They arrived by the good ship HMT (hired military transport) Dunera in Australia from Britain during World War II.

Mostly they had only the clothes they stood up in. Some 2200 men and boys aged between 16 and 66 on the ship were to become known as the Dunera Boys. About a third remained in Australia after hostilities ceased.

German-born Dunera Boy Bern Brent was sent to Australia during the Second World War.Credit:Martin Ollman

German-born Bern Brent was aged 17 when he arrived in Australia. He will be 100 in December and is now believed to be the only surviving Dunera Boy in the country – and only one of five worldwide.

Their remarkable story will be safeguarded with the opening of a tribute memorial on Sunday at Jones Bay Wharf in Darling Harbour, where the Dunera offloaded its Sydney contingent.

“Collar the lot!” was the abrupt order made by then British prime minister Winston Churchill after Italy joined the war in 1940 and applied to all “enemy or dangerous aliens” in Britain.

Germans and Austrians, mostly Jewish, previously determined not to be a risk, were incarcerated in their thousands in Britain in the belief it would stop any spies among them from forming a “fifth column” in the event of invasion. They were interned in Britain or deported to Canada and Australia, where most would be held for the duration of the war.

Bern Brent with his mother Helena ‘Lola’. She and her husband Otto survived the war and settled in Australia.

Brent, who was an only child and lives in Canberra, will open the memorial at Doltone House by remote internet hook-up.

He was 15 when he got out of Berlin as part of a Quaker youth group in December 1938 following Kristallnacht, the Nazi regime’s co-ordinated wave of antisemitic violence the previous month. He first lived in a hostel in south-west London and worked in a factory in Lambeth.

“My mother said [that] there’s a war coming, it would be a good thing for me to get out. She had spent the First World War in Berlin, which wasn’t very pleasant. I was interned for four weeks in Britain when France fell in May 1940 and the newspapers carried on about thousands and thousands of enemy aliens being at liberty in Britain.”

Bern Brent was 15 when he got out of Berlin in 1938.

Some 24 hours after the Dunera left Liverpool it was attacked by a German U-56 submarine. A torpedo hit with a loud bang but did not explode. During the voyage, Brent’s rucksack was taken from him and thrown away.

After a stop in Fremantle, he disembarked at Port Melbourne before the ship continued to Sydney. Brent was sent to Camp 2 at Tatura near Shepparton and interned until January 1942. He studied and then served in the Australian Army. In 1945, after the war, he was entitled to a scholarship at Melbourne University. He then taught English to refugees and married his Australian wife Jean, who he met on a boat on Sydney Harbour, and then taught in Saigon. They had three children, Barbara, Peter and Joanna.

The ship HMT Dunera in Sydney, 1940.Credit:Fairfax

Asked what it felt like to be the last of the Dunera Boys, he said: “I think I chose my parents wisely.”

Were people suspicious of his German background? “I didn’t find that. I would go out dancing and I didn’t experience any hostility.

“Being sent to Australia was the best thing that could have happened to me at my age. I would have joined the army when I turned 18 in Britain and I give myself only a 50:50 chance of having survived the war. I had a much better life in Australia than I imagined had I stayed in Britain and survived. I was lucky to have been interned and sent to Australia.”

Bern Brent says he was lucky to have been interned in Australia.

The memorial includes large-scale photos of Dunera Boys disembarking at Jones Bay Wharf, artefacts and displays as well as a large model of HMT Dunera, built by a member of the Dunera family.

Dunera Association president Ron Reichwald, whose father was a Dunera Boy, said the younger boys saw it as an adventure. They were in reasonable shape when they arrived given the circumstances, he said.

“We are 99.9 per cent certain Bern is the last Dunera Boy in Australia,” he said. “We have an archivist and researcher, and she has put together a dossier on each boy. She says there are only five left worldwide.”

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