History Australia | Volume 12 | Number 2 | August 2015

‘To reunite the dispersed family’

War, displacement and migration in the tracing files of the Australian Red Cross

Ruth Balint

The mass of displaced persons (DPs) to Australia after the Second World War generated thousands of enquiries both to and from Australia of people searching for the fate of their family members. The Australian Red Cross tracing service often became the only means of communication for many families divided by the Cold War. This article examines the case files of Red Cross tracing enquiries for what they can reveal of the experiences of war, displacement and migration to Australia, and the reach of Cold War in the everyday lives of migrants. These records also demonstrate the limits of the Red Cross goal of family reunion, for not all of those who were sought wished to be found.

This article has been peer reviewed.

To many contemporary observers of 1945, the destruction of the family was the most visible and devastating consequence of war. Its reunion was often promoted as humanity’s only possible salvation. ‘No other war’, writes Caroline Moorehead, ‘dispersed so many civilians’.1 Over 20 million people had been displaced by the war, either because they had been forcibly taken from their homes or because they had fled, and the frantic hunt for loved ones in the ruins of cities and communities became a first priority of the survivors of the devastation. ‘To reunite the dispersed family’ became the official mantra of Red Cross tracing in the postwar era, as the organisation sought to manage the thousands of urgent enquiries flooding its offices around the world in the aftermath of the Second World War. Even before war’s end, humanitarian organisations and western governments had begun planning for postwar relief, and the tracing of missing civilians was quickly identified as an issue of first

1 Caroline Moorehead, Dunant’s Dream: War, Switzerland and the History of the Red Cross (London: Harper Collins Publishers, 1998), 517.

124 ‘To reunite the dispersed family’ concern. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) was at the frontline of tracing relief operations. Displaced rather than soldiers and prisoners of war became the candidates and the focus of its tracing service, reflecting the fact that for the first time in the history of modern warfare, civilians were targetted by deliberate killing policies, their deaths and their displacement in numbers alone far outweighing those of soldiers on active duty.2 Over 170,000 DPs came to Australia, mostly via the DP camps of Allied- occupied Europe between 1947 and 1952.3 Many left for the west with the hope and the promise of bringing out other family members as soon as they were able. Others, many of whom had spent years languishing in DP camps, came still searching for information on whether their family members were alive, or where they had spent the war. Almost immediately the Australian Red Cross tracing service began receiving enquiries from individuals about tracing victims of , or from other Red Cross agencies overseas responding to enquiries in their own countries for family members who had migrated to Australia. As the Cold War deepened across Central and Eastern Europe, the Red Cross tracing load increased. While some of these enquiries came from Jewish families seeking the fate of their relatives in the Holocaust, the vast majority related to non-Jewish DPs from Eastern and Central Europe as well as the , universally understood as exiles from Communism rather than as victims of National Socialism.4 These included those who were forcibly relocated to Germany during the war as slave labourers and now refused to return home, a second wave of refugees who from mid- 1946 began streaming into Germany and Austria fleeing the Communist takeovers of their countries, and refugees from Soviet Russia whose trajectories of displacement sometimes dated back to the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution.5

2 Timothy Snyder puts the figure of civilian victims of deliberate policies of mass murder by the Nazi and Soviet regimes at 14 million. See Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 409-12. Article 4 of the Geneva Conventions of 1949 was an explicit recognition for the first time of the need for humanitarian law to protect civilians. Before this, the Geneva Conventions only related to the protection of combatants in wartime. See, https://www.icrc.org/eng/war-and-law/treaties- customary-law/geneva-conventions/overview-geneva-conventions.htm (accessed 2 October 2014). 3 For a description of this history, see Jayne Persian’s contribution to this special feature, 78–99. 4 Anna Holian, Between National Socialism and Soviet Communism: Displaced Persons in Postwar Germany (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2011), 119. 5 See the contributions by Edele and Fitzprick, 6–15, Edele, 16–39 and Persian, 76–99.

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These tracing records reveal, often in startling ways, the impact of Australia’s resettlement and migration policies on DP families who, often separated in the first instance by war, were then forced apart a second or third time by the strict requirements of entry to Australia via its Displaced Persons resettlement program. Migrant recruitment policies favoured the young, the fit and the unattached: in other words, single men who could perform the manual labouring work that was required to rebuild Australia’s economy. In the initial period of the displaced persons program, migrant ships out of Europe typically carried hundreds more men than women, and only a handful of small families. The fact that Australia’s immigration scheme tore families apart was not a secret. In 1950 a newspaper report quoted Harold Holt, immigration minister under the Menzies government, defending the separation of families under the current migration scheme in response to criticisms made by the Australian Council of the World Council of Churches. ‘The spiritual leaders of our community would be the last to suggest that we should leave family units to face a grim and hopeless future in Europe’, he was quoted as saying. ‘Yet this is the only alternative to the present arrangement whereby wives and children are housed in holding centres until such time as their bread winners can find family accommodation elsewhere.’6 When pressed, the government argued that such separations were temporary, the result of a housing crisis for migrant families in rural areas where the men were mainly indentured. Yet the Red Cross tracing records show that these temporary separations often led to more permanent family dislocations. While this situation changed towards the end of the DPP, as the International Organization (IRO) began to close the DP camps and Australia bowed to international pressure to relax restrictions on, for example, reuniting aged parents of Australian DPs, families remained a major casualty of the war long after the ‘violent peace’ of the postwar years subsided. 7 Many left behind families in DP camps, in their countries of origin, or in any of the other countries of exile or domicile that made up the complicated story of European displacement in the first half of the twentieth century. Sometimes what was intended as a temporary separation became more permanent as men re-established

6 ‘Migrant Wives Wait in Europe’, Townsville Daily Bulletin, 16 February 1950, 4. 7 Peter Gattrell uses the term ‘violent peacetime’ to describe the immediate postwar years, during which population displacement continued on a global scale, the mass flight of Germans and others in the face of the Red Army but one example. Peter Gattrell, ‘Trajectories of Population Displacement in the Aftermaths of Two World Wars’, in The Disentanglement of Populations: Migration, Expulsion and Displacement in Post-War Europe, 1944–9, ed. Jessica Reinisch and Elizabeth White (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 5–6.

126 ‘To reunite the dispersed family’ themselves with new wives and new families. The Cold War also cemented these rifts, for those left behind, most of them women and children, often remained stranded, only reaching out to the Red Cross when letters stopped coming and hopes of being reunited were becoming desperate. The international dimensions of Australia’s postwar migration history are still under-explored, despite a specialised literature on the history of Australia’s DP resettlement program .8 The break-up of families was a relatively well known consequence of Nazi Germany’s policies of forced labour, population transfers and liquidations, but there has been less recognition of the influence of resettlement policies of western governments on DP families in furthering these separations. An exception to this lacuna is a recent study by Joy Damousi of the separation of children from their parents during the Greek civil war (1946–49).9 Although of a different focus, the story of Greek family separation she tells is another example of Australia’s refugee history as one of family rupture. Thousands of children were separated from their parents, ending up in Communist countries in Eastern Europe, and their parents, some of whom came to Australia, spent years desperately trying to retrieve them. Her focus is on the role of the International Social Service (ISS), a branch of the International Migration Service, in facilitating these reunions: in particular she examines the indomitable efforts of its director, Aileen Fitzpatrick. Her article examines a number of individual cases of Greek families forcibly separated; like Damousi’s, this article deploys microhistory to tell a wider history of forced separation in the Cold War across what were often considered impermeable international borders during the 1950s and 1960s. The renowned neutrality of the Red Cross meant that it had extraordinary access in the Soviet Union or eastern bloc countries societies during the Cold War. This often led to the Australian Red Cross extending its charter beyond establishing first contact and to playing an intermediary role in ensuring ongoing correspondence between family members in Australia

8 Klaus Neumann, Refuge Australia: Australia’s Humanitarian Record (Kensington: University of New South Wales Press, 2004); Jayne Persian, ‘Displaced Persons (1947–1952): Representations, Memory and Commemoration’ (PhD thesis, University of Sydney, 2011); Andrew Markus, ‘Labour and Immigration, 1946–1949: The Displaced Persons Program’, Labour History, no. 47 (1984): 73–90; Ruth Balint, ‘Industry and Sunshine: Australia as Home in the Displaced Persons’ Camps of Postwar Europe’, History Australia 11, no. 1 (2014): 106–31, to name only a few. See also the introduction to this special feature, 6–15. 9 Joy Damousi, ‘The Greek Civil War and Child Migration to Australia: Aileen Fitzpatrick and the Australian Council of International Social Service’, Social History 37, no.3 (2012): 297–313.

127 History Australia | Volume 12 | Number 2 | August 2015 and countries otherwise inaccessible to normal routes of communication. The Cold War was an omnipotent presence in tracing, and certainly informed the responses and experiences of individuals who used, or were traced by, the service. But the response of Red Cross officers involved in assisting or seeking DPs in this period appears most of all to have been both a humanist and a gendered one. The tracing service was frequently contacted by Red Cross agencies in Eastern Europe or the Soviet Union on behalf of wives whose husbands had come to Australia via the mass resettlement program and subsequently disappeared. The role of these men as breadwinners, and their abrogation of it, was foremost in tracing correspondence, not their role as anti-communist crusaders, which is how they were so often imagined in the official assimilationist rhetoric of the immigration program. There is a small but growing scholarship examining the history of the Red Cross, usually as part of wider historical analyses of humanitarian­ ism and human rights in the twentieth century.10 In Australia, the role of the Red Cross in assisting prisoners of war in the Pacific and Korean Wars was the subject of a recent special issue produced by History Australia, but there are no detailed examinations of Red Cross tracing.11 In a recently produced history commissioned by the Australian Red Cross for its 100 year centenary, Melanie Oppenheimer provides a bird’s eye view of the organisation’s many areas of work and relief in Australian society since its beginnings in 1914.12 Oppenheimer documents the inception of the tracing service, as the Wounded and Missing Enquiry Bureau under the leadership of Vera Deakin on the battlefields of Gallipoli and the Western

10 Two works that explore the twentieth-century history of the Red Cross are Moorehead, Dunant’s Dream and David Forsythe, The Humanitarians: The International Committee of the Red Cross (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Scholarship on the origins and practices of international relief in the twentieth century, in which the Second World War is understood as a pivotal moment, is extensive, but two recent works of note are Michael Barnett, Empire of Humanity: A History of Humantarianism (Ithaca and London: Cornell Universty Press, 2011) and Peter Gatrell, The Making of the Modern Refugee (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). Jennifer Rodgers has analysed the history of the Central Tracing Bureau (later to become known as the International Tracing Service, or ITS) set up by the Allies in 1943 and its politicisation in this period as an important weapon in the struggle for ideological and military hegemony over the fate of millions of refugees from Communism: Jennifer Rodgers ,‘From the “Archive of Horrors” to the “Shop Window of Democracy”: The International Tracing Service, 1942–2013’ (PhD thesis, University of Pennsylvania, 2014), 36–41. 11 History Australia recently produced a special feature, guest edited by Teresa Morris- Suzuki, examining the role of the ICRC in protecting wartime detainees as well as civilians in the Pacific and Korean wars. History Australia 10, no.2 (2013). 12 Melanie Oppenheimer, The Power of Humanity: 100 Years of Australian Red Cross 1914–2014 (Sydney: Harper Collins Publishers, 2014).

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Front in 1915, but tracing after 1945 receives scant attention.13 The Second World War, however, transformed the world of tracing. Europe’s biggest population crisis in modern history also meant for Australia the first mass arrival of refugees in the history of white settlement and with them, new demands for Australia’s only major tracing service. And as this article seeks to show, the ability of Red Cross officers to fulfill their charter to reunite family members and re-establish initial contact was often tested by the particular historical circumstances of DP migration. The rules of war that had traditionally governed tracing on the battlefield were in many ways easier to navigate than the far murkier politics of peace.

International tracing and the Australian context Like other resettlement countries hungry for labour to rebuild postwar economies, Australia’s DP program was a muscle-building mission that targeted, in the first instance, able-bodied men and to a lesser extent, women of child-bearing age.14 The humanitarian mission of family reunification, as promoted by the Red Cross, was frequently undermined by these nationalist recruitment schemes. Family members considered to be invalids – too lame, or blind, or sick, or old – were routinely rejected by Australian migration policies.15 This had direct, often brutal consequences. In a letter to the Immigration Department in 1954, a Red Cross officer in Perth explained the plight of one man who had come to Australia as a DP in 1951, but had not seen his wife and child since 1947. His wife had been given permission to come to Australia, but their eight year old son was refused because his right eye had been removed two years earlier, the result of an infection which, if treated in time, could have been cured. Now, mother and son were in Czechoslovakia. ‘His wife natur­ally refuses to leave the boy and come to Australia by herself. As a result, a severe case of hardship has been created for all parties concerned’, wrote S. Verios, Red Cross officer, ending with the hope that a ‘re-examination of circumstances may lead to a permit being granted’.16

13 Oppenheimer notes in particular the instrumental role of Red Cross tracing in the international search for 30,000 Greek children removed from their parents in the Greek civil war. Oppenheimer, The Power of Humanity, 160. 14 See Klaus Neumann’s contribution to this issue (p. 60). 15 Andrew Markus, ‘Labour and Immigration’, 81. 16 Letter to the Commonwealth Migration Officer from S. Verios of the Perth office, Australian Red Cross, for the Petrides family, 18 November 1954, Australian Red Cross General Correspondence Files (ARCGCF), Melbourne, Series NO33, Box 2834.

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Often family members were left behind with promises of being sent for later. Others had to find more permanent separation arrangements. ‘To date, we have had 40 mentally defective children reported’, wrote child welfare officer Eleanor Ellis in the Bad Kissingen area of the American Zone in Germany, to the IRO welfare division chief Marie D. Lane, in mid- 1949. Of this number, ‘there is indication that in 26 cases the families would take advantage of the opportunity to place the defective child so the rest of the family can emigrate’.17 In another case, the IRO Child Welfare Board met on 23 July 1950, to consider the case of a girl in its care. Presumed to be born of married parents in the Ukraine, the board reported that: The father was deported as forced labour 1942 and has not been heard of since. The mother and daughter came to Germany 1942/43. The mother disappeared during the journey and has not been traced to date. R. cared for by foster parents until they decided to emigrate to Australia. She could not meet the medical standards to be included in the family group so was transferred to a DP children’s home where she is living at present. Her health is generally good and she is a girl of natural intelligence. She is, however, subject to seizures of an epileptic type and is unacceptable to any present scheme of resettlement for unaccompanied children.18 The board recommended that she be considered for any special scheme of placement that should eventuate. What happened to her in the end is not known. The Australian Red Cross tracing archive shows another dimension to this history, because it was not only the non-able bodied who were left behind. The official emphasis on a masculine workforce in its immigration program heavily affected women. As Ruth Fincher, Lois Foster and Rosemary Wilmot state: ‘Two consequences emerged – on the one hand, the masculinisation of the Australian immigration population and on the other, the marginalisation of women in the immigration program’.19 They describe the costs of this discrimination, which made it harder for women to gain paid employment or recognition of skills. But there was another hidden casualty of Australia’s masculinist agenda, frequently

17 Letter to Mrs Marie D. Lane from Eleanor Ellis, 20 May 1949, International Refugee Organization (IRO) records, Archives Nationales (AN), , 43AJ/301. 18 Telegram received on 14 February 1950 in file (no names attached), IRO Records, AN, 43AJ/301. 19 Ruth Fincher, Lois Foster and Rosemary Wilmot, Gender Equity and Australian Immigration Policy (Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service, 1994), 24.

130 ‘To reunite the dispersed family’ encountered by the Australian Red Cross in these postwar years. ‘Dear Madam’, Miss A. Rivier, of the ICRC in Geneva, wrote to a certain Mrs. Borthwick of the Australian Red Cross welfare service: The following is another case that we are not willing to refer to an official agency because we fear that the requested enquiry may reveal a delicate situation. We have received from Mrs. Radunka G., Krusevac Yugoslavia, a request for news of her husband Mr. Vladac G. who for two and a half years used to write to her. He had promised that he would call his family over but has not written anymore for quite a long time. We wonder why the man does not write? Has he been discouraged by difficulties encountered in having his wife join him in Australia? Has he found a new attachment in Australia? The enquiry would have to be made cautiously in case the man had married again without telling of his previous marriage. We hope this is not the case, but one never knows especially when the first wife lives in a country from where it is difficult to emigrate.20 Deserted wives with children appear frequently in the postwar tracing record. Their entreaties to the Red Cross are a twist to the better known ‘problem’ of the unattached migrant bachelor that preoccupied author­ ities in the period. As Zora Simic argues, it was the unhappily unmarried migrant worker who posed the most concern to attuned observers of DP adjustment to Australian life.21 A surplus of men produced by the scheme had created a structural imbalance of the sexes in the Australian migrant population, and the ‘bachelors of misery’, a phrase coined by Czech migrant Vladimir Borin in 1961 to describe single migrant men unable to find a wife, were a clear source of public anxiety. Marriage, a home and a family were the trifecta underscoring an ‘Australian way of life’ in this period, a discourse that shaped the doctrine of assimilation and the possibility of social stability. The media frequently carried stories of happy migrant marriages: on the boats, in the migrant holding centres, or sometimes, in the towns where Australians and migrants (rarely) mixed.22 These were further complemented by the occasional success story of Red

20 Letter to Miss J. Borthwick of the Welfare Service of the Australian Red Cross from A. Rivier, Casework Division, 26 April 1954, ARCGCF, Series NO33, Box 2834. 21 Zora Simic, ‘Bachelors of Misery and Proxy Brides: Marriage, Migration and Assimilation, 1947–1973’, History Australia 14, no.1 (2014): 149–74. 22 Ibid., 151–2.

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Cross tracing that miraculously reunited families and marriages torn apart by war.23 There were equally many stories circulating in the public domain of the ‘migrant bachelor’ struggling with isolation and despair, particularly in rural Australia, and these representations of male loneliness were an uncomfortable reminder of the difficulties associated with migrant settlement.24 But Red Cross tracers were encountering an altogether different phenomenon. ‘I have during the past months received quite a number of enquiries … in regard to migrants to this country’, wrote a piqued Joyce Astley of the Red Cross welfare service in South Australia: We have, in all cases, been able to trace the man concerned, but I am afraid that we have not had great practical success in any cases. These are mostly concerned with failures to support wives or children left behind in Europe, and we have, at all times, found that once the man is here his sense of responsibility towards those he has left behind becomes very blunted.25 For some, the difficulties of settlement in Australia were actually the cause of the desertion. Cases such as that of Herbert K. were reminiscent of the struggles men faced in adjusting to Australia and the often brutal work conditions of their employment. In a letter to the Red Cross welfare branch, Rivier referred the case of a German migrant ‘whose attitude towards his wife and children is not clear’.26 He had emigrated in 1951, and although it appears he had originally intended to send for his wife, things had not turned out as well as he had hoped. After writing regularly for the first two years of their separation, he had stopped writing, although he continued to send remittances when he could. ‘You will agree that there is something strange in this, especially as his last letters seemed to show that he had difficulties in adapting himself, in finding employment, etc.’ His wife, who worked as a packer in Germany, was eager to join him in Australia. A Red Cross interview with Mr K. revealed that he did not write ‘because he appears to be very restless in this country’. He did not wish his wife and children to come to Australia, and wanted to go to New Zealand or return to Germany. In a memo to the ISS in Geneva, the Red Cross

23 See for example, ‘Red Cross Action’, Western Herald, 25 September 1953, 11; ‘“He Can’t be Dead”: Europe’s Tragedy of Broken Homes’, Sunday Herald, 11 February 1951, 7; ‘File Under H for Humanity’, Australian Women’s Weekly, 31 March, 1971, 7. 24 Simic, ‘Bachelors of Misery’,154. 25 Joyce Astley of the Red Cross Welfare Service to A. Rivier of the International Social Service, ARCGCF, Series 33, Box 2834. 26 ‘Note concerning the K case’, Geneva, April 25, 1954, ARCGCF, Series 33, Box 2834.

132 ‘To reunite the dispersed family’ noted that the interviewer ‘gained the impression that Mr K does realise his responsibilities towards his wife and children but is not prepared to face up to the problem. She is of the impression that any attempt by an outside person to intervene or being [sic] pressure to bear on him, would only result in what little money he does send to his wife being stopped’. Such information, it was hoped, would help the wife ‘to rebuild her own life and that of her children’. More common, and more problematic for Joyce Astley and her welfare co-workers, were cases such as Freida M., whose fiancé had remarried in Australia without her knowledge. A letter to the Australian Red Cross from the ICRC in Geneva described ‘a rather delicate situation’ concerning a Czech-born Hungarian man who had emigrated to Australia in 1950: During his stay in Germany before that, he lived for sometime in the house of the widow Frieda M. … Mrs. M. has two children of her marriage, Otto – 14 years old and Marielouise –12 years old. Mr. N. and Mrs. M. got engaged to be married and a child, Josef Peter was born to them on June 12, 1949. When Mr. N. sailed for Australia, he promised Mrs. M that he would send for her and the children. After he arrived in Australia he continued to write regularly… till June 1952, after which all letters written to him at the above address were not answered and not returned.27 The Red Cross was able to trace Mr. N. and wrote back with new infor­ mation. ‘Mr. N. has married a widow with two children, the eldest of which is working, and since their marriage they have had another child’: I think you will probably agree with me that under the circumstances, Mr. N. is most unlikely to have any further interest in Mrs. M. and her children. It is curious, isn’t it, that the pattern out here seems to follow the pattern in Germany exactly – I mean a widow with two children and now a child of their own. I think you will probably agree with me that it would be useless to contact Mr. N. The tracing files are littered with examples of migrant men sought by former wives and partners, often mothers of their children, who were discovered to be in new marriages without having yet annulled or broken off their former commitments. ‘We beg you to kindly undertake the search of Mr. Avram U., Bulgarian, born the 19th February 1925 in the village of Zafirovo, profession of hospital attendant, who, according to

27 Letter from Joyce Astley, Red Cross Welfare Service to A. Rivier, International Social Service, Geneva, 4 March 1954, ARCGCF, Series 33, Box 2834.

133 History Australia | Volume 12 | Number 2 | August 2015 information given by the Italian Red Cross, left Trieste in December 1954 to go to Australia’, wrote the Bulgarian Red Cross in 1956. ‘The enquirer is his wife … who would very much like her husband to be reinstated in the home and provide for his children.’28 The Red Cross replied that they could not trace his whereabouts. Australian immigration records show, however, that the man came to Australia in 1955 on the Toscana from Italy.29 Red Cross officers clearly struggled to assess how far the responsibility of these men as fathers and husbands to their former wives weighed against the sensitivities of new families in Australia. In 1959, for example, the Red Cross and Red Crescent Society in Moscow asked the Australian Red Cross to trace Grigory U. on behalf of his wife Maria and their 17 year old son. Grigory U. (also known by the Ukrainian form of his name, Hrihory) was already well known to the Red Cross, having initiated an inquiry of his own three years previously for his brother Nicolai, believed to be in Siberia. But as the West Australian division informed national office, the enquiry was not forwarded on to the man in question, now living with a new wife and her two children: She is well known in the district and greatly respected. The current inquiry from the Russian Red Cross society has not been mentioned to Mr or Mrs U. … Assuming that Maria U. is the legal wife of Hrihory U., we appear to be in a delicate situation. We would be glad to know how you intend to reply, bearing in mind that these people are living happily as man and wife and that Mrs. U. (an Australian) is in all probability ignorant of her husband’s former marriage.30 The Red Cross in Australia decided instead to inform its Soviet counter­ part, ‘we cannot trace’. This was followed up by an official letter to the Red Cross and Red Crescent Society in October 1959, which stated ‘our enquiries have failed to trace Mr. U’. These decisions, difficult as they clearly were for women like Joyce Astley, reflected the fear that the ‘old’ family might wreak havoc on the ‘new’. The desire to protect the rights of the new Australian family against those of the families left behind was, ironically perhaps, a reflection of the widespread adherence to the ideals

28 Australian Red Cross Tracing Archive (ARCTA) , Melbourne, Case 342, Box 8731. Please note, these files are loosely held in storage by the Australian Red Cross International Tracing Service, and are not catalogued. 29 ‘U. Avram born 24 June 1925 – Bulgarian – travelled per ship TOSCANA departing in 1955’, National Archives of Australia (NAA), A2478, U. Avram. 30 ARCTA, Case 335, Box 8731.

134 ‘To reunite the dispersed family’ of family and marriage and even relief that these men were no longer in the ‘miserable migrant bachelor’ camp. Some people simply did not want to be found. The suspicion that some migrants might have actively used Australia as a place to ‘disappear’ is borne out in the tracing service case files. For example, a father in Estonia searching for his son Elias made contact with the ICRC, who in turn tracked the son to Australia. Alfred Brown wrote to Geneva that although the son had been located, ‘he did not desire his present address to be released to the enquirer. In view of Mr. V’s wishes, therefore, perhaps you may care to advise the enquirer that his son’s address is not available to us’.31 This was not an infrequent response. Daughters sometimes did not wish mothers to find them, brothers their sisters, sisters brothers, fathers their children. ‘We refer to your enquiry of 11th March, 1964, concerning the above-named on behalf of his daughter, Mrs Dalia U, Pola Yugoslavia’, wrote the secretary general, L. G. Stubbings, to the ICRC in Geneva. ‘For completion of your files, we wish to advise that Mr Josip U. does not wish to contact his daughter’ adding that he wanted no further communication ‘“for family reasons”’.32 In another case a young 14 year old girl also attempted to locate her natural father. In 1961 the ICRC wrote to the Australian Red Cross about an enquiry from the Hungarian Red Cross, on behalf of a young woman, Noemi, whose father had emigrated to Australia in May 1958, with a new wife. ‘We wish to advise we have now been in touch with Mr. U., at his new address’, the Australian Red Cross responded: He does not wish to enter into correspondence and make contact with his daughter Noemi, he said that the mother married Mr. S. approximately seven years ago, who adopted the little girl a year later. Mr. U. knew his daughter only as a small baby. Mr. U. also said ‘the question arises whether it is right to tell a child of 14, whose name is S. and who has been cared and looked after by her foster father anything about me, as my existence would be of no advantage to her.33 The daughter was subsequently told that the father’s address was not known. This strategy of telling enquirers that the persons they were seeking could not be found appeared to be a standard one, but such evasions

31 ARCTA, Case 476, Box 8732. 32 ARCTA, Case 362, Box 8731. 33 ARCTA, Case 379, Box 8731.

135 History Australia | Volume 12 | Number 2 | August 2015 could often lead to desperate and lengthy searches. In 1961 the British Red Cross received a new enquiry from the same Maria U (see page 134) still looking for her husband, because she had received a parcel from him via a Polish delivery agency located in London. She believed that he must now be living in England. This Polish agency was subsequently traced by the British Red Cross to an Australian company in Perth. Finally, the Red Cross took the decision to visit the West Australian home of Grigory U. and his Australian wife, two years after the original enquiry. ‘From the outset it was obvious that Mrs. U knew that her husband had a son (now aged 19) in Russia’: She was anxious that her husband should ‘do the right thing’ by his son, even to the extent of nominating him as a migrant, and that he should correspond and send parcels to Maria. I do not think that Mrs U had any knowledge of these circumstances at the time of her marriage. She referred to the facile marriage and divorce customs in the Soviet Union and said that if her husband had been married in Russia the marriage was a wartime marriage and of about six weeks duration as he had been taken P.O.W. by the Germans and had not returned to Russia after the war. In the lengthy memo to the national executive, the tracing officer defended the exemplary social standing of the couple, who ‘live in their own home which is well kept and well furnished. They are regarded as good citizens’. Moreover, Mr U was regarded by his employer, the WA Railways, as a ‘steady reliable type’. This sketch of the good home, well kept, well furnished, owner-occupied by good citizens, described the exemplary migrant-citizen in assimilationist Australia.34 It also had deeper Cold War connotations. The nuclear family was posited as the antithesis of Communism in the early Cold War years, which was frequently demonised, as Tara Zahra notes, in terms of its alleged destruction of the family. 35 In this context, Grigory U.’s story could be read as a success. As the Red Cross officer went on to confirm, it was not his responsibil­ ities to his Russian wife that Grigori feared, but Communism: Mr. U didn’t confirm or deny marriage. His main fear was that the Soviet Government will try to compel him to return to Russia. This

34 Fiona Allon describes the way citizenship was constructed by Prime Minister Robert Menzies in this period as a commitment to domesticity and private life rather than as a set of rights or entitlements. ‘At Home in the Suburbs: Domesticity and Nation in Postwar Australia’, History Australia 14, no. 1 (2014): 13–36. 35 Tara Zahra, The Lost Children: Reconstructing Europe’s Families After World War II (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2011), 230.

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fear is prompted by the fact that after he wrote to his niece and brother-in-law in 1956 he received a letter from the Soviet embassy in Wellington, New Zealand, asking him to return to Russia (‘all is forgiven’) and enclosing application forms for a passport. This request is a veritable Sword of Damocles to Mr U against which I tried to reassure him.36 A fear of Soviet discovery is common in the tracing documents. A memorandum written by the Victorian division in 1952, concerning the nature of contact with the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies of the USSR, Polish Red Cross, Yugoslav Red Cross and Czechoslovakian Red Cross Societies, explained: The enquirers here, many of whom are political refugees, are very reluctant to have their names forwarded to the above mentioned Societies. Some, in fact, would prefer to cancel the enquiries if they cannot be sent through International Red Cross. Others only want to ascertain if their families are alive. They do not wish to correspond or have it known that they are seeking news as they are afraid of reprisals.37 An article in the Townsville Daily Bulletin, for example, described how ‘Migrants from behind the “Iron Curtain” (such as Russian-occupied Germany, the Baltic provinces and Russia itself) were not corresponding with their loved ones in the homeland because a letter from outside the “Iron Curtain” immediately places the people who receive it under suspicion’. It was an established fact, the article continued, ‘that many thousands had disappeared and were doubtless lost due to having received letters from the outside world’.38 Yet how well established was this fact, and how well founded this fear? Certainly for people living within Communist countries, contact with westerners was dangerous and could have serious ramifications. As Katherine Verdery notes, in Romania the simple act of having a conversation with a foreigner was considered a crime if not reported to the authorities,39 and many sought persons from the Soviet Union spoke of the fears they held for their families if Soviet authorities discovered they were living in the West. Yet the danger of contact for those already living in Australia with people

36 ARCTA, Case 335, Box 8731. 37 ARCTA, Case 346, Box 8731. 38 ‘New Husbands Forced on Latvian Wives’, Townsville Daily Bulletin, 9 March 1950, 2. 39 Katherine Verdery, Secrets and Truths: Ethnography in the Archive of the Romania’s Secret Police (Budapest and New York: Central European University Press, 2014), 207.

137 History Australia | Volume 12 | Number 2 | August 2015 living in Communist regimes is unclear, and there are occasions when the protestations by sought persons in Australia could be interpreted as a ruse, to avoid responsibilities and/or contact with former families in the Communist bloc. Red Cross officers faced a dilemma when it came to deciding how far their charter extended in facilitating and supporting contact between families separated by the Cold War. Victorian Red Cross officer Sybil Irving, in a memorandum to the national office, described the case of Mr. H, who had sent a Red Cross message to Moscow, to be given to his family: The reply message written in the handwriting of the enquirer’s brother stated that the mother was dead, but the remainder of the family well. The writer seemed to indicate that it would be unwise to correspond. This was the first news received in six years. It appears now that the only contact the enquirer can have with his family is through Red Cross. Can we accept further enquiries from him, and if so, how often? The mission of the Red Cross, ‘to reunite the dispersed family in the first instance’, meant that, officially, it was unable to continue to perform the role of conduit for communication across Cold War borders. But these messages were, for many, an invaluable chink in the Iron Curtain. Mr Nedelko T. contacted the Australian Red Cross in 1952. He had been in Australia two years, and in that time, had written regularly to his wife in Bulgaria, but had not received any replies. He approached the Red Cross to forward a letter to his wife, and it became apparent, through Red Cross messages, that this was the first communication from her husband she was able to receive. ‘She suggested that he continue to send through Red Cross as it was the only way she would be able to receive letters. We understand that Mrs. T. is frequently interrogated by police – many of these interrogations resulting in ill-treatment: When we were again requested to forward a letter to Mrs. T., we regretfully had to refuse as contact had been established only three months ago … Again, this indicates that contact is only possible through the Red Cross. Can we accept further letters or messages and if so, at what intervals?40 These requests for guidance from field officers spurred Alfred Brown, the secretary general, to approach the ICRC in Geneva, to ask for a ruling in such cases. In February 1952 the ICRC replied, sanctioning the use of Red

40 ARCTA, Case 346, Box 8731.

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Cross messages as a means of communication across the Cold War divide. Twenty-five word messages were now to be permitted on forms stamped with the ICRC logo, if they were ‘of a personal and family character without political or economic indications of any kind’ and limited to one every three months. These messages were to be used only in cases where it was felt that ‘the parties in Australia cannot obtain news of their relations by means of the ordinary post, or are afraid that the use of the ordinary post may draw attention of the authorities to their relations’. The file of Nedelko T. detailing his efforts to reunite with his wife spans 15 years. In 1967 he again approached the Red Cross, this time to assist him to bring his wife out to Australia. Although the Australian government had approved her visa in 1965, the Bulgarian Red Cross responded that Mrs. T. had been refused a passport in Bulgaria. Here the file ends. The Cold War division of families dominated the caseload of Red Cross tracing in Australia right up until the end of the 1970s. Correspondence between the Australian Red Cross and Red Cross organisations in the eastern bloc and the Soviet Union was extensive and provides a rare insight into the ways in which the politics of the Cold War played out in some migrant homes of postwar Australia.41 A confidential Red Cross memorandum reported that: We have found that over the past twelve months the nature of our enquiries is changing; the number of enquiries for members of families separated by World War II have decreased, but those for whom contact has been made either through Red Cross or other channels, and since lost owing to Communist occupation, have increased considerably.42 Mr Konstantyn S. approached the Red Cross in 1959 to search for his parents, with whom he had last had contact in 1940 when he fled the Ukraine to escape deportation. He had subsequently changed his name. He instructed the Red Cross not to send the enquiry to the USSR, but to enquire in Geneva ‘in the hope that perhaps they had escaped from the Ukraine’. 43 The ICRC were able to contact the parents, and notified the

41 These also provide new information about the Soviet DPs who went to Australia because as Sheila Fitzpatrick notes, Soviet origins were ‘the elephant in the room’ so far as DPs were concerned: ‘Nobody wanted to admit to having been a Soviet citizen before the war’ because this hampered resettlement opportunities to the west. Sheila Fitzpatrick, ‘Reasons for not going back’, London Review of Books 35, no. 7 (11 April 2013): 29–30. 42 Confidential memo, ‘National Tracing Bureau’, 24 November 1952, ARCTA, Case 346, Box 8731. 43 ARCTA, Case 327.

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Australian Red Cross that they had received a letter from them ‘who are to know who is the enquirer: they have no relatives abroad and their son Boris was reported missing during the war. They ask: could it be him? And wait for a quick answer’. They enclosed a short letter in the mother’s handwriting. ‘He was here at 9am today, very happy to hear that his par­ ents are still alive’, the director of the New South Wales tracing bureau notified the national office. A message to his parents in German and Russian noted that he was well, ‘happily married with a daughter and son’: For your confidential information he still does not want his name and address to be sent to his parents through Red Cross, because he is about to be naturalised, and he fears any possible repercussions … he did not say whether he will write to his parents under the new name he has taken, he is still considering what is the best way to avoid any harm to parents or brother, as the authorities in the USSR do not approve of their nationals taking other countries’ citizenship, and he dares not say that he is in good circumstances here in Australia and happy to remain here to bring up his children.

Conclusion These searches demonstrate the longevity and reach of the Second World War and its aftermath on families, for even today, a heavy part of the caseload for the Australian Red Cross, as for Red Cross tracing services in Europe and in the newer nation states of the old Soviet Union, continues to relate to the Second World War. In 1998 for example, it was reported that the majority of enquiries in the 15 Red Cross national societies of the former Soviet Union, and the national societies of Central Europe, still concern victims of National Socialism.44 At the heart of these cases lies all the drama, and the mystery, of human relations. Why did the sister not want to be found? Why does the father not want his address to be known? Was this a symptom of Cold War politics or of a dysfunctional family? For those who were successful, what happened next? As Carolyn Steedman writes, ‘You find nothing in the Archive but stories caught half way through: the middle of things;

44 Violène Dogny, ‘Cooperation Between the ICRC and the Tracing Services of the Independent States of the Former Soviet Union’, International Review of the Red Cross 38, no. 323 (1998): 206. Since the break-up of the Soviet Union, the Soviet Red Cross tracing service became the Tracing and Information Service of the Russian Red Cross, and the other 14 states of the old USSR each had to create their own.

140 ‘To reunite the dispersed family’ discontinuities’.45 The tracing files are fragments of human stories, of lives ‘caught halfway through’. But they are also windows into the individual politics of migration and the family during a unique period in Australian immigration history. Ironically, some of these cases expose a migrant Australia that lent itself more easily to the trope of assimilation, as a country in which migrants could ‘disappear’. While Australian historians have become attuned to the oppressive ramifications of an assimilation policy that demanded of migrants that they ‘merge’, quickly and quietly, into the dominant Anglo culture of a White Australia, there is less recognition of the very real agency of some migrants who might have used, and even embraced, this opportunity. The disappearing acts of husbands, fathers, daughters and sisters all had their unique circumstances and individual motivations. For many left behind, the questions were tragically repetitive: Why does he not write? What is she doing? They were frequently, as in the case of Zhanya I. from Lithuania, underscored by a mixture of disbelief, fear and expectation. Zhanya’s lengthy search for her sister through the Soviet and German Red Cross organisations had finally led to her discovery in Australia: There was no reason for us to quarrel and not to write to each other. Four years have passed now and I know nothing about her … So I would very much like to know whether she is alive or not.46 She was alive, but, as the Australian Red Cross informed its Soviet counter­ part in Moscow, did not wish to have future contact with her sister. As the tracing record shows, Australia could be a place of refuge, hiding or exile for DP families. There were families who were never reunited despite the best efforts of tracing officers throughout the country. But it must also be remembered that the communication channels offered by the Red Cross throughout the Cold War period were also a precious lifeline for many. In 1985 a father in Poland located in Australia a son from whom he had not heard for over 30 years. A telegram from the Australian Red Cross to their Polish colleagues reported that the sought person had been found in Orange, New South Wales. ‘The look on his face at learning his father was alive was wonderful.’47 Similarly, one brother’s search finally ended after almost 50 years of separation from his two sisters, brother and step-brother. Nikita V.

45 Carolyn Steedman, Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 45. 46 ARCTA, Case 4211, Box 8686. 47 ARCTA, Case 18843, Box 8638.

141 History Australia | Volume 12 | Number 2 | August 2015 had fled to Australia after the Russian Revolution when he was 18 years old and lost track of his siblings in 1925. He had tried to find them continuously in the intervening years. Furthermore, in 1968, the Red Cross had approached the Department of Immigration in Canberra to try and locate him on behalf of his brother Vasili, who was seeking him through the Alliance of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies in Moscow. In a not uncommon example of bureaucratic bungling, the department informed the Red Cross that there was no record of this individual in Australia. Three years later, out of pure luck, Nikita, who had been living in Sydney all along, approached the Red Cross to initiate a similar search for his siblings in the USSR, thus alerting them to the original search by his brother. On 1 December 1971 the New South Wales tracing office wrote to their national office that Nikita V. had ‘called at the National Tracing Bureau, his face transfigured by happiness and holding a letter from his long-lost brother, Vasili, in which was given news of all the surviving members of the family’.48 He planned to visit the Soviet Union next year ‘in the hope of being reunited with his loved ones’. His story is one among many personal histories revealed in the tracing files that provide a glimpse into a unique twentieth-century epic of family rupture and reunion, against the backdrop of war, displacement and migration in the lives of many Soviet migrants to Australia.

Acknowledgments Thank you to Sheila Fitzpatrick for her feedback and advice on earlier drafts of this article.

About the author Ruth Balint is a senior lecturer in History at the University of New South Wales. She teaches and writes on transnational histories of migration, displacement, refugees and family, with a current focus on the Displaced Persons of postwar Europe. She is the author of Troubled Waters: Borders, Boundaries and Possession in the Timor Sea, published by Allen and Unwin in 2005. Her documentaries include Troubled Waters for SBS Television and The Somerton Man: A Mystery in Four Acts, for ABC radio. Ruth has collaborated with the Australian Red Cross International Tracing Service since 2012.

Correspondence to Ruth Balint: [email protected]

48 ARCTA, Case 439, Box 8731.

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