The stars in the sky are brighter here
Penelope Bieder
Penelope Bieder’s father, Ludwig Bieder, arrived in New Zealand by sea in 1939. He had an MD from the University of Vienna Medical School and was the ship’s doctor. At 28 years old he was fleeing the brutality he had witnessed.
Ludwig was the only child of Abraham Bieder and Bertha, nee Flinker. Bertha's family were from Czernovitz, now in Ukraine. Ludwig was born there. (Now Chernovsky). The Bieder family were lucky to survive the war hidden in Brussels. The family story is told by Penelope’s mother Lois Bieder in two books, ‘Escaping Vienna’ and ‘Beginning Again’, published by the Dunmore Press and available in libraries. ‘The stars in the sky are brighter here’ won the annual NZ Listener Montana Poetry Prize in 2000.
Penelope Bieder writes:
In 1999, with refugees arriving in New Zealand from other European wars, I thought about dad's arrival 60 years before. He always found New Zealand an empty, lonely place, and of course he also had the ghosts of his family members who did not survive the war. (Wondering where everyone was has a double meaning.) But he loved his new country with a passion. He was young enough to start over and he had a long, successful life and a long and happy marriage.
When he died in 1995, aged 85, I was 45, and in the years since, I have often longed to talk to him with the perspective of age. Isn't that always the way? Ask those questions before your elders are gone.
“The stars in the sky are brighter here”
Kosovo refugee, May 1999The stars in the sky are brighter here
Everyone has been most kind
Each person has received many gifts
There were speeches at the airport.
Sixty years ago this month
You arrived alone by sea
With one suitcase
A fine cashmere greatcoat
And thirty shillings
At a boarding house
In Molesworth Street
You spent your first night
Unpicking the stars from your sleeves
You learned to be like us
To mow lawns, dig potatoes, drink tea
And pull one end of a flounder net
Through the shallow surf
Those empty windswept beaches
Curving away like pale sickle moons
Filled you with a secret panic
Always, you wondered where everybody was.