Girl Stows Her Sweetheart Away In A Trunk

Wanganui Chronicle, 6 January 1949, Page 5

Girl Stows Her Sweetheart Away In A Trunk

FREMANTLE. Jan. 5 (Recd. 7.55 pm).—A former German paratrooper, who, hidden in a trunk, was smuggled into his fiancee’s cabin aboard the Yugoslav migrant ship Partizanka, is now being kept in a locked cabin until the immigration authorities decide whether he should be permitted to land.

This was disclosed when the Partizanka reached Fremantle en route to Australian ports and New Zealand.

The girl concerned is pretty Fraulein Elsa Blaich, aged 21, who is travelling to join her father in Melbourne. She says she met Hans Heinrich, aged 24, a former paratrooper, at her uncle’s house in Cyprus, where they fell in love. She and her mother, who is travelling with her, planned that he should stow away by iding in a trunk 36 by 24 by 18 inches and being carried aboard the ship. The trunk was fitted with inside locks and breathing holes wer P bored in the lid. It was marked to travel in the hold, but she cried until a steward brought it to her cabin.

Five hours after th e shio sailed the paratrooper emerged, but he lived mostly in the trunk until a steward saw the lid lift three days later. After discovery, she paid his fare and radioed her father, asking him to guarantee Heinrich as a migrant. Heinrich has no papers, but says he fought in Russia, Greece, Italy and France. He claims that he bribed a British merchant crew take him from Bremen to Alexandria, and that he travelled to Cyorus in a Roval Naw ship. The pair first met in April, 1948.