The Knight´s Legacy

Cape Town

CHAPTER 4.2

CAPE CITY - OCTOBER 1945

The war was finally over. Huge contingents of men, both winners and losers, were being demobilized throughout the world. Hundreds of thousands were returning to their towns and villages throughout the Earth. Some found relatives and friends happy to see them again, while others did not find anything waiting for them at home. Sonderwater camp was progressively emptied to the extent that there were enough means of transport to return the former prisoners to their respective countries. Ugo and Renzo had been transferred to Cape Town in trucks and were patiently waiting a ship that will take them to Genoa. There they would seek the way and means to carry out the long-awaited trip to America. Many of their mates had chosen to travel from Cape to Morocco, in order to enlist in the Foreign Legion. Indeed, the only thing they had done in their young lives was to follow orders and fight so at least the Legion would give them accommodation, food, some  money and meaning to their devastated lives.

The steamer Crystal a former freighter which had integrated endless convoys during the war, and that had survived several attacks of the packs of German submarines to the columns of ships that it was part of, was already being boarded by the soldiers who were to be repatriated, a grey defeated and hopeless mass of men that moved like robots. Ugo and Renzo picked up the bags with their meager belongings and made their way toward the boarding gangway. After Genoa, America -that mythical place for millions of beings who longed to rebuild their shattered lives- was expecting them.

CHAPTER 4.3

BUENOS AIRES- JANUARY 1946

The Immigrants Hotel  was full with freshly landed people carrying their minimal belongings. The Conte Biancamano ship coming from Genoa had arrived only a few hours before and the landing had followed a strict hierarchical order, with the few passengers of first class at the beginning, with its luxurious trunks conveyed by a legion of low skilled pawns while the passengers wore their briefcases with documents and valuable effects with them. A couple of hours later, when the first class had already left the dock the remaining classes commenced to land. Ugo and Renzo were among the first of the third class in descending, anticipating the numerous contingent that had to collect their luggage, changing diapers of babies, help the elderly and other duties that delayed them.

Among them there were refugees, demobilized soldiers and families who came to meet with members who had preceded them on the journey, survivors of concentration camps  and possibly some masked war criminals.

The two young friends carried only  squalid cardboard suitcases with very little content. They wandered meaningless along the dock waiting that something happened, without really knowing very well that they could expect, until a young man crudely dressed and with a frayed cap on his head approached them asking them in the veneto dialect:

“Any of you is Renzo Roselli?”

As Renzo identified himself  the other shook his hand, saying:

“I'm Nicola Marcon, my family is neighbor to your relatives in General Roca, Río n***o. They didn´t tell that there were two people, they just only spoke of Renzo.”

Renzo explained the relationship that had begun between the two prisoners of war in Africa giving some details of the journey from the camp of prisoners, adding that they had now decided to try their luck in America together.

“Ebbene, benvenutti tutti i due.” Answered Nicola. “ You will surely find an occupation in the South. “ He added addressing Ugo.” Everything is to be done down there.”

Nicola explained to them that he was in Buenos Aires to buy spare parts for the machinery of the fruit farm of their parents and that he was planning to return to General Roca in two days.

“If you have no accommodation you can stay with me. I think that the owner of the pension will let you share my room for a couple of pesos a day. This is the offer that my parents made to your relatives.” He added now addressing Renzo.

As indeed they had no alternative, Renzo and Ugo accepted in exchange of taking care of the food expenses of the three of them. This was the beginning of a long friendship frequent among uprooted men who were adrift in the post-war period.

A half hour after Renzo and Ugo a somewhat spectral figure also descended from the ship Conte Biancamano. At the age of forty-two he had become an old man by the hard suffering in the Wewelsburg and Flossenburg concentration camps, Joachim Levinson dragged rather than walked on the ship gangway and then stayed waiting with no excessive faith that someone would come to look for him. After his release from the horror of Flossenburg by the English he had been interned in a crowded hospital until doctors established that he had a chance of survival outside the hospital, taking into account that they needed his bed for others who were in a worse shape. He was not sure if any other members of his family had survived, although he had no illusions in this regard. In any case would be a subject to find out later once the chaos of refugees and the masses of displaced people from the immediate post-war period settled down.

He recalled that he had distant relatives in Argentina and tried to determine their addresses and make contact with them. He did not know if the efforts of the informal group of former prisoners in concentration camps had had any results or not, and that was to be unveiled that day as he set foot on Argentine soil. Despite the hardship suffered before Joachim could barely dominate the anxiety generated by his new situation in a remote land whose language and habits he didn´t know, virtually no financial means of any nature, and his psychological resources exhausted. An hour passed in the grey dock with increasing despair and skepticism. His head was away from the immediate reality when he heard that some asked in Yiddish.

“Are you Joachim Levinson?”

When all the ship passengers had already descended and the shadows of the evening fell on the dock another character emerged along a corridor of the steamer and descended the ladder. He moved with great caution watching repeatedly in all directions and was evident by his furtive movements that he wanted to go unnoticed. He was using a dark overcoat with raised tabs and a hat covering his head. Between both garments a long scar that crossed his face was barely visible. Kurt Grobel landed in Buenos Aires after traveling with false documents belonging to a Hungarian called Szabo, in reality a prisoner died in the ovens of the concentration camp of Dachau, in whose custody Grobel had been until his escape. He knew that no one would come to look for him as his minions did not want to appear, particularly in a place exposed as a passenger ship arriving from Europe. Being alone did not worry him because he had some money and a concrete direction to go, located in Villa Ballester, a suburb of Buenos Aires.

They were hosted at a miserable guesthouse located in Pasteur Street not far from the textile business district of Once. Towards the evening of that first day in the new country, Nicola invited them to accompany him to find a woman who he had recently met and with whom he had relations. Possibly he wanted to boast of his conquest to his new friends. It was understood that at a given time they  should leave him alone with her.

In the absence of another program for that night, Ugo and Renzo accepted because it would give them a chance to see the night of Buenos Aires of which they had heard on the ship. Indeed, as they went on the old tram along Corrientes Street their eyes were filled of neon lights, business well supplied with all sort of goods, including some that were unknown to them and looked superfluous as well as well dressed women and men and shimmering but few cars. They had never had freedom of action in a major city before. A little disappointed, they saw that as they approached the place where his friend was taking them the bright street lights and most of the attractions were left behind. Indeed, when the tram approached  the area near to the port and they finally got off it at Reconquista Street  the area had turned gloomy and even scary. They then walked up to a dark store, one of the numerous perengundines in the area, where came and went men –including some sailors- of overall dirty appearance and with evidence in their walk of being drunk. Upon arrival, Nicola told his companions that they should wait for his friend to leave the store after her duties. Ugo and Renzo, without anything else to do in the unknown city went on a walk in the unsafe area, and by what they saw there they understood the profession of the Nicola´s girlfriend. Once in a while some drunkard was thrown out of the locals into the street by the patovicas where they stayed on the sidewalk, wobbling down the sidewalk or even crawling over the floor, until dawn. Many couples entered hallways disappearing behind  wrought-iron gates.

After an hour they returned and looked with some surprise that Nicola was still waiting in front of the local.

“She will be released at any time” He told his friends. “ If you want you can wait here with me.”