A stolen story

My Mother, the Beautiful Balt

A few years ago I wrote an article titled “My Mother, the Beautiful Balt” and published it on Medium. It was a memoir piece blending both history and personal memoir. It was about my mother’s migration as a post-war refugee from Europe to Australia. To make it feel more personal, I included some photos from the family album such as this one:

Recently I noticed that the article has been lifted in its entirety, translated into German and published (meine-mutter-der-schone-balt) on a German lifestyle website called ‘burbry.com’. Whoever has done it has carefully removed my name from the by-line so it is now by anonymous. There is no information attached as to who is behind this website and when I scroll down to the bottom to “contact”, “terms” or “privacy” - it gives no information. Although they do have the audacity to put up a copyright warning.

Feeling a bit miffed by this theft, I complained to the legal department at Medium who replied rather obscurely that it could be a “cloudflare error”. And then gave me the advice of “Do you report the site to Cloudflare?” Apart from the grammatical error here as I think Medium legal meant “did you report …” but without giving me any link of how I could report this to Cloudflare and as I’m not particularly tech minded, I feel at a loss as what to do next. Although I’m inclined to think that if the content has been stolen from a particular platform such as Medium, then the onus should be on them to report it to their website security assistant.

My son works in digital marketing so I turn to him for advice. He examines the mysterious ‘burbry’ and has this explanation:

‘Burbry appears to be a private blog network or PBN. A PBN is basically a content rich website that is part of a bigger network which is designed to increase the ranking of another website. So I guess they are taking content from Medium. Even if it’s edited or translated then that’s unique in terms of Google’s algorithms. There are ‘black hat’ ways or ‘white hat’ ways of increasing traffic. ‘White hat’ ways use legitimate content to increase a Google ranking.’

I learn that I’m dealing with a ‘black hat’ and then he suggests I should make a report about stolen or illegitimate content to Google. When I go to their information page they suggest contacting the original owner of the website but the mysterious ‘burbry’ has left no way of how to contact anyone behind the website. Google will remove personal information especially if there is an intent to harm or damage someone e.g. explicit non-consensual personal images or someone’s financial or medical ID. I can see Google has much more important matters to deal with than a simple stolen story.

I do wonder if my piece was translated by a person or a robot and ask a German speaking friend to give her opinion. She said some automatic translators are pretty good these days, but the translator did have trouble with the expression “nursing a shandy”.

Another friend suggests that if my content is being stolen for another website perhaps I should just take it as a compliment. Indeed.

Well one thing I can do is take it back again, so here is the same story published on yet another website, courtesy this time of Substack.

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My Mother, the Beautiful Balt

At the end of WW 2 Australia was experiencing a labour shortage and the government seriously began to look to the approximately a million Displaced Persons (DPs) in camps across Europe as a solution to this problem.

In the 1940’s the social anthropologist, Caroline Kelly, wrote a report offering the following advice to Australian bureaucrats who were assessing how to deal with the country’s labor problem.

“There is a great deal to be said for peopling such a young country as this with the youth of Europe — taken from the horror of War ravaged countries and transplanted to happier conditions they should have ample opportunity to use the Future Peace worthily. Moreover, there is a certain charm in the thought that Australia could thus assume the role of a benevolent Pied Piper of Europe.”

My mother, Vera Ludzitis, was one of those selected to go on the ‘first transport’ of 839 refugees. The gender breakdown was just over 700 men and about 120 women DPs and the group became the flagship for Arthur Calwell’s post-war immigration program. Young, healthy and good-looking, they were chosen deliberately to test the Australian public’s predominantly xenophobic reaction to large-scale non-British migration and quickly dubbed “the Beautiful Balts”.

My mother had been working in Germany for UNRRA, whilst my godmother, Valeska Lans, and their friend, Reina Roosvald had worked for the American Army so these women spoke English well and were thus promised “office jobs” in Canberra. For these refugee women this was seen as a real coup because the public service, up until then, had had a policy of only employing British subjects.

In my mother’s case, the decision to come to Australia was made on the spur of the moment. She was working in Heidelburg and heard that Australian immigration officials had set up an office in a room at the Hotel Perkeo. Like many DPs her first choice was the US but out of curiosity she went to see what it was all about. The officials sat at a table and behind them on a wall they had pinned up a couple of posters of a tropical Queensland beach with fringed palm trees. Vera later said,

“Germany was in ruins, and already there was talk about another war coming and they kept telling me Australia was a peaceful country that had never had a war.”

(A rather ironic statement considering the battles that had occurred between Aboriginal tribes and British colonizers, but this history was not documented at that time.)

Then she paused, “Anyway, it was a grey November day, drizzling outside and I couldn’t bare the thought of staying through the winter.” Plus there were those unforgettable images of the palm trees on the beach.

A few weeks later she was on a US troop ship, the USAT General Heintzelman, but once on board and leaving Europe she was still shocked by the finality of her decision and said to herself, “What have I done?” Other Balts too wondered what kind of world they were heading to.

One passenger who kept a diary, Lithuanian Juozas Sestokas, wrote:

“On 8th Nov. we reached Port Said. There we were met by small boats with sun tanned Arabs who were shouting out to us. Some were offering us various goods, others were calling out, asking us for heaven knows what. At that point I began to feel that I am actually on my way to Australia. The next day we sailed through the Suez Canal. On either side you could see the sights of Egypt and Arabia. Here I saw the people I had previously only seen depicted in books. They looked like the people in the time of Christ, wearing all kinds of skirts, often quite filthy and their heads covered in ragged cloths. They were doing all kinds of slave labour. Some were repairing the sides of the canal using very primitive tools. Others were carrying sacks from one place to another to build railway embankments. Yet others were carrying big crates on their heads from ships to vehicles on shore. Meanwhile, in contrast, you could spot splendid mansions with beautiful gardens and ‘filthy rich’ colonists basking in the shade of palm trees. This raised doubts in many of the ship’s passengers about Australia, because it too is a British dominion …”

Somewhere on this journey the Latvians on board held a party and to mark the occasion that they would soon be having new lives in a new land, threw their warm coats over board into the swirling waters below. After all, they thought, Australia was a hot country and wherever they were going they wouldn’t need such things. (However many, including my mother, would end up in places where winter temperatures regularly got down to 4 or 5 degrees and so they would have had to have found other coats to keep warm.)

On their arrival in Australia, the media came out in force to assess these strange Balts. As if to reassure the Australian public, the captain of the ship, Valentine Pasvolsky, who had already taken four shipments of refugees to Brazil and Canada reported that these refugees were the “the pick of the bunch”. He said,

“Their conduct has been excellent, their discipline has been remarkable, their physique is good, they are clean, and generally their educational standard seems high.”

They first stayed for four days at an army camp in Fremantle before being transferred to the HMAS Kanimbla which then took them to Melbourne. During their short stay in Fremantle, a group of Estonians went down to the beach and, beguiled by the ocean, threw themselves into the water for a dip. They later wondered how one of them didn’t drown as they had never before experienced such surf or currents.

Several weeks later one of the Balts did end up drowning. It was at a “resort” area (aka caravan park) near Albury called Noreuil Park. According to a local paper, Alexandras Vasilliaukas, a 23 year old Lithuanian, was a “poor swimmer and went out of his depth and sank”. He was pulled out and taken to hospital where they put him on an iron lung but it was too late to save him.

The look of the Australian countryside disturbed many of the Balts and it took a while for them to see a different beauty in it. Back in Latvia, my mother’s father had grown timber and my mother had a life-long love of trees of all kinds so she was a little surprised by the appearance of Australian eucalypts. She noticed that the tree’s leaves hung down in a listless way. To her mind this was a sign of poor health and wrongly assumed they were all dying. Great forests of them. She wondered, so what kind of country was this that couldn’t sustain its trees? Australian gums, of course, have adapted to our hot climate. The leaves hang vertically reducing the amount of light on them and thus reducing transpiration so plant moisture is cleverly conserved.

My mother’s picture, along with other girls, appeared in various news reports. On the strength of those photos, she ended up receiving a couple of offers of marriage from lonely farmers who were looking for a wife. One Baltic woman quickly took up such an offer as she was already pregnant from a liaison with an American soldier and needed to get married quick if she had any chance of prospering here.

At Bonegilla migrant camp, 1947.

With seven men to every woman on board the Heintzelman, it wasn’t surprising to hear that a few romances were kindled amongst them. One of the first engagements to be announced was that between Estonian Miss Helvi Kald and a Lithuanian, Joseph Jablonskis. On the ship, she had been the police warden for the women and he the police warden for the men so they “met on duty on moonlit nights in the tropics.”

The first wedding took place on December 17 between a Latvian, Erika Elkins, who was described as a “pretty blonde” and the groom an Estonian “grey-eyed, bronzed and good-looking”. Reading back over these articles there are countless references to their northern European heritage, again, reassuring a racist Australian public about these immigrants, for example as one reporter bluntly wrote, “these are not Chinese coolies” coming into Australia.

Yet despite the media spin, the DPs still managed to arouse plenty of suspicion in the minds of many Australians. Some Australians wanted them gone as they were deemed to be “too pink” i.e. Communist. Indeed, one passenger, a Latvian woman, was sent back for “security reasons” after Australian authorities received a cable from American army officials in Europe. But other Australians saw them as being too much on the right — and it was true that the Balts felt working conditions in Australia were, how do you say it, rather slack. In Germany the working week was 60 hours whilst in Australia it was only 40 so it was hardly surprising there was resentment among local unionists that they were coming over here to steal good jobs away from Australians.

The Balts all went through the migrant processing camp of Bonegilla, near Albury in northern Victoria. Here they were given lessons in English, on Australian customs and way of life. One instructor told a reporter the following anecdote:

“We are trying to give them the Australian outlook. For instance, I said to a chap peeling potatoes, ‘Hello, I hope you’ll be happy here’. At his humble, ‘yes, Sir’, I said,

‘don’t say “sir”, we are all workers in Australia and one man’s as good as another.’ You should have seen him square his shoulders and the smile in his eyes. The Nazis had taught him otherwise.’

Part of the settlement deal for the refugees was that they had to work for two years in whatever industry Australia chose for them. Many of the women ended up as waitresses or hospital orderlies. As for the men, they were sent everywhere — to cut sugar cane in Queensland (there was a fear 20% of harvest would be lost without them), to work in forests felling timber, coal mines of Victoria, building dams like Warragamba and soon after on the famous Snowy Mountain Scheme.

A new world order was being created and most Balts were vehemently anti-Soviet and anti-totalitarian. As one newspaper reported from that time the Balts cherished the four freedoms articulated by American President, Franklin D Roosevelt: Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Worship, Freedom from Want and Freedom from Fear. These freedoms, if nothing else, were something Australian authorities assured the new migrants that this great nation could definitely give them.

Nonetheless, at this time Australia was a patriarchal society and my mother railed against the limitations placed upon women here. For instance, after marrying my Australian father in 1953, she could not understand why women employed in the public service, as she had been, were forced to leave their employment. (The marriage bar continued to exist until 1966.) And she made fun of the voluntary segregation of the sexes at social functions, where the men would group together around the barbeque whilst the women were banished to the kitchen or another corner of the house. My father was a great beer drinker and at country pubs it was typical for him to leave my mother in the car (nursing her shandy) whilst he went into the male-only bar for a drink. She had come from a Europe where men and women always mixed and drank and socialized together. So this division of the sexes was hard for her to understand. (And again it wasn’t until the mid 1960’s where women protesting against this gender segregation were filmed chaining themselves to male-only public bars around the country that changes across society began to take place.)

Brian Hickey, Vera Hickey (nee Ludzitis), Noel Hickey and Shirley Hickey (nee Waite)

The USAT General Heintzelman would go on to make many more trips to Europe bringing thousands more refugees to Australia many of whom would go through Bonegilla. Last week (November 28, 2017) was the 70th anniversary of the ship’s arrival in Australia with its’ first load of post-war refugees. Sadly, despite all the immigrants that have since graced this nation, we still seem to nurse lingering suspicions of outsiders, as we did back in my mother’s day.