02 | The Buried Tea Chests

When two tea chests full of letters are found under a house in Sydney, they're identified as one of the most important finds in Australia's postal history. But for journalist Annika Blau, they also expose family secrets, silences and shame, as more startling truths are revealed about who her family really is and where they come from.

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  It is a truth universally acknowledged that on one's 250th birthday, there should be a celebration. I'm Claire Nichols and on The Book Show, we're raising our teacups to Jane Austen. Why Austen? What is it about her? Authors Colum Tobin, Karen Joy Fowler and more will explore why in 2025, the Austen Effect is bigger than ever. It's quite incredible. Search for The Book Show and look for Dear Jane wherever you get your podcasts, or hear it now on the ABC Listen app.

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  Hilary Harper here with ABC Rewind. And today, we continue to dig into a family tea chest of buried secrets. In our last episode, Annika Blau made some startling discoveries about her family history, after long thinking that there were gaps and silences across generations. Her search began after she discovered that a Sydney antique dealer owned a chest of letters belonging to her great grandfather, Oscar. After weeks of cold calling, Annika finally convinced Paul Storm to meet her.

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  In amongst it, there was a lot of mail out of prisoner of war camps. Father and son, when the First World War broke out, had been interned.

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  From there, the revelations kept coming for Annika, including a cousin she didn't know she had, and into a world of family secrets, silences and shame.

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  That's early for a picture postcard. The address in Budapest.

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  Oh, my goodness.

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  It means Eagle Street.

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  Now I know where they lived.

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  Here's Annika Blau with episode two of The Buried Tea Chests.

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  I don't know what my great grandfather, Oscar Blau, was thinking when he placed his prized stamp collection under the floorboards of a Sydney house almost a century ago. But he must have had a reason.

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  His father Julius brought the family to Australia from Austria-Hungary in 1909. His eldest son, Oscar, was 24 years old. Father and son became successful businessmen in Sydney. But in 1914, when World War One was declared, Oscar and Julius were interned as enemy aliens.

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  And to pass time in the camp, Oscar took up his hobby of stamp collecting.

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  So there's Julius and Oscar, clearly pestering all their associates in the Liverpool camp for their mail. And there it is, in the tea chest.

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  That's collector Paul Storm, who I discovered wound up with some of Oscar's collection. Our family knew very little about the internment camp. And this historic find has given my cousin Kim and I more leads in our search for answers.

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  What it's taught me is that history is made up of these concrete artefacts and documents and letters. And they have such potent stories attached to them that that has a life of its own as well.

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  Hmm. And while we might not have known a whole lot about Oscar and Julius's life in the internment camp, it seems that at the time, all of Sydney did. See, Julius Blau had made his fortune as the Australian agent for the famous 4/7/11 Ode Cologne. But at the start of the war, he and Oscar were caught continuing to trade with their German company, charged and interned. The press couldn't get enough of the Blau's downfall.

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  Mr Julius Blau of 4/7/11 Ode Cologne fame was interned last Monday with his son, Mr Oscar Blau. Why was this step not taken a year ago?

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  During their first Christmas behind bars, the military authorities returned a Christmas dinner my great-great-grandmother sent to the camp.

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  We do not feel the slightest sympathy with Mr Blau at the deprivation of his special Christmas dinner. If they want Mr Julius Blau to have his poultry, we suggest they should bring all the influence they can exert to bear on the Kaiser.

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  Professor of European history, Dr Gerhard Fischer, says there was an assumption that all Austrians living in Australia were well-connected and sympathetic to the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

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  All of a sudden, they were told, "Okay, well, you're not Australian, and you're German, and we're gonna put you into a concentration camp, and you will have no rights whatsoever." Businesspeople in particular were arrested and put into camps. Their companies were closed, their holdings were confiscated.

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  The Blau's financial success before the war saw them targeted by criminal gangs within the camp.

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  And they blackmailed people.

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  It didn't take long for the wealthy merchant Julius Blau to come to the blackmailer's attention.

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  We found court reports where Julius admitted to paying protection money to a camp gang leader. They'd threatened to kill Julius because Oscar had snitched on a prisoner trying to escape.

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  I did not want to be beaten. I gave him money because I was afraid of him.

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  And on the outside, Julius and Oscar were being hit for money as well. Julius owed the government £6,000, a whole year's salary, for trading with the enemy. And they wanted to know when this would be paid. But the Blau's were bankrupt as their company had been forced to stop trading. Parliament was relentless, but they also had other motives.

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  Julius Blau and Sons' trademark, 4711, was owned by the enemy on the declaration of war. "If we can kill German goods while the war is on, the names will become forgotten."

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  4711 wasn't the only brand targeted. The papers ran columns with British alternatives to other German products, including swapping aspirin for a tablet literally called Empirin.

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  Gerhard Fischer says this was the business community basically just being opportunistic.

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  In some cases, there was just economic jealousy of successful German businesses that could be dealt with. For Prime Minister Jürgen Wiesbaden, essentially, the war was all about economics, it was all about commerce. It was about who was controlling the international trade. And the really only competitor that he could see was, in fact, Germany.

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  The agitation with regard to Julius Blau and 4/7/11 in the columns of The Mirror ultimately secured the suppression of both Blau and his perfume.

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  The war had taken my family from riches to rags, fame to infamy, high society to shame. And now it was affecting their personal lives. Having been interned, Oscar was unable to see his baby son, Ozmar. Oscar's younger brother, Robert, wasn't interned. But the war still came between him and his socialite wife, Rita.

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  Sydney's society beauty Rita Blau divorces her husband.

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  Kim is Robert and Rita's granddaughter.

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  She cited irreconcilable differences, political differences.

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  According to Mrs. Blau, the war had not been raging long before Bob raised certain national differences with his little patriotic woman, Mrs. Blau.

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  And Robert, his heart is with the enemy, and I am Australian.

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  These led to endless disputes.

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  And so she cites, she had no alternative but to seek a divorce.

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  This wasn't an uncommon story. Husbands and wives were forced to pick a side. And often, that meant switching sides or splitting the family. By the end of the war, there were about 6,000 internees. And when it was over, almost all were deported.

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  It was the biggest mass deportation in Australian history. Although a lot of them had never been in Germany or had not been born in Germany either. Most of the people who had been interned actually thought they would have no future in Australia anymore. So they decided to go voluntarily. There's only a few hundred who protested that they would want to stay, and only a few of them were actually allowed to.

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  And guess who was given special permission to stay? The determined Julius Blau and his son, Oscar.

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  It certainly seems very curious that Julius Blau, a man of considerable means, should have been released from intern.

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  In November 1918, Oscar walked free. And a few weeks later, Julius followed. After four years of incarceration, the Blau men finally sat down to their Christmas chicken.

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  But the Returned Servicemen's League was outraged and wrote letters to Prime Minister Billy Hughes demanding Julius be deported.

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  Nobody knows better than Mr. Hughes all the circumstances concerning Julius Blau.

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  The Blau's were again scapegoats for public resentment towards Germany.

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  In a sense, it was the end of the German-Australian community in comparison to what it had been before, namely, a very prominent and proud community with their own infrastructure. And that was purposefully, I think, destroyed by the Australian government.

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  My family decided that only English was ever to be spoken again. Oscar and Julius emerged from the camp infamous, unemployed, and bankrupt, their perfume empire in tatters. But they looked for new opportunities. And like the phoenix from the ashes, Julius rose again.

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  Julius Blau flourishes like the proverbial Green Bay tree of Holy Rite and cuts quite a figure in Australian commercial circles.

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  Julius, by now in his early 60s, volunteered his service without pay to the American bag store and was taken under the wing of a former Lord Mayor of Sydney, Sir Alan Taylor.

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  Take the case of Julius Blau. From the German internment camp to the managership of a King Pitt Street emporium, from the shadow of public mistrust to the sunshine of Sir Alan Taylor's patronage, is a romance yet to be written.

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  Julius also began rebuilding the market before 7-Eleven perfume. And his anti-German sentiment was still rife. He proposed manufacturing the perfume in Australia.

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  Julius Blau of the Ode Cologne Perfumery is not alone in wishing to make Australia a self-centred nation.

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  His son, Oscar, my great-grandfather, had also rebuilt. He was doing well for himself, importing Wurlitzer pianos and a category simply called fancy goods.

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  But then, in the early 1930s, the Great Depression hit Australia.

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  And here's where our family fortunes really take a turn. Kim and I had always wondered why Oscar might have hidden his stamp collection under the floorboards. And now, I've made a discovery that could explain it.

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  And the fact that it survived is, I think, amazing.

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  Yeah.

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  Handwriting tells you so much.

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  It turns out that the internment experience wasn't our only family secret.

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  Bankruptcy. Liabilities amounting to £24,109 were included in the Statement of Affairs of Oscar Blau, who was examined before the registrar in bankruptcy yesterday.

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  By the early 1930s, demand for fancy goods and Wurlitzers had dried up.

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  And they can't flog all these millions of pianos that they obviously have imported but no one wants. The company has plenty of assets, but the owing-to-general-trade-depression sales have been slow.

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  Oscar was stuck with mountains of debt and a factory full of unwanted keyboards. Well-known department store maverick Mark Foy took him to the bankruptcy court. Oscar's resulting loss also sent his father Julius bankrupt, again.

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  I gave my son some money and then he got into trouble and I sent him some more money. Then came the depression and the creditors were on me like a pack of wolves.

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  When the embarrassing news of Julius's bankruptcy reached 4/7/11 in Germany, the perfume licence was transferred from Julius to his second son, Robert, Kim's grandfather.

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  Robert was very steady. Started his own business and went off on his own and went around the world selling perfume and other goods. He was really good at business. The sisters would often write to him and say, "Oh, I'm desperate for money and can you help?" And Oscar was a little the same.

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  Robert helped Oscar where he could and continued the perfume trading. But unable to honour his debts, Oscar's assets were seized in 1935, except two large tea chests. Could this be how they ended up hidden under the floorboards for over six decades? I put the theory to collector Paul Storm.

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  Under the floorboard sounds like hiding it, doesn't it?

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  Hmm.

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  Storing it would be in the basement or in the garage or something.

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  If Oscar was hiding the tea chests from the liquidator, it's possible he intended to go back for them. But his health was declining. Four years later, in 1939, on the eve of World War II, Oscar died at the age of 55. The irony is that while Oscar died bankrupt, he had a stamp collection that would be sold decades later for around half a million dollars.

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  I'm reading so much about how Oscar went through this terrible bankruptcy. And I think it probably hastened his death because he had tuberculosis. His health really declined over the course of this bankruptcy and it would have been so shameful.

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  That's exactly right. And so the story I get is of the jolly grandfather and the gorgeous, glamorous aunt, the hats with the big osprey feathers. I don't get any of the dirt, but my gut tells me there's more to this story.

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  And there is. The death of Julius's eldest son was tragic for him, but the family patriarch was dealt yet another blow with the return of war. Now elderly, he was unable to receive his pension from 4/7/11 because Hitler had banned money leaving Germany. Julius cycled through the bankruptcy court until he died an uncelebrated death two years after Oscar in 1941.

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  But there were two more loose ends I had to follow. The fate of 4/7/11 and that of my family's origins, perhaps the most important one of all. Luckily, collector Paul Storm had kept some of Oscar and Julius's correspondence. And that's how I uncovered another secret.

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  The address in Budapest.

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  Now I know where they lived.

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  Now, you know, but you wouldn't find, it means Eagle Street. I doubt whether there's still an Eagle Street and I would imagine it's been renamed.

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  I'm going to find it. I will.

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  You will, go.

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  I'd always been told we were Austrian Christians and that's why we had a German surname, Blau. But the mail revealed that we were actually Hungarian. And one of the addresses in Paul's collection let slip another secret.

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  So what else? So, and here's one of the few letters. And it's all in German. So there they've got a proper letterhead. They're in the city.

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  1898, Oscar Blau, Judenstraße 5. Judenstraße means Jewish Street.

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  Blau might be a German word, but it's a name that was given by the Austro-Hungarian emperor to Jewish people in the 18th century. He insisted that they be tracked, and that required surnames. Those without a family name were assigned German colour and season names, like blau, blue. No one on my side of the family had any idea we were Jewish, not even my grandfather.

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  How could my great-grandfather Oscar, who lived on Judenstraße, not tell his own children they were Jewish? I had more questions, and I couldn't go to Hungary. So I called my brother Ziggy, who's living in Paris, and he agreed to go.

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  I hunted for some relatives Ziggy might be able to look up when he got there, but no luck. I was then devastated to find out that our family, who stayed behind, were sent to German concentration camps during World War II. I broke the news to Ziggy when he arrived in Hungary.

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  All of Oscar's cousins were killed. Yeah.

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  That you confined, or just all of them?

• 18:18Speaker 10

  All of them, and all of Grandpa Jim, all of his cousins were killed as well.

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  Really?

• 18:24Speaker 10

  Yeah, they were children.

• 18:26Speaker 11

  Holy shit.

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  That they were, yeah.

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  Yeah. I know, it's so surreal. I can't believe that we had all this in our family and I had no idea.

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  Yeah, oh my god.

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  As shocked as we were, Ziggy then headed into the city to look for our great-grandfather's childhood home.

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  Okay, I guess I'm going to Eagle Street now.

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  Number five, Eagle Street Budapest. Julius and Oscar's address on the letters in Paul's collection.

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  These buildings do look really old, actually, so this could be the original numbering. This is number five. It's a big green building with all this ornate stone detail.

• 19:12Speaker 11

  If it wasn't for those letters, I wouldn't be standing here right now, looking incredulously at a green building. Find where their great-great-grandparents lived in. How cool it is to see where my great-grandpa lived.

• 19:26Speaker 04

  The Blaus had moved from the house over 100 years ago, so Ziggy wasn't surprised there was no trace of us. But it was amazing to at least have a photo.

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  Then, in the rain, he went searching for their other address, Juden Strasser. But there was no record of it existing, besides a Jewish alley on what became the wall of the ghetto.

• 19:51Speaker 11

  It smells like piss. It's kind of weird how these streets that were once Jewish ghetto is now one of the biggest party destinations in Europe.

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  There were 70,000 Jews crowded into an area of 300 metres squared.

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  It's crazy to think that this would have been our great-grandfather.

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  Julius Blaus' decision to move to Australia in 1909 saved our side of the family.

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  Ziggy then decided to go to the city of Jöhr, 100 kilometres west of Budapest, where our relatives lived before they were deported to Auschwitz. And after Googling Jöhr and Jewish families, I found Marinka Spiegel.

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  Her relatives, like ours, were sent from Jöhr to Auschwitz, but her mother was one of the few that returned.

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  They meet at the synagogue.

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  Are you Marinka? Nice to meet you.

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  Marinka takes Ziggy to the local synagogue, where she sometimes teaches piano. It's the first time he's been in one.

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  Oh, wow.

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  It's such a beautiful entrance. Huge archway.

• 21:15Speaker 11

  We have this strangely shared history. But yet, we live in completely different parts of the world and we're both piano teachers. It's sort of, yeah, it's surreal.

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  So behind the altar, there's a big display cabinet. It's this enormous black book with the Star of David on the front of it. Yeah, it's really thick parchment paper.

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  From here, 5,700 people, only 870 came back. Auschwitz is the largest cemetery for Hungarian people. The people who came back made this catalogue.

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  The victims.

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  From Auschwitz and labor camps.

• 21:59Speaker 11

  Oh, I see some Blaus. Oh my god, that's my last name. There's a lot of Blaus. Oh, it goes on to the next line as well.

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  My grandpa's cousin was Peter Kraus. There's a lot of Kraus's there. Peter Kraus. Yeah, wow. Seven years, nine months and 24 days.

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  I didn't know until pretty much yesterday that these people were my family. Like, I only found out very recently. So it's kind of surreal, this story.

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  Learning what happened to our relatives, we now understood why our family hid their Jewish ancestry. But there was one final piece of the puzzle that was still niggling me. How did our Sydney family break apart?

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  I now knew it was something to do with the inheritance of the 4/7/11 perfume licence.

• 23:03Speaker 04

  During the Depression, the licence was passed on to Kim's grandfather, Robert, when Julius and Oscar went bankrupt. But after Robert died in 1958, my side of the family wanted to take it back. And they tried to stop the licence passing to Robert's wife and daughter. They claimed 4711 wasn't women's work.

• 23:24Speaker 05

  And Will inherits this business.

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  Will, that's Vilma, Kim's aunt.

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  Her father gets sick and so she's called back to Australia.

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  She was studying in Paris at the time.

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  And it's, "You'd better come home. You know this business, you've worked in 4711. This is the trade you were born into, to run the family business." And she comes home and that's what she does.

• 23:50Speaker 04

  The press, as always, had their bit to say.

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  Miss Vilma Blau has had a job waiting for her since the day she was born, Australian representative for 4711 Cologne.

• 24:03Speaker 05

  The story that I heard was that Blau goes to 4711 and says, "These two women are not fit to run, to have that business." And 4711, to their credit, say, "No, they are." And that's when the pressure was really on Will to say, "I will stay and commit to running the business." And that's what she did.

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  Miss Blau spent two and a half years in Cologne, where she learned everything about the making and selling of 4711. Everything except the secret formula.

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  She did love it and it was her life. So easily, that could have been a different life.

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  And so Vilma was the anointed one. Vilma became the Australian agent for 4711 perfume for the next two decades. And the two branches of the family never spoke again. That is, until collector Paul Storm introduced me to Vilma's niece, Kim.

• 24:58Speaker 05

  I go to Paul's, I meet you, and I think, "Wow, I immediately connect with you." Because I don't know any of my Blau relatives.

• 25:06Speaker 04

  Kim had been in the dark too.

• 25:09Speaker 05

  All of us are forever looking for the Holy Grail.

• 25:13Speaker 04

  We still don't know exactly when the teachers were hidden or why.

• 25:19Speaker 05

  Letter by letter, lead by lead, false paths. And that's how history is unraveled, I think. And that's how we explain our history.

• 25:31Speaker 04

  I've always been fascinated by this since I was a child. I just always had this feeling, even as a kid, that I was from Eastern Europe. And that was where my story started. And I can't explain it, but even as like a seven or eight year old, I was just preoccupied by it.

• 25:53Speaker 13

  This is an interview conducted between Osmar Blau on his 90th birthday, with Annika Blau, aged 11 years.

• 25:59Speaker 14

  Now, I was wondering about Julius Blau. First of all, what he did for a living?

• 26:04Speaker 15

  Yes.

• 26:04Speaker 14

  And about his son, Oscar Blau. I was wondering what he did for a living?

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  He was an importer with goods from Germany.

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  I've been on a similar quest to you, having an origin story that never quite sat well. For me, what's always been interesting is when you don't know where you come from, you do keep everything because everything is that shoring up of self. And the gift of all of these letters and the documents, and meeting you as well, has been to say, ah, at last, I can hold in my hand and I can see belonging.

• 26:49Speaker 04

  I thought my family story was one of perfume, travel and fancy goods. But the story I found, starting with those tea chests, was very different. It was the story of ordinary people losing their freedom and sometimes their lives through conflicts they were powerless to stop. My family hid so much more than those tea chests. Their language, their story, their ancestry. And now I understand why.

• 27:25Speaker 02

  The Buried Tea Chest was written and presented by Annika Blau. Many thanks to Kim, Ziggy Blau, Gerhard Fischer and Marinka Spiegel. The sound engineer was John Jacobs and the producer Roz Blewett. And this has been Rewind on ABC Radio National.

• 27:43Speaker 00

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