then as MLC. He could arrange a loan to buy or build a house, or insure property, or insure against accidents and illness. This venture probably did not make him much money, given that he did not buy his own house for the first time until 1965, well after Napoleonas Butkūnas’ 1951 purchase.
Juozas Jablonskis in the early 1950s, from his second Alien Registration passbook
Before Johns & Waygood and after MLC, he had completed another form to advise the Department of Immigration that he was moving from the Melbourne suburb of Mont Albert to the Kaunas Poultry Farm on Scotsburn Avenue, East Oakleigh. Given the name the owner had chosen for this business, it must have been started by a Lithuanian – but by whom? (A ChatGPT search of the Web has failed to find any business of this name operating during 1940 to 1970, but it might have left records which have not been digitised yet.)
His Australian citizenship was granted on 20 October 1955. In 1960, there was another life change when he married Birutė Vasariene. This probably was a registry wedding, given Juozas’ previous marriage and divorce. Lithuanians can tell from her family name that Birutė Vasariene had a previous marriage as well.
Juozas and Birute on their wedding day
Life in the Capital
By 1963, Juozas, Birutė and her two sons were living in Canberra and getting very involved in its Lithuanian community life. Juozas was a committee member of the Canberra Lithuanian Community by then. Both he and Birutė were founding members of the Canberra Lithuanian Australian Club. Juozas and one of his stepsons participated in the construction of the Club during that year, with Juozas donating 27 hours of his time and the stepson 3 hours
Mūsų Pastogė records that both Juozas and Birutė were members of the Canberra Lithuanian choir, Aušra (Dawn) by 1968, and probably earlier. They returned to Melbourne for the 1970 Lithuanian Days with the choir.
There is mention of Juozas working for various government departments while in Canberra, but no details.
Juozas Jablonskis in 1967 in front of a house he owned -- from the cream brick inserts,
it was built in the late 19th century and therefore is not in Canberra
Life in Sydney
Juozas’ stepsons, Vytenis and Gintaras, moved to Sydney, with the elder one marrying Dalia Kišonaite there in 1973. Juozas and Birutė moved to Sydney also in 1982, presumably to be closer to family members.
Lithuanian Army Day, now Armed Forces Day, is celebrated annually to commemorate the founding of the army on that day in 23 November 1918 following independence. In 1984, the Tėviškės Aidai newspaper reported that, in Sydney, the guest speaker was to be the former Lithuanian Military School lecturer, Captain Juozas Jablonskis.
Birutė and Juozas in Sydney's Lithuanian Club, 1985
Juozas' death
Juozas’ death on 15 July 1989, at the age of 77, was not expected by his Sydney friends. His obituarist wrote that he had not wanted to believe the news when he received the telephone call. He had seen Juozas only a week or two before at church.
Juozas was always friendly, helpful, polite and it was pleasant to exchange words with him, in the opinion of everyone who knew him.
He was farewelled in a service at Sydney’s Lithuanian Catholic Church, St Joachim’s, in the suburb of Lidcombe. Members of the congregation provided a guard of honour for his coffin, covered in the Lithuanian flag. In the Lithuanian section of the Rookwood Cemetery, more farewells were delivered by the Chairman of the Lithuanian Sydney District Committee, the chairman of the Ramovė branch and Juozas’ stepson, Gintaras.
His final farewell was the Lithuanian national anthem.
Juozas' First Wife
What happened to his first family? Germany after WWII was a place of chaos, one reason why the Allies were so keen to involve other governments, like that of Australia, in the resettlement of the displaced people that it housed.
Newspapers were full of advertisements for people seeking other people. The Red Cross was also attempting to help family reunions.
We don’t know if Juozas’ wife was a party to the divorce he obtained in Hamburg or whether it was possible in the circumstances to obtain one without the other party’s knowledge. However, Juozas’ wife may have been in Germany at the same time because a Geni entry shows her dying in Rockford, Winnebago County, Illinois in the United States, in 1998.
Given that the Geni entry shows her as mother of Daniel Herman as well as Juozas’ daughter, Nijolė, finding her grave and a short obituary was easy. The short obituary says that she actually was selected for resettlement in America from Belgium.
Irena's obituary in the Rockford IL Register Star, from the Find A Grave Website
The ashes of Irena Danutė Šernas Herman, previously Jablonskienė, are buried with those of her mother, Kleopa or, in America, Cleopatra, in the Greenwood Cemetery, Rockford, Illinois.
Juozas and Irena's daughter
Nijolė received a lengthy obituary on the Web upon her passing in 2022. It tells us that when her mother and grandmother fled Lithuania, expecting to return soon, they left 2-year-old Nijolė with her great-uncle, brother of the eminent politician Jokūbas Šernas, a priest called Adomas and his wife, Zuzana. When it was obvious that the Communists were staying in Lithuania, Adomas managed to get new documents for Nijole Jablonskytė, who became Kristina Šernaitė. Her relatives continued to call her Nijole.
After finishing high school, she worked for a year on a collective farm, looking after the calves. Then she was permitted to study music, first at the Panevėžys Music Technical School (renamed the Higher Music School, V. Mikalauskas Arts Gymnasium). In 1977, after graduating from the Klaipėda Faculty of the Vilnius Conservatory (now the Lithuanian Academy of Music), she became a music teacher. She got a job in the Music Department of Lithuania’s National Library and eventually became Chief Librarian its Music and Visual Arts Department.
In 1993, she was able to stay with her mother in Rockford, Ill, for several months, meeting her half-brother, Daniel, for the first time and visiting other relatives who had settled nearby.
In May 2004, she was happy and proud to be part of a reunion of descendants of Jokūbas Šernas, organised by her nephew and his grandson, Paris resident Matiejus Šernas. Jokūbas was one of the 20 signatories to Lithuania’s 1918 Act of Independence. Relevant to the life story of another First Transport passenger, Endrius Jankus, Jokūbas put much effort into the unification of Lithuania Minor with Lithuania.
Kristina Nijolė Šernaitė Jablonskytė
Source: Lietuvos evangelikų reformatų bažnyčia (Lithuanian Evangelical Reformed Church)
You might wonder if she had wanted to meet her father too for the first time as an adult. When he died in 1989, the Baltic States were on the cusp of their second independence, this time from the then Soviet Union, but its dramatic events were yet to happen. Freedom of travel outside Lithuania did not come until 1991.
The Šernas family were member of Lithuania’s minority Evangelical Reformed Church. Her guardian, her great uncle Adomas, had become superintendent of this church in 1942. He confirmed her as a nun in 1956.
When the Vilnius Reformed Parish was re-established after second independence in 1991, Nijolė or Kristina became an important member. She was active in its choir, Giesmė (Song), touring Europe with it.
She helped to organise celebrations of famous members of the Church. In particular, she unveiled a plaque on the occasion of the 110th anniversary of the birth of her grandfather, Jokūbas, in 1998. Since he had died in 1926, she knew him only from family stories, which she related to those assembled.
She was able to ensure that Reformed Church publications were lodged with the National Library. When not engaged in library work, she was supporting the Reformed Church in every way she could.
The urn containing her ashes was buried next to her family members in the Nemunėlis Radviliškis Reformed Cemetery during Easter 2022. The Nemunėlis Radviliškis area is north of Vilnius, on Lithuania’s border with Latvia.
Although aged only 14 at the time of her confirmation, Kristina Nijolė Šernaitė Jablonskytė appears to have kept whatever vows she took in 1956.
Helvi Kald
As for Helvi Kald, Ann was in frequent contact with her during the last decade of her life, and they did discuss Juozas. It’s possible that we now know more about him and his family than Helvi ever knew.
SOURCES
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