Pennies For Hitler (33 page)

Hitler — and his Gestapo — imprisoned or killed anyone in Germany or the lands they conquered who opposed him. The dictator wanted to make the (imaginary) German Aryan race fit and pure — a land of ‘Supermen’ or Übermensch. Anyone who was Jewish, Gypsy, communist, homosexual, had dark skin or was disabled was to be exterminated for the good of the race. Perhaps twelve million people were killed in concentration camps in Germany and the countries Hitler conquered.

P
OEMS IN THIS BOOK

Wandrers Nachtlied II
by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (a very loose translation by me — I tried to keep to the spirit rather than the words of the poem)

The Wild Colonial Boy
, Anonymous

The Man from Snowy River
by AB Paterson

The Night Before Christmas
by Clement Moore or Henry Livingston, Jnr

Andy’s Gone with Cattle
by Henry Lawson

The Dying Stockman
, Anonymous, and changed by me

G
EORG AND
M
UD’S SCHOOL

This was typical of small country schools until the early 1970s, when ‘one-teacher’ schools were closed and children started travelling by bus to larger towns. Often these one-teacher schools were superb, with the older kids helping to teach the younger ones and teachers sending for textbooks to help gifted kids learn more about the subjects they loved. Other teachers, not so gifted or dedicated, left kids to read textbooks and do the exercises in each chapter. There was no help for kids with learning problems; like Big Billy in this story, they were often asked to do jobs around the school instead of schoolwork. Many kids left school not even knowing how to read the front page of a newspaper.

B
RITAIN AND
A
USTRALIA IN THE
1940S

At the beginning of World War II many people in Australia still called Britain ‘home’ — even if they’d never been there and even if their grandparents had been born in Australia. Australians travelled on British passports until 1949.

Even though the Georg in this book was brought up in Germany, he had a British passport because of his English father
and so that made him British too — and, back in the 1940s, legally free to live in Australia. His Aunt Miriam, however, would have been correct when she worried that his German accent and name might lead to his being classified as an ‘enemy alien’.

Australia’s foreign policy followed Britain’s too, until the threat of Japanese invasion, when Prime Minister Curtin made the decision that Australian troops should defend their home country, not Britain’s colonies.

T
HE SCHOOLS AT
W
AR:
A
MESSAGE FROM THE
P
RIME
M
INISTER,
J
OHN
C
URTIN

This was published in
The School Paper
, a magazine for schoolchildren, in November 1942. I have changed the date in this book to make it appear in early May, when most of the action in this book ends, instead of November, as it so clearly expresses what kids were expected to do in that year of threat.

R
ATIONING

Severe rationing only came into force in Australia after the end of the main story in this book, in the latter part of 1942. There were also shortages of many foods, as fewer people were available to grow, harvest or process them — although ‘land girls’ and the women of farming families did take on most of the work, and many children in farming areas left school or didn’t attend regularly, so they could farm too.

C
OOKING IN THE
1940S

Even with rationing, most women loved baking cakes, usually on Saturdays. The Saturday cakes, pikelets, biscuits and pies were the family’s major luxuries and a source of pride for many women too.

Once rationing began women swapped recipes for sugarless, butterless and eggless cakes. Even rationing wasn’t going to put an end to cakes. Dried fruit was mostly kept to send to ‘our boys’ overseas, but there was plenty of fresh fruit to make cakes feel rich and moist — at least till they cooled down and became hard and crumbly.

Eggless, Sugarless, Butterless Apple Teacake

6 Granny Smith apples, peeled and thinly sliced and dipped in lemon juice so they don’t turn brown

2 cups self-raising flour

½ tsp nutmeg, grated

1 cup ‘top of the milk’ (Before milk was ‘homogenised’, with the cream distributed evenly through it, the cream used to rise to the top of the bottle. Use cream instead or light sour cream.)

Rub a cake tin with dripping (the fat scooped off the pan after meat is roasted) or, these days, with butter. Dust with flour so the cake won’t stick.

Mix all ingredients except the apples. Pour the batter into the tin. Slide in as many slices of apple as you can, pointed side down. The cake will rise up in the tin as you cram more and more apple in.

Sprinkle with nutmeg. Bake for forty minutes at 200ºC or till the top is lightly brown and springs back. Eat hot — the cake turns gluey and crumbly when it’s cold. But it is better than no cake at all.

War-Time Apple Pancakes/Pikelets
(pikelets are just small pancakes, especially good for afternoon tea)

An experienced cook could have fresh hot pikelets or pancakes on the table by the time the kettle boiled to make the tea, served on an embroidered ‘tea cloth’, with lace or crochet at the edges. Pikelets could be made sweet with a topping of jam, which was made with only a little sugar in those war years, so it didn’t keep well. But it was good.

I still make apple pikelets, but I add an egg to this mix. It gives the pikelets a better texture.

1 cup self-raising flour

1 cup grated apple

1 cup milk

Grease a frying pan with dripping (these days, use butter or half butter and half olive oil). Heat it on top of the stove for five minutes on a medium heat, then scoop in spoonfuls of the mixture in small rounds. When they begin to bubble turn them over with a spatula (this takes practice). Leave for about as long as the first side needed to cook, then use the spatula to take them out of the pan. Add a bit more butter (or dripping) and pour in more pikelet mixture till it is all cooked.

Butter and eat them while hot, or eat with jam and whipped cream, or, just as they were eaten back then, with fruit stewed down to a thick paste with just a little sugar to seem like jam.

Apple and Date Spread

My grandma made this in the war years to use on toast or scones instead of jam that needed sugar to make. It is so good my mother made it when I was young, and I still make it sometimes.

2 cups pitted dates, finely chopped

10 Granny Smith apples, peeled, cored and chopped

3 cups water

Simmer everything till the mixture is thick and goes
glop! glop! glop!
The dates will have dissolved into the apple to make a thick sludge. Keep it in the fridge for up to ten days, in a covered container. Eat on toast or scones or in a bowl with a good helping of natural yoghurt. Warning: don’t let it ‘glop’ on your skin — it’s hot. If a bit gets on your arm or hand put under the cold tap and run water on it till your skin is cool.

S
PAGHETTI IN THE
1940S

Tinned spaghetti in tomato sauce and tinned baked beans became popular in the 1930s, especially hot on toast or cold in sandwiches. Kids at school would say ‘swap you a beetle for a worm’ — in other words, you take my baked bean sandwich and I’ll take one of your spaghetti ones.

But few Australians ate spaghetti that didn’t come from a tin till the 1960s, when the growing number of Italian restaurants made ‘spag bol’ popular enough to even feature in women’s magazine recipes. Georg and Mud would have graduated in the early 1950s when Italian food was still strange to most Australians; even spag bol.

J
OHN
C
URTIN

John Curtin was the prime minister who led Australia through the most dangerous time of World War II. He took office on 7 October 1941; and was a quiet, incredibly dedicated man, who walked to Parliament House every morning rather than be driven in a car.

Curtin fought fiercely and openly with Britain’s prime minister Winston Churchill to bring Australian troops and equipment back to defend Australia. If it hadn’t been for Curtin standing his ground, Australia would never have been able to turn back the advancing Japanese in New Guinea. Curtin also put the US General, Douglas MacArthur, in charge of Australia’s defence forces, instead of relying on leadership from England.

Curtin declared that seven days was too short a week. He worked every day till midnight, even on Christmas Day, forcing his body to keep going even when he was ill.

The effort killed him.

Curtin died on 5 July 1945, just six weeks before the end of the war in the Pacific.

K
IDS EVACUATED

During the bombing of London and other major industrial towns and ports in England, many kids were evacuated out to the countryside. In 1940 some were sent as far away as Canada and Australia. One thousand, five hundred and thirty children were sent to Canada, 577 to Australia, 353 to South Africa, 202 to New Zealand and another 838 children were sent to the United States.

One ship of kids going to Canada was torpedoed, though all aboard survived, then on 17 September the SS
City of Benares
was also torpedoed by a German submarine. Seventy or seventy-seven of the ninety kids on their way to Canada drowned. The horror of their drowning, as well as the lack of destroyers to accompany the ships taking evacuees, meant the end of the official evacuation programme, though it seems likely that some children were sent on ships later in the war by their parents.

I’ve only been able to trace the records of two ships that brought evacuated British children to Australia. I have made the Georg of this book come on the second of them. I’ve been unable to find much detail about them however; and most of that detail is in this book. Georg’s ship is based on the small amount I’ve been able to discover about the two journeys to Australia, including letters from a child sent here and one of the escorts, as well as letters from escorts and kids sent to Canada. While the latter voyages had escorts or were in convoy, there is a reference that indicates that at least one ship with children aboard was sent unescorted apart from the first few days out from England. It’s possible that records with more detail about the ships and evacuees no longer exist.

Many children sent to Australia from Britain suffered cruelty and abuse in orphanages and other institutions. But the few records that remain indicate that unlike these children the Blitz evacuees had mostly good experiences, possibly because there were relatively few of them, so went to homes where they were genuinely wanted. However, I base that on the very few records I know to exist, and it is very possible that the stories of other evacuees on the ships to Australia, New Zealand and Canada were not as happy as the ones I have come across.

I
NTERNMENT CAMPS IN
A
USTRALIA

Australia had internment camps for any Japanese or German nationals living here. Even German Jewish refugees were sent to internment camps. Some Aboriginal people were also imprisoned in the north of Australia, as the government was afraid that they might help the Japanese if they were promised their lands back. By 1944, nearly 7,000 men, women and children were interned in eighteen camps spread across the country.

Prisoners of war were also held in Australia. By August 1944, there were 2,223 Japanese, 14,720 Italians and 1,585 Germans held in various camps in Australia. The biggest Japanese and Italian prison camp was in Cowra, in central western New South Wales.

Most of the Italians had been captured in the Middle East. They’d fought bravely but now they made the best of being prisoners. Soon the people of Cowra welcomed them. They worked on farms, made wine, played music at dances. Many later married Australian women and others returned to Cowra to live after the war, sponsored by the community.

Since World War II Cowra has become a ‘Centre of World Friendship’. Japanese and Australians lie together in the Cowra War Cemetery. In 1979, battling drought and using faith and ingenuity to raise the money, the Cowra community opened Cowra’s superb Japanese Garden, lugging water in buckets in the blazing sun to keep the trees alive.

A
USTRALIANS

This is a book about hatred. Although Georg is unable to kill a man he believes to be a helpless enemy, I also believe that Alan Peaslake in this book — who did attack and kill the enemy — was a hero, who died serving his country. If the German or Japanese armies of World War II had conquered our country many Australians would have been killed; all would have lived under a cruelly totalitarian regime. Sometimes you need to fight. But even then, it is worth remembering that an enemy can also become a friend.

Like many Australians, my different ancestors came from many countries. Some were Irish, Scots, Welsh, English, French, Native American, probably long ago Spanish and Danish too; and others were from many other places too far in the past to be remembered. Over the centuries the Irish have fought the English or the Scots; the Scots have fought the Danes; the English have fought the Welsh, the Spanish, the Danish, the Native Americans and the French.

I wonder if any of my ancestors ever dreamed that their descendants would marry their enemies. Less than a hundred years ago my Presbyterian grandmother was cast out of her family for marrying a Catholic. Now the two religions share services sometimes, to celebrate or pray for those in trouble or despair. Like their members, they are friends.

The world’s hatreds are bitter, but in ten years, or a few hundred, they can be gone.

A Further Note from the Author

Sometimes many stories come together and become a book. More than ten years ago a story told to me in my childhood by a man — a kind man — who had once been a guard in a concentration camp, became the book
Hitler’s Daughter
.