Russian AnzacsCentenary Stories
To mark the Centenary of the First World War in 2014-2018, this site, in a weekly post, celebrated the Russian Anzacs who enlisted in the AIF that week.
Dyson, Zander, Levene, Mayer
Today we celebrate the lives of four servicemen:
- Briton born in Riga, Latvia, and educated at Oxford.
- Worked on farms in Konagaderrer, Victoria.
- Survived, unscathed, three years in the artillery units in Gallipoli and on the Western Front.
- Killed in the Somme in April 1918, leaving an orphaned daughter.
- Born near Vilnius; he was most likely a Baltic German.
- Took to sea at sixteen, and worked on ships in England and South Australia.
- Survived a full term at Gallipoli, and during furlough in London married his old friend Ethel Agnes Horne, a widow with two young kids.
- Killed at Mouquet Farm in August 1916.
- Born in Russia in a Jewish family, he was raised in Nottingham.
- Came to Australia at eighteen to follow the occupation of ‘bush worker and general labourer’
- Enlisted in the AIF as ‘David Conroy’, a Scot from Glasgow
- Wounded in Gallipoli at the battle for Bloody Angle, he rejoined his unit only to be killed a few weeks later at Shrapnel Valley.
- Born in Warsaw, Poland, came to Australia with his Jewish family as a child. Was a tailor.
- Enlisted at nineteen and served at Gallipoli with the 1st Battalion, returned to Australia medically unfit. Reenlisted and served on the Western Front, where he was wounded in Perrone in September 1918. Court martialled for petty crimes in London and repatriated to Australia.
- Mayer’s life crumbled apart after the war: he became a thief with extensive police records in several states.
Szablowsky, Markowicz, Ball
Today we celebrate the lives of three servicemen:
- Born in Dlugosiodlo, Poland; works as a cook on Australian ships.
- He is the first former Russian-born subject to enlist, serving in the Australian Naval and Military Expeditionary Force in Rabaul, Papua New Guinea.
- He leaves for the USA in 1915, where, unemployed in the 1940s, he signs up for WWII service and vanishes from the records.
- Came from a noble Polish family.
- Soon after the Gallipoli landing, he is detained on suspicion of being a spy, and fights for years to clear his name.
- In 1935, defeated, he commits suicide, and is buried by a chevra kadisha, a Jewish burial society.
- A Briton, Ball was born and raised in St Petersburg, and comes to Rutherglen, Victoria at 18.
- Wounded in the Gallipoli landing, he is awarded a Distinguished Conduct Medal for gallantry at Lone Pine.
- Killed at the Somme in 1916.
- He is commemorated officially in the Australian Dictionary of Biography, and in the local Rutherglen newspaper by his friend, Violet Hicks. His St Petersburg family was never found.