EXTRACT | Refugees in Austria

ABOUT THE BOOK

Life in Poland under the communist regime in the late 1970s and early 1980s was okay — so long as you didn’t get to travel across the Iron Curtain and develop a taste for all that ‘decadent’ Western Europe had to offer.

When the Solidarity Movement rocked the Warsaw boat, starting in the shipyards of Gdańsk and then spreading across the country, the regime began making life uncomfortable for strike participants. Things started looking much less rosy to naval engineer Zbyszek Miszczak, even before Russian military intervention threatened. The last straw was the arrival of dreaded army call-up orders. So, in cahoots with his new bride, her twin sister and her husband (all doctors), they did what the regime most feared — plotted their escape to the capitalist west.

But getting out of Poland and to a refugee camp in Austria was only stage one of their arduous journey that led, ultimately, to South Africa. How ironic, then, to find themselves not only in the embrace of another harsh regime, but employed in the heart of its repressive military machine. Yet South Africa offered a wonderful lifestyle and a seemingly endless choice of just about everything (except TV channels back then). Eventually, Cape Town proved just the place to put anchors down.

EXTRACT

Refugees in Austria

Traiskirchen, September 1981

So here Jacek and I were, locked up in a refugee camp in a small town in Austria. Our wives and sons would have landed in Vienna hours ago, expecting us to be at the airport to meet them. Surely they’d been intercepted by the guy we’d paid to meet them and bring them to Traiskirchen? If so, why hadn’t they arrived in the camp like all the other asylum seekers? Had something gone wrong?

Having smoked twice as many cigarettes as normal for me in the course of the day, my nerves were on edge. Unlike Jacek, I couldn’t just sit there waiting for the girls to appear. Not being a patient person at the best of times, I had to do something, but what?

My eyes had been drawn to a young family among the group of new arrivals. As I watched the mother finish feeding her child, the empty bottle with its teat on it gave me an idea.

I took Jacek’s car keys and persuaded the mother to lend me her child’s bottle. I walked to the gate of our ‘cage’ resolutely, brandishing the empty milk bottle and car key, and told the guard that I needed to fetch milk from the car. He let me out! But he stopped somebody else behind me who also wanted to get something from his car. The guard told the guy that he would only let him out when I came back. I rushed downstairs, drove the short distance to the main gate, and parked. I started looking around for Em and Ewa. I even went into the office building to check if maybe they were in the process of applying for asylum or being fingerprinted. They were nowhere to be seen. I was panicking.

After about ten minutes at the gate, asking people if they’d seen blonde twins with two small boys anywhere, a car pulled up with Ewa and Em inside. Relief! I told them to go to the office with their passports to apply for political asylum. I paid the guy the rest of his money, put the boys and their travelling satchels into Jacek’s car and quickly drove back to the main building. With satchels strapped on me, boys under my arms and the empty milk bottle sticking out of my pocket, I climbed the stairs to the third floor. When the guard at the gate saw me sweating with my precious cargo under my arms, his eyebrows shot up and his jaw dropped. ‘Milch, ja?’ he said. He started laughing as he let me in. As he allowed the other guy who was waiting to go out, he shouted something after him, probably a warning that he didn’t want any more surprises.

Jacek had been waiting anxiously for me. He took the boys and settled them on our beds. I handed the empty milk bottle to the couple from whom I’d borrowed it, and, looking at our boys, they had a good giggle, saying that the milk had done wonders in transforming an empty bottle into two toddlers.

The fellow occupants of our room quickly declared that the vicinity of our beds was a no-smoking zone, which was very decent of them. Following the example of other smokers, I went to the passage to smoke a cigarette, which I badly needed, keeping an eye on the gate for Ewa and Em’s arrival. It took longer than I expected, but after about an hour they eventually came into the ward. All the emotions I had been going through in the last three days just evaporated, and I felt like a flat tyre.

‘How come it took you so long to get to the camp?’ I asked. Em replied, ‘Well, you wrote in your note that we should go shopping, so we did.’ I realised that in future I should be careful not to say ‘go shopping’ without specifying what was needed from the shops.

Our wives immediately took care of the boys, feeding them and changing their nappies, then settling them in the beds. It didn’t take long for the two boys to fall fast asleep, and the four of us went into the passage to chat. I desperately needed a drink, preferably a strong one, to calm me down. I asked some of the other smokers in the passage about the chance of getting some alcohol. They told me that there was an Albanian who would probably be able to help me, and pointed to a tall, lanky chap, saying, ‘He’s the guy who organises things around here.’ I approached him and said that I would like to buy some booze.

Speaking passable Polish, he said that he could get me some beer. I had hoped for something stronger than that, but beggars can’t be choosers, as the saying goes. The Albanian came back 15 minutes later with two half-litre bottles of Kaiser Premium beer. How he managed that is still a mystery to me. He was either bribing the guards or using other channels to smuggle in the contraband. I didn’t even argue about the price, but I was sure he made a hefty profit on the deal. We sat on the floor in the passage and shared the beers, out of view of the guard at the gate. After that, we settled down for the night and, for the first time since our arrival, I slept soundly until the morning.

The boys woke us up before 6:00 am, seeming unfazed by the unfamiliar surroundings. Ewa and Em took care of feeding and nappy changes. Breakfast was delivered a little later, and then we waited anxiously for the camp officials to arrive, hopeful that our names would be called out. Shortly after 8:00 am, the officials arrived, and we were on the list! As we gathered our stuff, I asked one of the officials where we were going. She checked the list and said, ‘Altenmarkt.’

Our wives boarded the bus with the boys, along with about 50 other refugees; Jacek and I followed in a convoy of six cars.

The village of Altenmarkt was conveniently located close to Traiskirchen and Vienna. The drive to our destination, Pension Satran on the outskirts of Altenmarkt, took us 40 minutes. Frau Christa Satran, the owner’s wife, came outside to welcome us all on arrival. She had a brief discussion with the refugee programme officials who handed her the relevant documentation before departing on the bus. Luckily, there was an oldish guy among us (anybody over 40 was old to us) who spoke fluent German and readily accepted the role of interpreter.

We followed Christa into the dining room, where she told us about meals — breakfast starting at 6:00 am, lunch at midday and supper at 6:00 pm. Next, she allocated rooms, calling out names from her list. There were six singles (four females and two males), and the rest of us were couples and young families.

When it was our turn, Christa consulted the list and said, ‘For now, I’m putting all of you in an en suite room that sleeps six. I have Austrian retirees who are leaving on 15^th September, and then you can have two family rooms in the new wing of the gasthof.’ We had no problem with that.

Our assigned room was spacious. Knowing that we would be moving to new rooms in less than a week, we left the bulk of our luggage in the car, so it didn’t take us long to unpack and settle in.

I went for a walk to explore the surroundings. The Triesting River formed the lower boundary of the property. It looked more like a stream to me, in a fairly deep channel. Beyond that was farmland with a solitary farmhouse in the distance. The farm was surrounded by forest-covered hills. Very picturesque.

I returned to the main gate of the gasthof and walked down to the village. There was a smaller gasthof (with a pub), a school, church, bakery, butcher and a grocery shop stocked with all kinds of booze. There was also a small branch of a regional bank, Sparkasse, and a combined medical and dental practice. That was it, all concentrated along the main road running through the village. It had taken me less than an hour to stroll through the village and surroundings of the gasthof, and I was back in time for lunch.

The dining room had two rows of long tables, which could seat 12 people, six on each side, on benches. We chose a table in the middle of the room and sat on one side, facing the entrance to the kitchen. Three couples joined us on the other side. Tadek (Tadeusz), an electronics engineer and his wife Dorota (I don’t remember what her occupation was); Daniela, a Polish language teacher and her husband Witek (Witold), a heavy current electrician who was actually a musician, playing clarinet and saxophone. Daniela told us later that Witek was advised to seek an alternative profession after he almost blew up a substation. The third couple were Ela (Elzbieta), a beautician and her boyfriend Krzysiek (Krzysztof), an aspiring chef. He had no formal training but had worked in a restaurant kitchen in Sweden during the summer season.

For readers who aren’t Polish, an explanatory note about all these duplicate versions of names: most Polish names are shortened or simplified, with men’s names usually being contracted to diminutive versions ending with -ek, as with the names mentioned above. Thus, my name Zbigniew becomes Zbyszek, my father Ryszard was Rysiek, and Sławek is actually Sławomir. Jacek, however, is a full (formal) name which is straightforward enough not to need simplifying.

We exchanged stories during lunch, and by the end of the meal we had formed new friendships. We talked about our emigration plans. Before leaving Poland, the four of us had decided that we would try to go to Canada, which had a small population of about 20 million people at that time. Our rationale was that the Canadian climate was similar to Poland’s, there was a shipbuilding industry for me, and the three doctors would be able to find jobs. Also, we hadn’t heard about anything of international significance happening there. Sounds boring, but that appealed to us after my experience in Poland. The three other couples weren’t yet sure about their choices of final destination.

The next day I changed some dollars into Austrian schillings in the Sparkasse, and on my way back to the gasthof I bought six bottles of Kaizer Premium beer. I realised that the Albanian in the camp had charged me four times the retail price for the beers he’d sold me! Oh well, business is business. It had been worth it at the time anyway.

After lunch, with the boys not ready for their routine afternoon nap, we sat on the lawn near the river with our new friends from the dining room, drinking beers and chatting about our future prospects. With the early autumn weather being great, we soon changed into bathing costumes to suntan, just enjoying being able to unwind and relax.

Anchors Down In Africa: Into exile from Communist Poland — a maverick shipbuilder’s journey by Zbyszek Miszczak is published by Southern Right Publishers. Extract provided by Linda Curling.