Arandora Star British luxury liner prior to WW2.

Introduction

Originally, this piece was composed for my public profile on Facebook, since there was the potential for more traffic there than here. I’ve been mostly on and off Facebook, especially for Marketplace, several times, as it’s a boring, tiresome fiddling of clicks.  As of this writing, i.e., in Oct of 2017, I’ve been doing a great deal of writing, as winter has set in with its characteristic vengeance here in Canada. 

My parents circa early 1950s.

This is a first for me to remember the little I know of the role my parents played during WW11. I’ve taken the facts of the ship sinking from the published report in Canada’s Maclean’s of Nov. 1960. There were other reports citing slightly different facts, when I searched for the Arandora Star’s name. Even Wikipedia has a report with differing facts — andsoitgoes…

Sometime in mid 1933, after Hitler became Chancellor and head of the German government, my father gave a speech in a Berlin park entitled: Buddhism, Christianity and Gnosis. He was immediately imprisoned for criticizing the Nazis and remained jailed for 2 years, becoming the first foreign national to be treated as such. Upon his release, he continued to openly speak out about the increasing fascism. He had to escape out a window in his mother’s house, when the brownshirts came for him. He swam to safety across the Danube. Pretty heady stuff all in all! The timeline is sketchy after that.

Arandora Star is converted to troop carrier.

My mother, born in 1912, resided in London at the time, telling only a few stories of the food rationing along with the nighttime blitz from the German V-2 rockets. Mama said it was fine as long as you could hear them whizzing by. She became a constituent of the secretarial pool for General Doolittle that worked in France after the Allied D-Day invasion of occupied territory, post Normandy, pushing forward with the land crusade against the Nazis.

Papa is the dude in the centre of the front row, clothed in the white smock. This was his staff. He was head of a Viennese health sanatorium. This is likely a late 1920s image. [Papa would’ve been in his late 20s or early 30s] He possessed both MD & Ph.D. degrees, rare in those days, but more common today.

Father’s role was somewhat more convoluted. As an Austrian citizen, he became an enemy alien, albeit a non-combatant, once Germany annexed Austria, forming the Axis powers. Papa was imprisoned in Warner’s Camp in Seaton, Devon, near Brighton, until England had no more room to warehouse German & Italian POW’s. In 1940, 1,500 men were moved on board the Arandora Star, a luxury liner, jury rigged as a troop carrier, to ship these POWs to Canada by agreement between London & Ottawa. The Arandora Star was hit by the last German torpedo from U-47, captained by the well-known German ace Günther Prien, sinking the ship, dumping most into the cold north Atlantic and unbeknownst to Prien, killing hundreds of his own countrymen. Only 6 lifeboats carrying 10 POWs and crew, got away from the fast-sinking Arandora Star. In all, 861 survived, Papa included. It was the CDN destroyer HMCS St. Laurent that answered the rescue call; that ship, was captained by Nova Scotian Harry George DeWolf. That night in 1940, more than 1,140 men perished at sea. The Maclean’s article from Nov. 1960, is Harry’s account as told to Terrence Robertson, a Maclean’s journalist at the time.

Maclean’s magazine of November 19th, 1960.

Papa was an MD, albeit with a broken arm and permanent hearing loss in his left ear, resulting from the engine room explosion, which took the sole direct hit. DeWolf picks up the story here; “At dusk, sentries were placed at strategic points throughout the ship, and the only men allowed to move freely were our sick-bay attendant and two enemy doctors — Dr. Ruhemann, a German and Dr. Ötvös, an Austrian. Exhausted as they were, these two worked throughout the night until all our medical supplies were exhausted.”

The Nova Scotia connection.

Dangerously overloaded, still at risk for other U-boat attacks, the St. Laurent docked in Scotland offloading the survivors. From there, pa was once again imprisoned, this time on the Isle of Wight, which is where Mama met him. She was part of a British group of women permitted by the War Office to administer whatever comfort to these prisoners was allowed, usually in the form of used clothing, cigarettes and sweets. ~ E.P. Ötvös {Eugenia (Ena) Prudence} 1912 — 2008

“In 1957, the regional commander of the German defence forces told visiting CDN officers of the new St. Laurent that the German president, Dr. Theodor Heuss, wanted to thank the officers and men of the St. Laurent that saved the lives of 861 German & Italian shipwrecked people.”

Papa gets a mention.

The only war story pop ever told me, was of the young Italian boy soldiers floundering in the cold, dark Atlantic, calling out for their mamas as they were drowning. Pa was in the ocean along with the other survivors for over 7 hrs., according to Harry’s report in Maclean’s. Prior to this, Papa lost much of the sight in his right eye from an exploding shell during WW1. ~ Dr. E.J.C. Ötvös {Ekkehard Josef Christian} 1895 — 1971

Papa carved this while suffering internment at Warner’s Camp, Seaton, Devon, UK.

Over the years, I’ve met and spoken with people whose parents survived WW11. Many tell a similar tale of parents rarely, mostly never, discussing actual events from that time period. My guess is that those experiences were too horrific for any to comprehend. Who would want to remember? Today, we know that PTSD is quite prevalent among returning soldiers; often there are more deaths from suicide than from combat. It was like that with CDN soldiers returning from their stints in Afghanistan. I suppose this is another meaning for the 11th of Nov.; I don’t know.

I AM John Ötvös, aka jayöh.