Another Migrant’S Tale

By Frank Paysen

Another Migrants Tale is the story of a boy who was born in 1936 in Germany and is a recollection of his experiences when he first came to Australia.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press AU
• Release date: Sep 26, 2018
• ISBN: 9781504314909

Frank Paysen

Frank Paysen was born in Berlin, Germany on 1936. He is now 82 years old, and currently lives in Australia.

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Copyright © 2018 Frank Paysen.

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ISBN: 978-1-5043-1489-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5043-1490-9 (e)

Balboa Press rev. date: 09/25/2018

I hope this story might bring back some memories for some of you who read this, and had similar experiences when you first came to Australia.

I

guess it all started when I was born, which happened on the 1st of August 1936, in Berlin, the day the Olympic Games were opened by the then Chancellor of the Third Reich, and for which my grandmother had been able to secure tickets in the arena, and then I had to upset the applecart totally by coming into this world and the attendance at that event had to be cancelled.

I later had the feeling that my mother never quite forgave me for that. For reasons best known to herself there were lots of topics which my mother avoided as though they did not exist, or else that they were of no real interest, like any reference to my father. My mother had gone through with a marriage ceremony sometime before my appearance on the scene, but that person was not my father.

The marriage ended by divorce a short time later and my mother changed her surname back to her maiden name. Fairly shortly after my birth my mother and I relocated to Titisee in the Black Forest, where my grandparents, who lived in Honduras, had purchased a house so they could retire there when the time came.

When I was very little I was sick nearly every winter with really major illnesses such as measles, diphtheria, scarlet fever, and I had a middle ear infection in two different years. One of those illnesses must have been very contagious as I have a vague recollection that I had to stay in a room that was off limits to all, except my mother, and that when I was well again, a person came to disinfect the room by sealing it off completely and then pumping a gas into the room through the keyhole, which was then firmly closed with cotton wool and it had to stay closed for some time before it could be opened up again.

When I was about 6 years old I was diagnosed with appendicitis and taken to the local hospital to have it removed. I believe I screamed the place down when the orderly just grabbed me and put me under his arm and carried me off, I was just not used to that kind of treatment.

I suppose back in the 1930’s it was rather unorthodox for a woman from a good family to have a child, but no husband, and so she had to disappear for a while, so to speak.

We lived in Titisee until about 1942 or so when all able-bodied persons had to work. As my mother had completed her nursing training she was given an option to either take up a position in a hospital, which could also mean a job in a field hospital close to the front, or, as she had a small child, to do a 3-month crash course as an auxiliary primary school teacher. She opted for the latter and a friend of the family looked after me during the time when she was doing this course in Wűrzburg, in central Germany.

Some time later she was given a posting to a village in central Germany, named Wabern, in the vicinity of Kassel. Whilst we were still living in Titisee we did one day get a bit of excitement, as we had a relative visiting who was serving in the army and when there was a sudden bang and the house shook a bit, he urged us all to go down into the cellar as he was quite convined that a bomb had fallen close to the house.

After we had huddled in the cellar for about 15 minutes or so he thought he should go and investigate and he came back laughing and told us that it had only been all the snow from one side of the roof which had suddenly slid down and we only had to dig an access path the next day so we could leave the house again.

We had only been in Wabern for 2 to 3 weeks and were still living out of our suitcases, when, in the early hours of a morning someone came running from house to house to rouse all with information that a dam some distance away had been bombed and that we all had to get out. It was the Ederdam, one of the dams bombed by the Dambusters. Just as well we only had to throw our belongings back into the suitcases and we were ready to go. It was the 17th May 1943.

Across the road from where we had been given temporary accommodation in the house of a middle-aged woman, was the farmhouse of the mayor of the village and he told us that he and his family would head out of the village in a couple of horse-drawn