Dunera Boys

From Bern Brendt

During the last years Uwe was the only remaining ‘Dunera Boy’ who, together with me and a group of a few hundred internees, was disembarked in Port Melbourne, spent the next eighteen months in the three Tatura internment Camps 2,3 and 4, and remained in Australia after the war. (the majority of over 2000 Dunera internees disembarked in Sydney and went to two internment camps in Hay).

Uwe was then twenty-three and at seventeen, the age I was then, a six-year age difference is enormous. But there were several points of contact. Uwe told me he came from East Prussia. My maternal grandmother was born in Königsberg, East Prussia. She lived with us when I was a Berlin school boy and had told me much about East Prussia. Also, when I prepared for the Victorian Leaving Certificate exams in Tatura Camp 4 – the matriculation qualification for Melbourne University – Uwe, together with his youngest brother Rainer, was a tutor for the two Leaving Mathematics subjects I had selected: Mathematics 2 (Algebra) and Mathematics 4 (Calculus). They were both excellent teachers and while I did not sit for these two mathematics exams in Tatura but later during the war, I passed both subjects and still feel it was, primarily, due to Uwe and his brother’s teaching skills that I did. I had left my Berlin Goethe Gymnasium in March’38 as a fifteen-year old ‘Obertertianer’, years before the ‘Abitur’.

We were in the same unit during the war – the 8th Australian Employment Company – and in the post-war years I ran into Uwe a couple of times at Melbourne University when he was a lecturer there. I was then an undergraduate and in ’49 I left Melbourne never to live there again. Some years ago I saw Uwe’s e-mail address in the tri-annual ‘Dunera News’ publication and we were in brief e-mail contact. He told me a little about his life during the past half-century and about his time in the U.S. I think it was sometime in 2007 that my wife and I happened to be passing through Coffs Harbour and I dropped in on Uwe unannounced. It was the first time since the 1940ies that I clapped eyes on him and Anita whom I recall as a Melbourne teenager when she was the sister of fellow internee and wartime friend Sandro.

I remember Uwe particularly as a pleasant young man in his early and mid-twenties in Tatura from September ’40 to January ‘42. I am so sorry to hear of his passing.

My condolences go to his immediate and extended family.