Castel Bianco

A Victory ship converted

The hull was built in 1945 by the Bethlehem-Fairfield yards at Baltimore for the United States Maritime Commission as Vassar Victory, one of the mass-produced Victory type built alongside the better known Liberty ships. As a freighter she registered 7,604 tons, measured 455 by 62 feet and made fifteen knots.12

The Sitmar Line of Genoa acquired her from the Maritime Commission in 1947 and renamed her Castelbianco, the form used on most of the wartime-era passenger rolls; Castel Bianco is the later spelling. She was refitted at the end of 1947 to carry some 900 passengers in segregated quarters, with a single deck of superstructure added. In July 1947 the mass resettlement of refugees from the former Reich began with the signing of a contract with the IRO for a group of ships, and Castelbianco was among the first earmarked for the work.12

How the charter worked

The selection chain was the same as for the other chartered ships. Applicants were interviewed in the camps, screened medically and for security, and signed a two-year contract to work where the Commonwealth directed. What varied was the route to the ship. Her Italian sailings loaded at Naples and Genoa, drawing on parties moved south by rail from the German and Austrian camps. Her one documented German sailing loaded at Bremerhaven on 22 April 1950 from the emigrant camp at Delmenhorst.35

Two Ukrainian couples who trained under the IRO at Ludwigsburg and Pforzheim, one as a dressmaker and one as a motor mechanic, recorded that the choice put to them was repatriation, Canada or Australia. They embarked at Genoa in 1950 with the wife's parents, three generations in one party. Passing through the Suez Canal the grandfather traded a thick featherdown quilt for a Pfaff pedal sewing machine, which suggests trading with boats or quayside sellers at the canal transit rather than a controlled shipboard economy.5

Reception followed the standard pattern. Arrivals at Melbourne went by train to Bonegilla for processing and on to holding centres such as Benalla; arrivals at Sydney went to the New South Wales centres at Parkes, Cowra, Bathurst and their neighbours.54

Dated voyages

The first Australian voyage arrived at Sydney on 23 April 1948, from Europe by way of Madras, and a second sailed from Genoa later the same year. Recorded 1949 voyages run: Naples on 18 February to Melbourne on 20 March; Genoa on 27 April to Sydney on 27 May; Naples on 5 July to Sydney on 3 August; Naples on 26 September to Sydney on 24 October; Naples on 29 November to Melbourne on 29 December.13

In 1950 she loaded in Germany at least once, leaving Bremerhaven on 22 April with a party drawn from Delmenhorst and reaching Fremantle on 17 May before continuing to Port Melbourne, where passengers landed on 24 May. A further Fremantle arrival is recorded on 29 March 1952, at the very end of the IRO's work. The Istrian shipping record dates her IRO group voyages from February 1949 to March 1952 and gives Naples, Genoa and Bremerhaven as the loading ports and Melbourne, Sydney and Fremantle as the arrival ports.362

Ukrainians on board

Named Ukrainian passengers are documented on three of her voyages. The Schillich family, Ivan and Sonia with their small daughter, reached Sydney from Naples on the Castel Bianco on 3 August 1949, six days before the Parkes Migrant Centre opened, and went to Parkes. Aleksandr Pandik, born at Konstantinovka and taken to Germany as a forced labourer at fifteen, and Luba Wysocka, born in 1927 at Zynkowszcyna, embarked at Genoa in 1950 with Luba's parents Mykola and Aleksandra Wysocki and came through Bonegilla to Benalla, where they lived in hut 36/7. A Ukrainian woman travelling alone with a two-year-old son transferred to the Castel Bianco at Naples after her original ship failed, and landed at Port Melbourne on 24 May 1950.456

No Ukrainian count can be taken from her passenger rolls. The 1949 lists carry names only. The one substantial 1950 list records country of birth rather than nationality, and of 889 transcribed entries 475 give Poland and 249 Germany, with a single entry each for Ukraine and for Dniepropetrovsk. That is a limitation of the record and not a measure of who was aboard: Ukrainians from interwar eastern Poland were registered as born in Poland, those from the Soviet republic as born in Russia, and children born in the camps as born in Germany. The 1952 Fremantle list, taken after the displaced-person programme had given way to Italian assisted migration, is overwhelmingly Italian.3

Afterwards

In 1952 she was reconstructed at Trieste. Her tonnage rose to 10,139 and her passenger capacity to 1,200, and it was at this point that the name settled as Castel Bianco. From 1953 she ran between Genoa and Australia, later switching her European terminal to Bremerhaven.12

Sitmar sold her in 1957 to the Compania Trasatlantica Espanola, which renamed her Begona, cut her capacity to 830 and put her on the Southampton to Spain and Central America run. She suffered machinery failure and began drifting on 4 October 1974, was towed to Barbados by the German tug Oceanic, and reached Castellon in Spain on 24 December 1974 for demolition.21