Thirty-Nine Days

“Thirty-nine days” Mother repeated every time she referred to our experience at sea. After numerous delays, disappointments, and months of waiting, we were headed to the Promised Land!

 In spite of the heat, we have been very well, but oh, how we long to set foot on solid earth again, wrote Dad at the half-way point.

Confinement on a cargo ship with a toddler was challenging. My parents spent a good deal of time running after me. Once I came frighteningly close to falling through a hatch into the hold.

The first stop in Trinidad was very short, with only a few hours to refuel, take on water, and drop off three persons. Some brave passengers took the light motor boats for the mile-ride ashore. We were among them.

My parents wrote about the people: The natives of Trinidad are mostly Negroes, but there are a few whites and a good number of Hindu people. They paused to listen to a street-musician from India play a one-stringed instrument and sing in his native tongue. Accosted at every turn by some young fellow selling bracelets, Dad wrote: North Americans know nothing of a real insistent salesman. He also noted, Their vehicles are very amusing. The most common are the burro and the English bicycle. Most of the cars are very small, some Austins and English-made Fords. A few of the street cars were very nice electric cars, but most were primitive-looking cars without sides.

The open market, in Dad’s opinion, was very interesting but not appetizing. Coconuts sold everywhere led him to question their shortage in the US at that time.

The great variety of food served onboard was not what they were used to. Mother listed: beef brains, head, tongue, intestines, tail, kidneys, liver; turkey; duck; chicken; all kinds of fish; veal. The special every meal is ‘bife a la plancha’ [grilled steak] so rare the blood runs out when you cut it. Oh, how we would enjoy a simple meal of well-done beef. Most meals included some form of fried potatoes. Mother always requested and was served ‘papas hervidas’ (boiled potatoes).

Of the hundred-thirty-four passengers onboard, twenty-five were children. I was the tiny curly-headed blond running around the deck. The sailors rewarded my greetings—Buenos días, buenas tardes/noches; Hasta luego; ¿Cómo le va?—with packages of cookies or an apple.

January 11, as we crossed the Equator, ship personnel held a special party with games and treats for all the children. As part of the ceremony, they squirted us with a hose and gave us an initiation diploma from King Neptune signed by the captain.

Life onboard was not all fun and games for my parents. They used this protracted time at sea to work on Spanish language skills. A Mexican lecturer and international negotiator offered my parents a couple of lessons to reduce the culture shock awaiting them in Argentina. Dad and Mom experienced more such learning in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the first port of call. 

My father was up at dawn to watch our arrival on Saturday, January 19, 4:00 a.m. It was a very beautiful sight. Lights outlined the shoreline as well as the huge statue of Christ.

Photo credit Joshua Woroniecki

Five hours later the ship pulled into Dock Number 2. Immediately the stevedores, handling the orange cranes that ran on tracks along the waterfront, began unloading the cargo—three hundred tons worth! These dockworkers were paid 20 cruzeiros a day, equivalent to $1, a small amount compared to those in New York whose wages were $10 a day.

Thursday, they were still unloading cargo. The José Menéndez would sail to two more ports—Santos, Brazil, and Montevideo, Uruguay—before reaching Buenos Aires, our final destination. 

Meanwhile, we set about to enjoy Rio! The longer stay allowed for sightseeing, shopping and even a Sunday church service.

Methodist and Pentecostal passengers who were ministers had conducted church services. Dad, a Grace Brethren pastor took his turn. Mother wrote about Dad’s sermon, a brief but clear message, with illustrations from the sea. (What were these examples, I wondered.)  
He asked four questions:

1)      What is man’s present moral condition?
            2)      What is God’s sentence upon man’s sin?
            3)      Since God’s sentence is death, will all be dead for eternity?
            4)      What must I do to be saved?  

According to Mother, the children talked about it for quite a while afterwards.

During the Sunday spent in Rio, the three missionary families attended a Church of God and were asked to share a few words through an interpreter. These new contexts and experiences stretched my parents beyond their comfort zone; for example, Everybody prayed aloud so that the man who was supposed to be praying could not be heard.

Monday the family began sightseeing and shopping. Most everything is high-priced and much is poorly made, wrote Dad. They have plenty of cameras, radios, etc.—things which are not seen very often in the States since the war. Mother’s find was a rubber plate scraper, something she’d been wanting for a long time.

A very old post card

Midweek we went to Sugar Loaf Mountain (Pão de Açúcar), the taller of two peaks (1,299 ft.) on a peninsula that juts into the Atlantic. The name originated in the Sixteenth Century at the height of the sugar cane trade, because the shape resembled the conical clay molds used to transport the sugar on ships. On top of the Sugar Loaf they have a sort of restaurant and dance floor.  Since then, hotels, tourist attractions and a variety of tours have been added. One experience offers rock climbing with a professional guide along the same path taken by the first climbers in 1817. Tourist ads claim that it is a classic adventure that shouldn’t be missed. Observe wild monkeys!

Cable car access in two stages is still necessary to reach the top, but the original 1912 cable car line was rebuilt twice since then.

Dad wrote about the spectacular view from Sugar Loaf Mountain, The waterline of Rio is especially nice; built up with beautiful curves, beaches, water-front streets. The houses and public buildings are so colorful—white, gray, pink and variegated colors. The roofs are mainly red tile.

Thursday, after a few cooler days, the weather reprieve was over and the forecast predicted hotter days ahead. I showed the effects of lingering in the tropics. Rita is a funny looking sight all bit up with mosquitoes, wrote Mother. Also she has a nice round black and blue mark on her cheek. The bruise came the other day when she fell on deck.

When we ask Rita where Grandma and Grandpa and Uncle Phil are she still says ‘Far away.’ Then she says she wants to go ‘bye.’

Rita and Uncle Phil, September 1945

As we whiled away the time in Rio, cargo was still being unloaded; no telling how long it would take. We are getting so tired of the trip already and the stop in Santos won’t hurry matters any. It will be a wonderful thing when we’re finally there! continued Mother, ever impatient and eager for what came next.

When I pondered my parents’ account, Proverbs 13:12 came to mind, "Hope deferred makes the heart sick,  but a desire fulfilled is a tree of life." Then I realized that to arrive in Argentina would be a mere beginning--a tree of life takes a lifetime to grow.

~~~~~~~

During those thirty-nine days at sea at the beginning of 1946, while our little family was cut off from homeland, friends, and kin, information was scarce, leaving us unaware of what was going on in the world at large.

Some newsworthy events my parents could have missed:

• Tornadoes in Texas;
• Fourteen coal miners killed in an explosion in West Virginia;
• Twenty-one perished as United Airlines flight crashed into the side of a mountain in Wyoming;
• A ten-day walkout by 268,000 workers that began on January 16 and lasted until the government seized 133 meatpacking plants;
• January 21, the largest strike in American history, when 750,000 steelworkers ceased work.

Headlines from abroad included: 

• “Lord Haw Haw Hanged for Treason”—January 3, William Joyce died in Britain’s Wandsworth Prison. 
• “USS Brevard rescues Japanese Civilians,” 4,296 onboard Enoshima Maru when it sank near Shanghai, January 23 (Guinness lists the event as “Most people rescued at sea”).

As the world purged the evils of World War II, peoples and nations changed and rearranged. January 1, Emperor Hirohito announced that “The Emperor is not a living god.” And that his people had to “proceed unflinchingly toward elimination of misguided practices of the past,” like “the false conception that the Emperor is divine and that the Japanese people are superior to other races and fated to rule the world.” His admission was published throughout Japan, but I doubt my parents heard of this or any of the following ongoing movements. 

• Pressure from the “Bring Em Home’ Movement” forced the War Department to continue the steady demobilization of soldiers from the Philippines, France, Guam, Germany and the United States.
• Austria, Nazi’s first victim, was restored as a sovereign republic.
• The Allied Forces returned control of the liberated Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) to the Netherlands.
• The first multiparty elections in fifteen years were conducted in Germany in the American occupied zone. 
• January 11, the People’s Republic of Albania was born, with Enver Hoxha as prime minister. 
• Charles de Gaulle resigned as President of France.

            As they left Brazil on January 31, it is likely that my parents were aware of Eurico Gaspar Dutra’s inauguration as the first popularly elected President in fifteen years.

Years later, the name Adolf Eichmann (mastermind of the Final Solution to the Jewish Question) would mean something to us all, when after several name changes, he was discovered hiding in Argentina and hanged in 1962. However, January 5, 1946, when he escaped from the American detention camp in Oberdachstetten, he was unknown to us.

Even today, with the internet and an overload of information, it is also possible to be unaware of what is really going on. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known. (I Corinthians 13:12 ESV)

Even so, back in 1946, full of faith and anticipation, my twenty-four-year-old parents were stepping into the Great Unknown.