Hanna’s Mother

Cindy Solonec

Story Tellers – Gertrud Solonec, Akim Solonec & Hanna Quaife 

Gertrud’s recollections of assaults on her home city during WWII, are vivid. 

‘In 1944 Hamburg was severely attacked by aeroplanes. Whole suburbs were destroyed. People jumped out of burning houses onto the streets and hot, melted tar.’ 

A petite yet fit woman with long brown hair that she plaited and wrapped around her head, Gertrud Hagerman Dammann had been a keen gymnast in her youth. She recalled cycling near the forest with her six-month-old daughter in the basket, as a British fighter zoomed low overhead firing rounds of ammunition into the ground nearby. 

‘The air attacks became frequent and harder. The Germans attacked England and England Germany’. 

Gertrud’s husband, Hans Dammann, was away in the German army when Hanna was born in June of 1943. The couple enjoyed happy times together with their little girl when he was on leave. So it is with no surprise that she became distraught when Hans failed to return from the battle lines in 1945.  

‘I tried every information office after another. But nobody knew. Now I did not know what happened to my husband. We had to live so I took his underwear, and we made trips to the country and exchanged the clothes for food’. 

It was on one of those trips that Gertrud met Akim. A handsome Ukrainian. A fugitive from the Russian Red Army, he worked for the British Army as a labourer. Earlier, Akim had escaped from Ukraine into Poland. There he met Anna. They married and had a daughter who they called Alla. Still under threat from the Red Army, he escaped again, this time into Germany where he found refuge in a displaced soldiers’ camp near Hamburg. He was attracted to Gertrud, and she had a daughter of similar age to his own Alla. Akim helped her. He brought chocolates and delicious smoked herrings – all still warm and oh, so fresh. She welcomed the food – it was how she managed to survive. The two became friends. 

After three years Hans did return and that was a shock. Gertrud, heavily pregnant and planning to migrate to Australia with Akim when their son turned one, agreed to a divorce. 

‘When the court-case was due, my pregnancy was pretty obvious, so I was the guilty part, so I lost my little girl. It was a very painful experience for both of us.’ 

Hanna was a pretty, little girl with grey-blue eyes and blond hair that her mother curled into ringlets, like in the photo that Gertrud kept close to her heart in the ensuing years. In the photo Hanna is dressed in typical German attire with laced bodice, blouse, full skirt, and an apron, cooing at her baby brother. Hanna was forced to remain in Hamburg with her father, who she hardly knew, and her stepmother. Many years passed before she would see her mother again. Akim never heard from nor saw his Anna and Alla again. 

Filled with migrant refugees from war torn Europe, the General Hersey sailed from Bremerhaven in northern Germany for Australia on the 12th of October 1950. They would help to progress Australia’s development post WWII. With one year old Victor, Akim and Gertrud spent twenty-five days aboard the ship preparing for their arrival in Australia. Devastated at being forced to leave Hanna behind, the trip provided some solace for Gertrud. She enjoyed the voyage with a mix of exhilaration and trepidation at not knowing what their lives would become in Australia. The men paid for their passage by working the ship and the women cared for the children. They all took English lessons, watched films about Australia and enjoyed a strong community spirit. They believed they were headed for a land of hope and glory. There was an air of excitement as they neared the West Australian coastline. 

The ship docked at Fremantle in December. The new arrivals’ excitement soon turned to bewilderment as they travelled to the Holden Immigration Centre, a refugee camp 100 km east of Perth at Northam. Listed as aliens under the Aliens Act of 1947, their first impressions were lasting. 

‘All [of] the bush was burnt. A fire must have gone through. Really, what can I say. The countryside was all burnt,’ Akim lamented. Gertrud added, ‘When we arrived in Australia, we looked out of the train from Fremantle to Northam. It was pretty empty that country. The houses were very primitive then.’ 

On arrival in Northam the migrants were accommodated in big, military barracks. All that divided the families were hanging blankets, along with possums and spiders. 

Within two years the family had expanded. Remembering that Gertrud was a little woman of just five foot nothing, she gave birth to Dieter on the 21st of April 1952. Then to everyone’s surprise, the midwife exclaimed: 

‘. . . there’s another one!!’ 

Michael arrived twenty minutes later. A smaller baby that had not been detected by the doctor during antenatal visits. These were very trying times for the young mother. She was discharged with her twins, both with whooping cough. Fifteen months later her fourth son arrived. Alexander was a bubbling, overactive child. Gertrud now with four sons all under the age of four was a sole parent since Akim was generally away, working on the railway lines. Moreover, under the Aliens Act, he was not allowed to return to Holden Camp without prior permission. If found to have stayed at the camp and not their official workplace of residence, an explanation was required by the authorities. His residential address was W.A.G.R. Seabrook though he lived at the W.A.G.R camp in Grass Valley. Gertrud was asked for an explanation as to why he had stayed there, to which she replied that one of their children was sick. She needed the support.   

Akim eventually rented a house in Balcatta where he brought his family to live. Not far away, in the same suburb he bought a block, and in stages, he built their home at 40 Jedda Road. Gertrud meantime became a Jehovah’s Witness. She had met people on the ship who she had grown close to. She frequented the Kingdom Hall, and she partook in door knocking, spreading their religion. She found other people in similar situations to her, and the congregation proved to be a solid support base. It was how she coped, away from Hanna, her beloved Germany, and her large family. Gertrud’s church family gave her a lot of moral support that helped her through the anguish of not having Hanna, while looking after the boys. The Jehovah’s Witness congregation became her family in Australia yet Hanna was never far from her thoughts. 

‘I wrote letters to Hanna. Heartbroken letters. Knitted for her. I felt I had still to look after her.’ 

Hanna never received those letters and gifts. Her father kept them from her. But it was on the 29th of October 1971 when twenty-eight-year-old Hanna and her four-year-old son Jan flew into Perth. 

‘I came to Australia basically because my mother lives here. My mother suggested it. We had kept on writing to each other, though we never knew much of each other. I couldn’t remember much of her from the time we were together, and of course when I was sad, every time I needed a cry, I just needed to think of my mother because I missed her somehow.’ 

Hanna knew very little about Australia and letters from Gertrud were now mostly about her religious beliefs as a Jehovah’s Witness.    

Like Gertrud, Hanna’s adjustment was difficult – but for very different reasons. She had grown up as an only child. Now suddenly she had four, half-grown, half-brothers. Hanna’s mother’s house was so strange in many ways. The atmosphere was robust to say the least, with a bad-tempered Akim to boot. She couldn’t understand anybody – they didn’t speak English properly. The boys spoke broken English and broken German and Akim had learned a bit of German and none of them could really understand his Ukrainian. The boys tried to converse in a few words of German with Hanna, but they knew very little. The hardest part for her was the realisation that Gertrud was determined about her religion no matter what. 

‘I didn’t make a bloomin’ difference, not to her.’ 

No-one even met Hanna at the airport. She caught a taxi to the Balcatta house. The family never celebrated Christmas nor birthdays like Hanna was used to. Come Christmas she bought a nice bottle of wine, and some little dried pine branches to burn so that the essence wafted through the house. But there was no one to celebrate with so she tipped the wine down the sink, while her brothers were outside on the lawn getting drunk on their beer. 

‘Christmas and no snow?’ 

Everything was the total opposite to Germany. 

‘Time wise, weather wise etc. When it was night in Germany, it was day here. When it was winter there, we had summer here. Even the sun wondered about in the opposite direction. Instead [of] going from east to west towards south, where it’s hottest in the afternoon, she went north!’ 

Mother and daughter eventually bonded, and a beautiful relationship grew despite the years of forced separation. In her twilight years, Gertrud would catch the bus each fortnight to Hanna’s home in Belmont. Together, they would go swimming then they would come home to eat a little and watch The Bold and the Beautiful.

‘She sucked me into that one,’ Hanna mused. 

Hanna is a skilful masseuse, and she would give her mother an invigorating massage while they listened to German music. 

Akim left us on the 15th of September, 2002, and Hanna’s mother followed two years later on the 5th of September, 2004. They rest together amongst the lush native vegetation and the kangaroos in the Pinnaroo Cemetery at Whitfords – a far cry from the burnt countryside that welcomed them to Western Australia a long time ago. Today, our beautiful Hanna lives contentedly in a quaint German, A-frame cottage in Manjimup in the southwest of Western Australia, close to her two sons and their families.