The Italian Immigrant Who Found a New Life in South Africa

An Italian Immigrant Story in Postwar South Africa

“The war brought him to South Africa as a prisoner. Life brought him back as an immigrant.”

In the winter of 1947, Antonio Bianchi stood on the platform at Treviso station with one suitcase, a worn leather bag, and his wife Maria's hand resting quietly on his arm. Their four-year-old son, Marco, slept against her coat, unaware that the three of them were leaving behind everything they knew. The train would take them toward the port, and from there toward a country Antonio had once entered not as an immigrant, but as a prisoner.
He had been twenty-three when the war took him away from the Veneto. Before that, he had been a mechanic, the son of a modest family, a man who knew how to repair farm machinery, bicycles, trucks, and anything else that came apart under a wrench. He had expected a life of work, marriage, children, and perhaps a small workshop of his own. War erased that plan in a matter of months.
In 1941, Antonio was sent to North Africa. When his unit was defeated, he became a prisoner of war. Eventually he was transported to South Africa, one of the distant destinations to which thousands of Italian prisoners were sent.
He remembered his first sight of the country as a confusion of light, dust, wire, and enormous sky.
The camp was nothing like Italy.
There were no familiar church bells. No narrow lanes between stone houses. No vineyards climbing gentle hills. No mother waiting at a window. There was only the fence, the guards, the barracks, and beyond them a land so vast that it seemed impossible to imagine where it ended.
At first Antonio counted the days.
Then the weeks.
Then the months.
Eventually he stopped counting.
A prisoner learned quickly that survival depended on routine. Wake up. Work. Eat. Wait. Sleep. Begin again.
But Antonio had hands that understood machines.
Under supervision, he was eventually assigned work involving mechanical repairs. Engines did not require a common language. A damaged carburetor did not care whether the man holding the wrench was Italian or South African. Metal obeyed patience, pressure, and knowledge.
It was there that Antonio met Samuel.
Samuel was an older South African mechanic who worked nearby. At first they exchanged only gestures. Then a few words. Then sentences made of half-English, half-Italian, and the universal vocabulary of men who know machinery.
One afternoon, after Antonio had spent hours repairing an engine, Samuel handed him a cigarette.
Antonio looked at it.
Then at Samuel.
“For you,” the man said.
Antonio accepted it.
Years later, he would remember that cigarette more clearly than many events of the war.
It was the first small sign that the country beyond the wire might one day mean something different to him.
When the war ended, Antonio returned to Italy.
He expected homecoming to feel like salvation.
Instead, he found a country exhausted by war.
Treviso was still there, but the Italy he remembered was not. There were shortages, damaged economies, families mourning the dead, and men searching for work. The war had ended, but peace did not immediately bring security.
Antonio returned to his trade.
He repaired bicycles.
He repaired farm equipment.
He took whatever work appeared.
Maria tried to rebuild a household around what little they had.
For two years they struggled.
Then a letter arrived from South Africa.
Antonio recognized the handwriting before he opened it.
Samuel had written to tell him that there was work in Johannesburg. Workshops were expanding. Mechanics were needed. The city was growing, and skilled hands were worth more than promises.
Antonio read the letter several times.
Maria watched him from across the table.
“Do you want to go back?” she asked.
Antonio looked at the letter.
Then at his son.
Then at his own hands.
“I don't know if I'm going back,” he said. “Maybe I'm going forward.”
They left Italy in 1947.
For Maria, the journey was frightening in a way it could never have been for Antonio. He had already seen South Africa. She had not. She knew only that it was thousands of miles away, that her husband had once been held there behind wire, and that they were now going there by choice.
When Johannesburg finally appeared before them, Antonio felt something he could not name.
The city was enormous.
There were trains, mines, construction sites, workshops, warehouses, streets filled with people speaking English, Afrikaans, Italian, Greek, Portuguese and many African languages. The gold mines had made Johannesburg a center of wealth and labor, and the postwar city was expanding rapidly.
Antonio understood immediately what Samuel had meant.
There was work everywhere.
He found a position in a mechanical workshop.
Maria found the transition much harder.
She missed Italy with a physical ache. She missed the bells of Sunday morning. She missed the food, the familiar faces, the language that did not require thought. She missed the ordinary things that Antonio had once taken for granted.
So she began recreating Italy inside their small home.
She made polenta.
She baked bread.
She preserved tomatoes when she could find them.
She taught Marco the songs she remembered from her childhood.
And slowly, something happened.
The home they had left behind began to exist again—not in Italy, but in Johannesburg.
Other Italians began appearing in Antonio's life. Some had been prisoners of war. Others had arrived after the war because they had heard that South Africa needed workers. Some came alone; others arrived with wives and children.
They gathered around tables.
They exchanged news.
They spoke about villages in Veneto, Lombardy, Sicily, Calabria and other parts of Italy.
They compared jobs.
They discussed wages.
They argued about food.
They remembered those who had not survived the war.
And they began building something they had not planned to build: a community.
Antonio never forgot the camp.
For years he kept a small piece of wire in a drawer of his workshop.
Maria once found it.
She held it between two fingers and stared at him.
“Why do you still keep this?”
Antonio took the piece from her.
“So I remember,” he said.
“Remember what?”
He looked toward the window.
“That freedom is not always the same thing as going home.”
Their son Marco grew up between two worlds.
At home, he heard Italian.
Outside, he spoke English.
He knew the names of places in Italy that he had never seen. He knew that his father had once arrived in South Africa unwillingly and had returned voluntarily.
One evening, when Marco was about twelve, he asked the question children eventually ask when their family history becomes complicated.
“Papa, are we Italian or South African?”
Antonio stopped working.
He wiped his hands on a cloth.
Then he looked at his son.
“You don't have to choose.”
Marco frowned.
Antonio smiled.
“You can belong to more than one place.”
Years passed.
Marco became a mechanic.
Then he opened his own workshop.
Antonio grew older.
His hands became slower, but they never stopped working.
One afternoon, an elderly man entered Marco's workshop.
Antonio was sitting in the office.
He looked up.
For several seconds he could not recognize the visitor.
Then his eyes widened.
“Samuel?”
The old mechanic smiled.
Neither man spoke.
They simply looked at one another.
The years between the camp and that workshop seemed to disappear.
Antonio finally stood.
The two men shook hands.
Marco watched them without understanding why his father suddenly looked young again.
Antonio turned toward him.
“This is Samuel,” he said. “I told you about him.”
Marco extended his hand.
Samuel took it.
Then he looked at Antonio.
“He has your hands.”
Antonio lowered his eyes.
His hands were no longer the hands of the young mechanic who had left Italy before the war. They were scarred, rough, darkened by years of work. They carried the marks of engines, tools, captivity, migration, fatherhood, and survival.
But they were still his hands.
And those hands had carried him farther than he had ever imagined.
Antonio had crossed the Mediterranean as a soldier.
He had crossed the world as a prisoner.
He had returned to Italy believing that home was something a man could simply recover.
Then he had crossed the ocean again as an immigrant.
In Johannesburg, he had discovered that sometimes home is not recovered.
It is rebuilt.
Brick by brick.
Table by table.
Generation by generation.
He never stopped loving Italy.
But he no longer believed that belonging required a single address.
Years later, when people asked where he came from, Antonio sometimes paused before answering.
He could have said Treviso.
He could have said Italy.
He could have said South Africa.
Instead, he would smile.
“I came from Italy,” he would say. “The war brought me here. Life brought me back.”
Then he would return to his workbench.
There were still engines to repair.
There was still a family to protect.
There was still a country to remember.
And there was still a life beyond the barbed wire.

Author’s Note
This is a fictional historical chronicle. Antonio Bianchi, his wife Maria, their son Marco, and Samuel are fictional characters, and the personal events described in this story are not presented as the documented biography of any particular individual. The historical circumstances surrounding their lives, however, are based on a real and important chapter of Italian migration to South Africa after the Second World War.
During the war, tens of thousands of Italian prisoners of war were brought to South Africa, where they were held in several camps, including the large Zonderwater camp near Pretoria. For many Italian prisoners, South Africa was first experienced as a place of captivity. After the war, however, some former prisoners returned to the country voluntarily, while other Italians arrived directly from a devastated postwar Italy in search of employment and a new beginning.
Johannesburg became one of the important centers of Italian settlement. Its mines, workshops, construction industry, commerce, and rapidly expanding urban economy offered opportunities to immigrants with practical and technical skills. During the postwar decades, the Italian community grew substantially, bringing together former prisoners, new immigrants, workers, professionals, and families.
This story uses that historical reality as its foundation. Antonio's journey—from prisoner of war to immigrant, worker, husband, father, and member of a new Italian community—is a fictional reconstruction of experiences that could have belonged to many Italians who found themselves rebuilding their lives in South Africa after 1945.
The purpose of the chronicle is not to replace documented history, but to give a human voice to it. Behind statistics, migration records, military records, and passenger lists were individuals who crossed borders carrying memories, losses, skills, fears, and hopes. Some arrived in South Africa unwillingly. Others returned by choice. Still others came because postwar Italy offered them too little to remain.
Their stories remind us that the history of Italian emigration was never a single road. It was made of thousands of unexpected destinations—and sometimes, as in South Africa, a country first encountered through the barbed wire of war eventually became the place where a family chose to build its future.

Dr. Luiz Carlos B. Piazzetta
Author and researcher of Italian immigration and family history