ELIZA IS HAPPY

New Zealand Listener, Volume 23, Issue 575, 30 June 1950, Page 6

ELIZA IS HAPPY

HIS week The Listener looked again for the child whose dark, patient eyes faced its camera for a cover photo a@ year ago, when the Dundalk Bay reached Wellington from Trieste with 942 displaced persons. On a dripping Saturday morning Eliza was in bed with the Auckland sniffles in a pleasant apartment beside the bush of Grafton Gully. She dressed herself and joined us jn the living room, shy and | glowing, rounded and wunrecognisable. She _ is

eleven and a-half and looks a ‘good thirteen. Even if she may never unlearn her lessons of acceptance of events, she has caught on to the shared secret of happy young girls; she seems to bubble with this private joke about the world which can scarcely be held in till it is exploded alone with a bosom friend. She was born in Lithuania and was still a baby when the Russians moved in and began to send people to Siberia Later the Germans came and the little country was a military highway. Then the tide moved back again, and this time her parents went with it into Germany. "We were taught these thimgs in history, but I have forgotten most of them," Eliza told us while her mother waited for the next question. We passed over the next years in Germany, when there was not enough work or food even for the Germans. Eliza was not always an only child. In 1949 the International Refugee Organisation forwarded the family to Pahiatua, from a Lithuanian camp near Hamburg. From the New Zealand arrival camp they went with nine other families to Murupara for timber work, Three weeks ago they came to Auckland. They like a city, and here the mother can earn, too. This month the first double pay envelope helps them begin to overtake the ten years’ delay in making a home for Eliza. There may be a radio set soon, even a piano and lessons. Though her eyes were bright, Eliza would not say what she wanted to be or do. She has not yet learned to count on anything. "Here it is always auturnn, it is never winter," her mother said. "We do not understand your weather yet, but

-it is small like ours, only two million." "No, Mother, Lithuania is three and a-half million." Eliza went this month into Form 1 at. a city convent school. The sums areeasier than the ones she did in the camp. school in Germany, but she thinks the language still keeps her back in ovine subjects. At Murupara she jumped ahead of ea rest of ‘us by adding a good deal of Maori to her Lithuanian and German. She can say Karangahape Road the right way. Her English intonation is quick, natural, and local. As we left, her mother said, "Now I think of it, I have never heard her speak English before. She is good, --, she?"