Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%

Wartime fates

A remarkable snapshot from Dunera
by
March 2023, no. 451

Shadowline: The Dunera diaries of Uwe Radok edited by Jacquie Houlden and Seumas Spark

Monash University Publishing, $34.99 pb, 189 pp

Wartime fates

A remarkable snapshot from Dunera
by
March 2023, no. 451

Uwe Radok was born in 1916 in East Prussia to a family of Christian converts who identified as German Protestant. Nevertheless, after the Nazis came to power in Germany, the Radoks were classified as Jews – their five children Mischlinge, of mixed ancestry. In 1938, the family applied to emigrate to Australia. When their visas finally arrived in August 1939, it was too late.

This is a familiar story: family scattered. By late 1939, Uwe and his two younger brothers had left for Britain, his father had been arrested and sent to a concentration camp, and his eldest brother was completing military service in Germany (still required of Mischlinge until 1941); only his sister and mother remained at home. What is more astonishing is that they all survived the war and that Uwe left twelve notebooks documenting the years of his internment as a Class A enemy alien.

The diaries begin aboard the SS Arandora Star in 1940 and end in Melbourne in 1943. His account of those three years – the sinking of the Arandora Star, the voyage to Australia aboard the infamous HMT Dunera, life in internment camps, and the relative freedom of working for the Australian Army’s Employment Company – is impressively even-handed and without rancour. Only occasionally does Radok succumb to ennui or allow a note of sarcasm to creep in, betraying his bitterness:

Shadowline: The Dunera diaries of Uwe Radok

Shadowline: The Dunera diaries of Uwe Radok

edited by Jacquie Houlden and Seumas Spark

Monash University Publishing, $34.99 pb, 189 pp

You May Also Like

Leave a comment

If you are an ABR subscriber, you will need to sign in to post a comment.

If you have forgotten your sign in details, or if you receive an error message when trying to submit your comment, please email your comment (and the name of the article to which it relates) to ABR Comments. We will review your comment and, subject to approval, we will post it under your name.

Please note that all comments must be approved by ABR and comply with our Terms & Conditions.