ROOTS (part 1).


It's one life and there's no return and no deposit
One life so it's time to open up your closet
Life's not worth a damn till you can shout out
I am what I am.....

What is it that makes us who we are?  Is it genetically pre-ordained, our upbringing, our environment, our peers, the people we meet, the choices we make, societies expectations....?

I believe that for me all of the above apply. As for most of us my childhood was largely dominated by my parents, so I think it is important to give a brief background on them and show how their own childhood's impacted upon them and in their future dealings with life.

Both my parents were born in the mid 1930's and grew up in war torn Europe.

The little I know of my father's background is what I remember my mother telling me, he never spoke of his childhood himself.

My father was born to a peasant family in a small farming village, nestled in the foothills of the White Carpathian Mts in Czechoslovakia.  shortly after the Nazi annexation of Czechoslovakia in 1938 the entire village was forced marched over 100 kms and resettled in a small town near the Austrian border.  Here they were given farmland to work and life continued fairly normally.

They farmed, went to school and enjoyed a life relatively untouched by the troubles affecting most of Europe at the time.  However one of his Uncles secretly printed anti Nazi pamphlets which my father used to deliver throughout the area on his bicycle after school.  Eventually his Uncle was caught and interned in Theriesienstadt Concentration Camp.  From there he escaped and somehow managed to travel across the Eastern Front eventually ending up in Vladivostok after the war.  When he returned they say he looked 40 years older and his hair had turned completely grey.

In the early months of 1946 when thousands of displaced persons were trying to make their way back to their former homes, or escape the Russian occupation my grandmother allowed an exhausted and starving German women and her children (Deutschevolk) to take some fallen apples from the ground in her garden.  This was reported by a neighbour to the Russian officials and a few days later my father's family were rounded up by the Russians and interned. 

My father only escaped capture as he was late home from school, but saw his family being herded at gun point into the army trucks.  All alone at 11 years old he hid for days in a haystack before deciding to try and escape across the Austrian border.  Traveling at night and sleeping during the day he eventually arrived at a safe crossing point from where, across the Danube River he could see an American military camp.

As he began swimming towards the Austrian shore he was spotted by a Russian patrol who opened fire on him.  He was hit several times in the arm and leg by bullets.  An American GI jumped in and rescued him.  He was treated, but to this day still has fragments of bullet in his hand which were never removed.  From there he ended up in a refugee camp in France where he stayed for nearly a year before being selected for immigration to Australia.  He was one of the first boatloads of the Arthur Caldwell 'populate or perish' migration scheme.

He was not to see his family again until the fall of the Communist regime in the early 1990's.  His early life in Australia was one of deprivation and hard labour, being sent to various outback farms where he was forced to work long hours and given no further schooling.  At 16 he ran away to Sydney and was taken in by the very small Czech community where he was given work and lodgings at a restaurant and trained to be a chef.

Years later we found out that his family had been interned by the Russians for two years.  During that time the entire family were tortured, my father's sisters raped, his brothers beaten and had cigarettes stubbed out in their eyes.  After their release they returned to their original village.  My paternal grandparents lived only a few years after that, both dying in their early 40's.