In 2002 Vivian was interviewed by Kathy Tzilivakis by phone for this article and it appeared in the ATHENS NEWS on 01/08/2000, page: A04 Article code: C12714A041
Memories of voyage to America still vivid for Greek immigrants Historic steam ship’s passengers remember journey to ‘New World’ as a unique experience
KATHY TZILIVAKI
A Dritsas family photo taken on departure day, July 11, 1953. ‘The boat seemed enormous to me,’ says Vivian Dritsas-Adams.
Many Greek Immigrants, who embarked for New York on the TSS Nea Hellas in Piraeus nearly a half a century ago, would agree with Greek poet Constantine Cavafis that “To arrive there is your ultimate goal. But do not hurry the voyage at all. It is better to let it last for many years; to anchor at the island when you are old, rich with all you have gained on the way.”
The transatlantic voyage to the ‘New World’ may have only taken two weeks, but for many of its passengers it was an experience that was never to be forgotten.
The Turbine Steam Ship (TSS) Nea Hellas was the largest Greek-flagged passenger ship of that day to be used in regularly scheduled service from Piraeus to New York. Her first voyage was in May 19, 1939. The ‘ship of dreams’ would set sail from Piraeus for the last time some 14 years later.
The age of transatlantic travel by ship may be long gone, but the memories are still alive in the hearts of thousands of Greek-Americans who made the journey as young children or from the vivid stories told by their parents and grandparents whose lives crossed paths with the Nea Hellas. To them, it was more than just a means of transportation. It was a bridge to a new beginning and for many a long-awaited reunion with family who had settled in the United States years before.
Rose Paparis, a native of Thessaloniki, boarded the Nea Hellas in Piraeus on March 7, 1952 carrying her three-year-old son Elias in her arms. She was on her way to reunite with her husband who had emigrated to the United States a year earlier. Mrs Paparis, today a grandmother, remembers her 17-day journey aboard the Nea Hellas as if it was only a short time ago.
“We arrived in New York on March 24,” she told the Athens News in a telephone interview from her home in Williamsburg, Virginia. “We had a very nice time on the ship. Everyone was very friendly. I was seasick for most of the journey and the very nice people aboard the ship helped me to take care of my little son.”
Elias, today the owner of the Yorkshire restaurant in Williamsburg, recounts his adventure aboard the Nea Hellas. “There was a big dead fish, possibly a whale, and everybody aboard was watching it,” he says. “And I climbed through the railing and was ready to jump. And one of the stewards grabbed my jacket, just at the last minute before I was getting ready to jump, and pulled me back in. I got a spanking after that.”
Nearly a life-time has passed since Mrs Paparis packed her suitcase and set off for New York, but her memories of the Nea Hellas have not faded. It was about 4am on March 24, 1952, she recalls, when crew members came knocking at the first class cabins announcing that they were sailing past the Statue of Liberty. The passengers took to the upper decks to watch.
Around a dozen people who themselves travelled as children or whose parents made the crossing from Greece to the United States onboard the Nea Hellas have shared their memories of this experience on an Internet site (http://members.aol.com/neahellas) dedicated to this historic steam ship. One of these people is Theodore Siamas from New Jersey, who sailed on the Nea Hellas at the age of five in October 1959 with his two sisters and his aunt.
Samias writes: “I remember a safety drill that was held once, where everyone was to wear this white very bulky life-saver and how Georgia, my sister, refused to put it on. My aunt threatened that if she did not the captain would throw her over, at which point she quickly put in on. I remember the eating room and the abundance of food (anytime you were hungry) and I remember I was always hungry. The food was strange. After dinner they would serve this thing that was red and alive (it moved), we refused to eat it, later we recognised it as jello. We would also be served bananas which again we would not eat (we had never seen them before and my aunt had warned us not to eat strange food because it would make us sick).”
An Immigrants Return
‘The TSS Nea Hellas’ was the largest Greek-flagged passenger ship in the 1940s and 1050s to be used in regularly scheduled service from Piraeus to New York.
Not only did the Nea Hellas serve as a transatlantic crossing to the ‘New World’ from Greece, but also the opportunity for many Greek immigrants in the United States to visit their homeland. The Nea Hellas reunited hundreds of Greek immigrants with their family and friends back in the ‘old country’.
Brochures from that time indicate that the price of a round-trip ticket in the 1950s was about $480 for an adult fare, and $240 for children. The adult ticket price was the equivalent of a month’s wage at the time.
Jim Kalafatis accompanied his father in 1953 on his first time back to Greece after 13 years in the United States. Father and son left New York harbour aboard the Greek liner on April 22. Jim missed the last two months of the second grade.
“I remember the captain letting me blow the Nea Hellas’ whistle at noon,” he told the Athens News,” the great food, the smells of the ship at sea and the dolphins racing at the ships bow.” “Our arrival in Piraeus is still vivid in my memory,” he adds. “We arrived at night at the old talon, and all disembarking passengers were announced on a megaphone. This was done because awaiting relatives would often not recognise their long departed family members. I remember the emotion, the tears, the bear-hugs, the first night-time glimpses of a strange third world port city. 1953 Piraeus was a city in which World War II bomb damage was still much in evidence. Several story partially standing apartment houses where walls were missing were inhabited with makeshift curtains where walls had once been. Poverty was rampant.”
He also recalls Gypsy women with babies in their arms begging for loose change to feed their children and boys around his age shining shoes. “It was quite a contrast to the comparative luxury of growing up in a working class neighbourhood in New York City,” Kalafatis notes. “I remember the first bright morning following our arrival, being awoken at 7am by the first calls of the travelling street merchants, shouting about the sweetness of their karpouzia [watermelons] or araposika [prickly pears], as their donkeys pulled carts down the street.”
Vivian Dritsas-Adams, her brother and parents travelled to Greece from the United States in 1953. It was the first time after her father arrived in the US in 1921. They boarded the Nea Hellas on July 11, 1953.
“We went to see our cabin,” Dritsas-Adams, 62, recalls. “All the luggage had been taken there for us. No lugging things around yourself. We investigated the ship and took pictures. Then the ship is moving, the horns are blowing and the tugs are pushing and we headed out to sea. The boat seemed enormous to me. I can see in my mind’s eye, the wooden decks, the rails, looking straight down at the ocean.”
She recalls the four-course lunches and dinners, the shuffleboard and ping pong games and the large lounge with bookcases and round tables and chairs. “There was always a card game going on in there.” A Greek Orthodox service was held in the lounge on Sundays and movies were also shown in the evenings. Dritsas-Adams, who was 19 at the time, participated in a beauty contest organised on board.
“When we arrived to Marmari, we were well prepared for the fact that there was no electricity, no running water, no telephone, no cars,” Dritsas-Adams says. “It was like entering a time machine, back to another age. We just loved it.”
Ship of dreams
The Nea Hellas was built after the first World War by the British-flag Anchor Line for their North Atlantic routes by Fairfield Shipbuilding and Engineering Shipyards at Glasgow, Scotland. The 597-feet-long and 70-feet-wide steam ship weighed 16,991 tons and had six steam turbines and twin screws capable of 16 knots. She was christened the Turbine Steam Ship (TSS) Tuscania and went into service in 1921.
At the time, the Tuscania was a state-of-the-art ship. Years later, due to the depression, the Anchor Line sold the ship to the General Steam Navigation Company of Greece, which planned to establish a first-rate transatlantic service between Greece and the United States. The Tuscania was renamed Nea Hellas. According to articles in the New York Herald Tribune, the first voyage from Piraeus on May 19, 1939 was celebrated with parties and dinners for the New York business, social and diplomatic community. World War II, however, broke out in Europe shortly after and the Nea Hellas was placed under allied control as a troop transport ship.
For the next seven years she was to be called the ‘Nelly Wallace’ by the soldiers. In 1943, the ‘Nelly Wallace’ was part of an Allied convoy going from Algiers to Glasgow. The convoy was attacked by German U-boats. The ‘Nelly Wallace’ was the only ship that survived the attack, as she was carrying over 100 German prisoners of war. The ship was returned to her Greek owner in 1947 and served under the Greek flag until 1955. During this time, hundreds of refugees and survivors of the Holocaust embarked for New York on the Nea Hellas.
In 1955, the Nea Hellas was replaced by the Greek Line’s newly commissioned Olympia as the Line’s new carrier for the Piraeus-New York route. She was renamed New York and put into service for the northerly route between Germany, France, Canada and Boston and New York. In 1959, when she was 37 years old, she returned to Piraeus on November 14 for the last time and was laid up for two years and sold to Japanese ship breakers. On August 19, 1961 she left Piraeus for Onomichi, Japan, where she met her fate in the scrap yard.
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