Helmuts Upe was easier to track down than many other First Transport arrivals because he was married to a cousin of a Dutch-born friend of mine. We spent a couple of September afternoons in 2003 talking in his Gooseberry Hill home in the Perth hills. A summary of what he told me then follows.
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| Helmuts Oskars Upe's photograph from his selection papers for entry to Australia Source: NAA, A11772, 313 |
He was born in Riga, Latvia, on 6 February 1926. When he was only 8 years old, his mother was one of several people drowned in a motorboat accident. Helmut missed his mother deeply. “A father is useful but a mother is necessary”, he said.
One winter’s night, the boat in which his mother was travelling hit a snag in the river and passengers were thrown overboard. Helmut’s mother could not swim and would have been wearing heavy clothing because of the weather. The cold water would not have allowed her to survive for long.
Helmut was a keen reader but used to daydream through mathematics classes. When he reached high-school age, his teachers said that he should give up thought of further education.
While the Soviet Army was invading Latvia for the first time, in 1940, he was already working behind the counter in a hardware shop. Given his now obvious intelligence, it is difficult to say how he would have earned his income had he been able to stay in Latvia.
Even at the still tender age of 14 in 1940, Helmut was politically aware and an active nationalist. He was a member of a group which resisted both the Soviet invasion and the ensuing German occupation.
He and fellow younger members would play ball games against a high wall, say that of the local church, while the older resistance members were meeting nearby. They stayed on duty, despite the taunts of other youngsters, because they knew that they had to warn their colleagues if the meeting was likely to be discovered.
Given Helmut’s activism, it is not surprising that the likely return of the Soviet Army in September 1944, when he was already 18 years old, saw him travelling westwards. After he got to Danzig on a German ship, he joined the German Army.
He was in Austria when World War II ended in May 1945. Arrest by the Americans and nine months as a Prisoner of War in the Bad Kreutznach camp followed.
The conditions here without any shelter were so poor, particularly when it was wet, that thousands died.
Early on, he had to wear the same boots and socks for two weeks without changing. When he and others were finally able to take their socks off, the soles of their feet came off too. They had to move about on their hands and knees for a couple more weeks until new skin grew and hardened.
He passed himself off as a German to ensure that he did not join other Latvians being forcibly repatriated to the now Soviet Latvia immediately after the War.
Later on he found out that, in his absence, he had been sentenced by a Soviet court to 10 years of hard labour for his resistance activities. Such a sentence might well have been accompanied by 25 years of exile, if the Estonian experience is any guide.
When he and a friend, Peter, were released from the POW camp, they started a wandering life, knocking on doors to ask for food and work. They found that the Germans were always kind to them, sharing the little food that they had.
One door belonged to a man who had been a general in the German Army. He looked after them first until their health improved and they could do some work in return.
On his application to migrate to Australia, the wandering life was described as '1 year, farm labourer'. This was after '2 years, merchant' in Latvia'.
At one of the German homes in Worms, in the Rhineland, they met another Latvian. She recommended that they try one of the camps which were being set up for Displaced Persons.
This was the name now being applied to the refugees from communism, who could not be called 'refugees' as the Soviet Union was one of the Allied victors in Germany. Helmut and Peter made their way north to one of these camps.
Life there was better, but boring. There was nothing much for them to do during the day.
Somehow they seized upon the idea of joining the French Foreign Legion and travelled westward to the French Zone of Occupied Germany. They were recruited and started training. It did not take them long to realise that they had made a big mistake.
On parade, they were being asked to swear an oath of loyalty to France. Helmut asked to be excused to go to the toilet. Given permission, he jumped a fence, headed for the nearby railway station and found a train about to leave.
Peter was with him. It did not matter where the train was going. This was just as well, since the train took them to Switzerland.
So it was over the border, back to Worms and, finally, back to the camp whose boredom they had escaped for a while. One day, somebody told them that there was a notice in the camp office about Australia recruiting migrants. Put me down, Helmut said casually.
In one of the holding camps before he left for Australia, Helmut saw the Chips Rafferty film, The Overlanders. This gave its viewers the impression that Australia was a vast desert. Wondering what he had let himself in for, Helmut was greatly relieved when the film’s action moved to Brisbane.
As he had no scars or tattoos, he had no trouble passing the medical examination for Australia as well as the interview.
He noticed on the General Heintzelman that something had gone wrong with the thorough selection processes as there were at least four passengers who could not speak any of the Baltic languages. One of them was one of the men who was sent back.
What he did not notice was that there were also 114 women on the ship.
Helmut remembers that the men on the ship had Turkish cigarettes which had become mouldy. As they were the same length as American cigarettes, the men took American cigarettes out of their packets and replaced them with the Turkish cigarettes. They used the packets with the substituted cigarettes to pay for goods traded by Arabs who came out to the ship in the Suez Canal.
It is hard to say who had the last laugh from this deal, as the men found that the brandy bottles which they pulled up in return were filled with tea.
As the Heintzelman sailed, its officers were suggesting that the men among the passengers should volunteer for jobs for the voyage, as they would get letters of commendation at the end. Helmut did not volunteer, as he believed that letters from the crew of the Heintzelman would carry no weight once they were in Australia.
When the Heintzelman berthed in Perth, Helmut remembers local people throwing small buckets of ice-cream up to the passengers.
The passage across the Great Australian Bight in the Kanimbla was very rough. Few people turned up in the dining room for meals.
One of Helmut’s friends returned from a meal to report that the ship was serving mushrooms in white sauce. Helmut quickly developed an appetite which overcame his queasiness.
At the mess table he found, however, that the “mushrooms” were in fact tripe, which he had never eaten before and has not eaten since.
He does not remember mutton on the Kanimbla but it was on the menu in the Bonegilla Camp. He refused to eat it there, and still cannot eat lamb.
Helmut remembers Bonegilla Camp as a time of dreadful food. For example, the residents received only one slice of bread a day.
The residents believed that the cooks were stealing the food to sell it. They used to walk to the local shop to buy extra food with the five shillings per week which they were paid.
The attitude of the commandant of the Bonegilla camp was, “If you don’t like the food here, go back to where you came from”. The Bonegilla and Kanimbla experiences contrasted with the good food on the Heintzelman.
Some of the residents used to slip out of Bonegilla to work for neighbouring farmers. Helmut knew three or four others who did this, for fifteen shillings a day, three times their weekly income at the camp.
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| Helmuts Oskars 'John' Upe at 21, on his Bonegilla card Source: NAA, A2571, UPE HELMUTS |
Helmut’s first job outside Bonegilla was fruit-picking at Shepparton. He felt well treated on this job. He was fed by his employer as well as being paid £8 per week.
Once he started working, the Germanic forename Helmuts was changed to John for Australians.
He and around twenty others were sent to Tasmania next, to work for the Goliath Cement factory at Railton, near Devonport. He was paid only £5 each week, from which he had to buy his own food.
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| Helmuts Upe (l) with Ojars Vinklers (r) captured by a street photographer -- they worked together at Railton, Tasmania, so perhaps this was in nearby Launceston or Devonport Source: Helmuts Upe collection |
He left Goliath Cement and Tasmania as soon as his two years’ contract was up. He moved to Melbourne where he was recruited by the Cyclone company and started in sheet metal work.
He married another Latvian. They had one son, a journalist who commenced his professional training with a cadetship in Ballarat. He is married, with two daughters.
Helmut and his wife ran a milk bar together in the Melbourne suburb of Ivanhoe for a while. This proved more and more stressful, leading to the break up of Helmut’s first marriage. It was at this point that Helmut moved to Perth, in 1966.
He returned to sheet metal work and was involved in major projects, such as the kitchens of the Parmelia Hotel and various hospitals.
His childhood indifference to mathematics was replaced by skilled awareness of the need to translate architects’ drawing exactly into three-dimensional stainless steel. He was so good at this that he remained in employment one year beyond the then normal retiring age of 65.
He even taught himself how to use the company’s new computer for his work.
One day his boss came to him to tell him that he had to leave because the company’s insurers were refusing to cover him any more. This refusal on the grounds of age may well be against the law now.
Helmut visited Latvia twice after its second independence, in 1992 and 1995. While life for the residents was obviously still difficult, Helmut felt much more at home there than he had in Australia.
Indeed, he would have returned to Latvia to live if it were not for his wife and son in Australia.
He enjoyed an active retirement, looking after his own large garden on the summit of one of the hills surrounding Perth and those of many neighbours.
Death came on 9 September 2018, while in the care of a Perth nursing home, at the advanced age of 92.
SOURCES
National Archives of Australia: Department of Immigration, Central Office; A11772, Migrant Selection Documents for Displaced Persons who travelled to Australia per General Stuart Heintzelman departing Bremerhaven 30 October 1947, 1947-1947; 313, UPE Helmuts Oskars DOB 6 February 1926, 1947-1947.
