Genoa and Naples embarkation

Origins and purpose

The International Refugee Organisation took over resettlement from UNRRA in 1947 and, by the time it closed, had moved over 600,000 refugees from Europe to the New World. That figure covers all nationalities and all routes. Italy mattered to this operation for a practical reason: Australia and South America lay beyond Suez or across the South Atlantic, and a Mediterranean departure removed a long and expensive passage down the coast of western Europe.5

The organisation ran the Italian end through a small number of camps rather than through the ports directly. An account of Giulian and Dalmatian emigration to Australia records that anyone intending to go there had to leave the refugee camp where they were living and reach one run by the IRO, mostly Bagnoli near Naples or Cinecittà in Rome. Selection and enrolment happened there. Departure, the same account states, was from Naples, Genoa or Bremerhaven.3

Federica Bertagna, writing on post-war transit through Italy, states that until the ports of Germany and Holland returned to operation the port of Genoa was the first option for leaving Europe, and that it was to Genoa that the International Refugee Organisation directed the thousands upon thousands of displaced persons. The same account records that before they could embark the refugees were lodged in structures and camps previously occupied by prisoners of war and set up across the whole of the national territory, and that the Italian press in 1947 spoke of 1,000,000 displaced persons in transit in Italy. That figure is a contemporary press estimate rather than an official count.20

How it worked in practice

Selection came first and was made by the receiving country, not by the IRO. For Australia the condition was a labour contract: adults signed an agreement to work for two years wherever the government directed. The Encyclopedia of Ukraine describes the same terms from the migrants' side, adding that changing residence or occupation during those two years was forbidden, that permanent residency followed automatically at the end of the period and that citizenship became possible after five years.34

Medical screening was the second gate, and tuberculosis was the disease that most often closed it. The examinations were carried out in the staging camp before travel, so a family could reach Bagnoli and still not sail. Because selection and screening were done at the camp rather than the quayside, the port was the shortest part of the process: people were moved to Genoa or Naples once a berth on a named sailing had been allocated to them.3

Transport was arranged by voyage, and the ships were not tied to a single route. The IRO chartered commercial vessels and also borrowed military transports; American correspondence of November 1948 discusses three United States Army Transport Service ships on loan to the IRO being put on the Australian run for one round trip each. The same hull could therefore appear at Naples on one voyage and at Bremerhaven on the next, and a ship's name says nothing on its own about where its passengers boarded.1514

The voyages themselves could go wrong. Passengers who left Naples aboard the Anna Salen on 1 December 1949 got no further than Aden, where the ship developed engine trouble and turned back into port. They were transferred to the Skaugum, which was returning empty from Australia, and reached Fremantle on 6 January 1950. One group of people, one journey, two ships.13

Reception was the receiving country's responsibility. Australian arrivals were taken from the disembarkation port to a reception and training centre, most often Bonegilla, and dispersed from there in small groups to meet demand for unskilled labour. Bonegilla, Bathurst and Benalla all have pages on this site, and the Bagnoli page follows one family from Naples to Bathurst.34

Ordinary commercial liners continued to call at both ports alongside the chartered resettlement voyages. An index of Naples passenger lists maintained by the GG Archives records the SS Saturnia of the Italia Line sailing from Genoa to New York via Naples on 22 July 1949, the SS Conte Biancamano sailing from Genoa to Halifax and New York via Naples on 12 August 1951, and the SS Constitution and SS Independence of American Export Lines sailing from Naples to New York via Genoa on 1 March and 27 October 1952. These were scheduled transatlantic services rather than IRO group resettlement voyages, and the index does not identify who among their passengers were displaced persons.21

The Ukrainian experience within it

Ukrainians appear on these sailings as one nationality among many rather than as a distinct scheme. The transcribed manifests of the Italian departures list passengers from Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Ukraine, Czechoslovakia and Romania together on the same ship. No published breakdown gives the Ukrainian share of any individual Genoa or Naples voyage.810

The destination figures are better documented, although they cover every route rather than the Italian ports alone. About 21,500 Ukrainians emigrated to Australia in 1948 to 1951, and about 6,000 Ukrainian displaced persons reached Argentina between 1946 and 1950, the latter drawn from the camps in Germany and Austria. Both totals include people who sailed from Bremerhaven, so neither can be read as a count of Ukrainians embarking at Genoa or Naples.46

Italian ports also served destinations that had nothing to do with the great resettlement countries. A nominal roll of emigrants leaving Genoa on the Star of Suez for Karachi on 19 January 1950 records a movement eastwards, and the Arolsen guide notes journeys through Genoa, Naples and Bari as far as China and Afghanistan. Genoa was a general-purpose exit from Europe, not solely an Australian one.182

The men of the Rimini camp

The former Galicia Division internees held near Rimini left Italy by a different route and under a different authority. They were surrendered enemy personnel in British hands, not civilians in the IRO resettlement system, and their departure was a British Cabinet decision rather than a migration selection. During May and June 1947, 8,570 people travelled by sea from Venice to Britain, among them nurses, clergy and some civilian relatives. Venice, not Genoa or Naples, was their port.7

Direct overseas emigration from Italy was considered for them and did not happen. The possibility of transferring groups of the men to Canada, the United States and Argentina was investigated but proved unrealistic at the time. Those who eventually reached those countries did so later and from Britain, after release from prisoner-of-war status into European Volunteer Worker employment. The Rimini Camp page on this site covers the Italian years, and the British camp pages, among them Hallmuir and Amisfield, cover what followed.7

What happened afterwards

The IRO wound up at the end of 1951, and the question of what would replace its shipping was argued over at length. A General Migration Conference held at Naples in October 1951 failed, chiefly because the United States, Australia and Canada rejected the plan put to them, but it produced one clear point of agreement: the vessels and auxiliary services the IRO was about to relinquish should be preserved within a new framework.16

That framework became the Intergovernmental Committee for European Migration, which inherited the fleet and the embarkation machinery and arranged the emigration of over 406,000 refugees, displaced persons and economic migrants from Europe during the 1950s. Genoa and Naples continued to serve as its Mediterranean ports. Bagnoli's own refugee use is dated by the Italian heritage inventory to January 1952, as the site's Bagnoli page records, so the port traffic outlasted the camp that had supplied so much of it.17