Kindness - Love in Action by Nuria

Kindness – Love in Action

by Nuria

One day, my cousin’s daughter asked her father why he ‘liked’ me. His answer was ‘Because she is kind’. She told me this herself!

It has always seemed a strange question and one I would like to explore. I felt close to my cousin Reinhold, but his daughter seemed to resent me and could not understand our relationship.

Our family came from Vienna, Austria and has since been scattered. Reinhold was the son of my mother’s eldest sister, and I only met him when I came to Australia in 1977. He was twenty years older than me and very kind. He showed me around Melbourne, signed me up to Medicare and gave me my first Melways (a map book of Melbourne/Victoria’s roads). This seems a symbolic gift – so I could always find my way when lost.

Reinhold’s mother had divorced her husband – he remembers going to his father at the weekend to collect money for food. They were very poor. He told me that his mother often took them (Reinhold, his sister and brother) to visit my parents in Vienna. It was a long walk, and my mother always gave them the tram fare home. But they walked and used the tram fare to buy food. They were a close and loving family.

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In January 1939, my parents escaped Vienna on one of the last trains and made a new life in Derry, Northern Ireland. Reinhold and his family could only leave much later when another sister gave them the money for the fares. They managed to get to Derry just before the war was declared in September 1939. He was with my father in the kitchen, listening to the radio when war was declared in September 1939. He was only a teenager then and got a job with the local milkman delivering milk.

The Dunera Boys

In the next year (1940), Winston Churchill’s government detained thousands of ‘enemy or dangerous aliens’ previously determined not to be a risk; this included Reinhold, who was only seventeen at the time. In July 1940, 2546 of these men, ranging in age from 16 to 66, were herded aboard the hired military transport ship Dunera at Liverpool and transported under abject conditions to Australia.

Churchill later described the arrest and internment of these men, now commonly known as the ‘Dunera boys’, as ‘a deplorable mistake’.

The Dunera left Liverpool at midnight with one destroyer as an escort. Less than twenty four hours out of Liverpool, the Dunera was attacked by a German U-56 submarine, a torpedo hit the Dunera with a loud bang but did not explode. A second torpedo was fired, and because the waves were heavy, the ship went up just as the torpedo passed underneath.

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The 57 days of the voyage were in appalling conditions, and the British guards robbed them of their luggage and took Reinhold’s watch. (1) Reinhold tells us that this happened when he boarded the ship. Reinhold was held with the other men in rural camps based in Hay and Tatura. Communities were created there, and the men made the best of their conditions as they could and encouraged education and culture in the camps. Friendships made remained and there were many reunions. Most internees were released in early 1942 – Reinhold volunteered for the army, married and settled down; He studied and became an architect.

I tell this story to show how close and fiercely loving our family was. We cousins understood how fortunate our parents were to have survived – they had helped and protected one another. Reinhold told me how happy he was when he heard that his beloved aunty and uncle (my parents) had a baby daughter (me) in 1943. We were family and familiar with one another - we knew who we were. There was no question of why. This made me think – firstly, why do we need a reason to love someone? Love is not a transaction – it comes from the heart. We love ‘in spite of’, not ‘because of’. Did Reinhold’s daughter not know love? Did she not have empathy? Or was there envy that we had something that she did not? She once told me that Reinhold was not my family. Of course, he was! I now realise that this feeling is a recognition of something known and understood in another person. It does not have to be a relative but usually recognition of ‘sameness’ of someone like us. I remember being told once that when we meet our teacher we immediately feel a likeness – there is no difference. When I first met Pir-O-Murshid Hidayat I felt this immediately. I saw so much of myself reflected in him or was it him in me? There was no difference. This is love!

Then came Reinhold’s answer - the thought that I was kind? I pondered the matter. Reinhold was kind – did he see that in me? Was this his way of saying that we were ‘kin’ and that this kindness he spoke about was really love? Only recently I have come to understand what real kindness is. It is love in action and my beloved cousin knew this and understood. I remember him with such love – he was a kind man!

(1) https://www.duneraassociation.com/dunera-boys/

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