From shadows into the sun

Henry Lippmann, Dunera Boy, 1921-2004

Henry Lippmann, who has died at 82, was not simply one of the Dunera Boys, that shipload of Jewish and anti-Nazi outcasts whom the British government deported to Australia as a potential security threat following the fall of France; he was their organiser, record-keeper and chronicler.

Henry [Heinz] Lippmann was born in Berlin to Ruth and Leo Lippmann, the proprietor of a modest carton manufacturing business. He lived, grew up and was educated in the Halensee area, between Grunewald - from whose railway station many of Berlin's Jews would later be deported to the eastern killing areas and Auschwitz - and the great stadium Hitler built for the 1936 Olympic games.

He attended the boys' high school just around the corner from the Koenigsallee intersection where, with portents that patriotic Jewish Germans like Lippmann's parents insufficiently heeded at the time, the German foreign minister, Walther Rathenau, a Jew and son of the founder of the great AEG electrical consortium, was assassinated by right-wing thugs in 1922.

Yet Lippmann had what he described as a charmed boyhood and youth, one that only at the end was overshadowed by the rise of the Nazis. Forced by Nazi legislation to leave his state high school, he completed his secondary education at a private Jewish school in 1936. Barred by the Nazis from university, he was enrolled in an overseas relief training scheme offering technical education to Jewish boys, intended as the prelude to their transfer to practical employment in England.

By that time he had also been deeply influenced by the courageously political Rabbi Joachim Prinz, an influential modernist whose book Wir Juden [We Jews, 1934] and ensuing series of lectures attended by thousands was one of the catalysts for a positive reaffirmation of Jewish identity among Jews.

His parents' belated efforts at family emigration were doomed, so they concentrated on Henry. After several false starts, and on the very eve of war on August 27, 1939, Lippmann finally left Berlin. His parents farewelled him at the Charlottenburg station on a train that connected with a Channel ferry to England. "Why have you bothered coming to see me off?" he asked them. For the rest of his life he was haunted by that farewell - he full of a teenager's heedless excitement at setting out on a journey into the unknown; his parents crying. They understood that they would never meet again; he did not.

In England Lippmann remained under the training scheme sponsorship in London, Leeds and York until the fall of Dunkirk, when, with 35 other boys on the scheme who had turned 18, he was interned on the Isle of Man and then transported from Liverpool to Australia on HMT Dunera. In December 1940 the Dunera delivered to Sydney its cargo of 2542 mainly German and Austrian enemy nationals. Most, but not all, were Jews - some of them religious, others quite secular - and many of them, whether Jews or not, were left-wing opponents of and exiles from Nazi tyranny. They had been thrown together with a number of Nazis and Nazi sympathisers.

On their long voyage to Sydney they faced not only German U-boat attacks but also atrocious treatment - including persistent and calculated brutality, humiliation, theft and harassment - from the poorly trained British troops assigned to keep them subdued during the two-month voyage to Sydney. These shipboard jailers saw them all as simply the enemy, or else as troublesome Jews whose own wilfulness had blighted Germany and had thereby dragged Britain and themselves into an unnecessary war with their Aryan Christian cousins.

Upon their arrival in Australia, the Dunera Boys, as they came to be known, were taken by rail to detention camps in Hay and Tatura. They arrived in a country that had little understanding of their plight. As one federal parliamentarian had earlier suggested of such people, either they were loyal Germans, and hence supporters of Britain's enemy, who deserved no sympathy, or else, as traitors to their own country, they were scoundrels with whom His Majesty's government should have nothing to do.

Some were eventually allowed to return to Britain to join the British Army, some were released to join relatives in other parts of the world, and others, after the war, were to return to Germany, some to play prominent and controversial roles in the cultural life of the German Democratic Republic [East Germany]. But most stayed in Australia.

At Hay and Tatura they devised for themselves an open university and adult education school and a lively intellectual and communal life. They produced their own camp currency with banknotes whose borders were elegantly but unconventionally scrolled with barbed-wire that, on close inspection, spelled out unendingly their motto, both despairing and patiently good-natured, that they had learned from the song of their Australian military minders: "We're here because we're here because we're here because we're here ... "

In time, many of those Dunera Boys who stayed in Australia, including Lippmann, were allowed to join the Australian Army in non-combatant roles in work and construction companies. For 3 years Private Lippmann served with the 8th Australian Employment Company. On his discharge in 1946, he applied for Australian permanent residence and naturalisation and, forsaking Melbourne where he had been based, returned to Sydney whose natural beauty, warm sunshine and cosmopolitanism pleased him.

Eating with friends one day at the Rosensteins' Kanimbla Restaurant, then a haven for Continental palates, he was introduced to John Lewinnek, a prewar refugee from Berlin who was active in the Jewish community and in the clothing trade. Lewinnek took Lippmann into his business as a travelling sales agent, and also, with his wife Peggy, served as sponsor and surrogate parent to half a dozen "Lewinnek boys" - five orphaned Holocaust survivors from displaced persons camps, and Lippmann.

Lippmann was to stay in Lewinnek's employment for 15 years. In 1951, on a sales visit to a store in Redfern, he met the proprietor's sister, Julie Wakil, a dressmaker born of a distinguished rabbinic family from Baghdad, many of whose members reached Sydney after World War II.

They were married in 1952, and by 1962, combining her fashion sense and dressmaking talents with his business and organisational skills, they launched their own venture, Florida Fashion. Two sons, Michael and Ed, were born. They, together with Juliet's large and welcoming network of relatives, helped provide the orphaned Lippmann with a rich replacement for the family he had lost.

For many years, Lippmann believed that his parents and brother Kurt had died in the Warsaw Ghetto, from where news of them had last reached him; only in the 1980s, when documentation became available, did he learn of their further transport into the ghettos of the east, until they disappeared at the Trawniki death camp.

Among the Holocaust survivors in Sydney there are many who endured far worse than did the Dunera Boys. Yet there was a particular poignancy to the fate of those like Lippmann who went on to live good and worthwhile lives, overshadowed by the memory of their early repudiation by the opponents of Nazism and the painful recollections of their separation from parents they would never see again.

By war's end those former German and Austrian teenagers like Lippmann had begun to become Aussies. Demobilised, they were assisted, with some continuing ambivalence, into the mainstream of Australian life, both by government departments and policies and by the more thoughtful elements of society, both Jewish and not. Australia, at first a timely haven, then poignant exile, became, as they came to realise and then proudly affirm, a new home. The Dunera Boys would make a disproportionately great contribution to Australian life, in the arts, law, music and scholarship. Collectively, they wrote a key chapter in the history of modern Australia as an immigration-based society.

Over the years, Lippmann became their chronicler, archivist, record-keeper, journal editor and publisher, historian and organising genius. He was the driving force behind what has become an annual event: the commemoration of the arrival of the Dunera at Walsh Bay, held at the nearby Maritime Museum.

The lives of Lippmann and those like him, including many of the Dunera Boys, were anchored by two cardinal principles: first, that of Treue, or fidelity to the memory of their parents, teachers, friends, and the devastated world of their German-Jewish origins; and, second, a thankfulness towards life, beyond any simple and pragmatic gratitude, because of what Australia had enabled them to salvage and reconstruct of their humanity as they started out again here. That is what the annual event, over which, in recent years, Lippmann presided at the Maritime Museum, has commemorated and celebrated.

Unlike many others who have arrived as migrants and, once secure, have wanted to pull up the ladder to prevent others from climbing aboard and sharing their fortune, the Dunera Boys have always remembered what they were when they arrived here, and have been compassionate towards others in the same situation.

"We, too, were undocumented aliens when we arrived," Lippmann remarked at last year's Dunera Commemoration, "even if it was those British Army shipboard jailers who spitefully threw my documents overboard."

Lippmann was an elegant and fastidious man. He had an eye for fashionable women's styles and - equally the secret of his business success - an appreciation of the style of fashionable women. He loved Sydney and its harbour. For the last 40 years of his life he and Julie looked from the veranda of their home upon the emerald harbour that he first saw through barbed wire from the deck of the Dunera . It was a change of perspective strangely symbolic for him, of the providential reversal in the lives of many Dunera Boys and other grateful immigrants.

Lippmann enjoyed Sydney's sunshine, swimming and gardening. A handful of sand from his favourite beach and of earth from his garden were mixed with Rookwood's clay when his grave was filled.

He is survived by Julie, his sons Michael and Ed and their families, including five grandchildren. In this year's Queen's Birthday honours he was awarded the OAM for his contribution to Australia through his Dunera activities; his medal was bestowed in an individual investiture by the Governor, Professor Marie Bashir, at the Sacred Heart Hospice in early June.

Professor Clive Kessler and Rabbi Jeffrey Kamins