This country doesn't want me

One Lithuanian couple arrived in Australia in February 1948, after being accepted as displaced persons. This part of the story is no different to the other 10,000 Lithuanians who came to Australia, but where the story becomes almost too hard to believe is that this couple ended up living in caves at Killarney Heights, a suburb of northern Sydney for nearly 20 years.

The true story of Stefan and Genovefa Pietroszys, is not clear as it changed many different times.

Stefan was born in 1898 in Vilnius, Lithuania, while Genovefa was born about 1910 in the Russian city of St Petersburg.      No sooner had the couple arrived than the authorities assessed Genovefa as having a mental illness and she was placed in a mental hospital.

The authorities also realised all was not well with Stefan – he was given a job at a timber mill near Perth but the mill owner told the authorities that Stefan was unable to work and appeared to have a mental illness.  By mid-March 1948, the authorities were recommending sending Stefan and Genovefa back to Europe.

Before this was initiated the couple fled but was soon caught and sent to the Bonegilla Migrant Centre in northern Victoria but they ran off again before reaching Bonegilla.  They remained at large for the next four years before being arrested and charged with vagrancy. They were returned to Bonegilla where papers and jobs would be found for them.

Again the couple ran off, later being found in Sydney.  They were ordered to return to Bonegilla but they left the train at Wagga and later that month were found living in a disused quarry near Wagga suffering severe malnutrition and exposure, and were taken to Wagga Base Hospital.

Immigration officials intimated that the couple could face deportation from Australia.  Stefan was being driven from Wagga to Bonegilla, when he dived out the window of the moving car, cracked his skull and was knocked unconscious.  He was placed in hospital under police guard.  Genovefa having been taken back to Bonegilla escaped again.  The couple were reunited somehow and in 1954 were arrested on charges of vagrancy and sentenced to three months.

For the next fourteen years little is hear of Stefan and Genovefa until 1968, when the Salvation Army was told about a couple living in primitive conditions in a cave.  The Salvos visited them regularly over the next 11 years. To avoid the public, they moved about the Middle Harbour living in caves.

The couple were considered odd, locals are recorded as referring to them as eccentric Russians.  Both had been interned in German labour camps before coming to Australia and they feared returning home.

In February 1979, Genovefa died of a heart attack, aged 68.  Stefan agreed to move into a Catholic aged care home at Marayong, where he died in October 1982, aged 84.

Stefan and Genovefa lie side-by-side in Frenchs Forest Bushland Cemetery.

 

Genowefa and Stefan from their Immigration Papers