INES PETRIN and a couple of her teenaged friends helped deliver the “War Breaks Out” flyers around Little Italy, thinking the outbreak of war was just “another event . . . Being young and stupid we didn’t realize how serious it was.” Their elders knew, however. The Italian Ladies League cancelled Columbus Day celebrations and the popularity queen contest, and the Italian government called its consuls back to Italy for instructions. RCMP bulletins warned of possible Italian sabotage on railways and harbours.
After the fall of Poland and into the early months of 1940, the “phony war,” when nothing warlike appeared to be happening in Europe, lulled Canadians in general and Italian Canadians in particular into a false sense of safety. Perhaps there would be no war after all. At a banquet in March 1940 to celebrate the thirty-fifth anniversary of the founding of the Sons of Italy, Vice-Consul Brancucci felt sufficiently comfortable with the political situation to treat his guests to yet another speech about the glorious Fatherland.
The vice-consul was also one of the speakers a month later at the Natale di Roma banquet, an annual event celebrating the birth of Rome, which had occurred 2,692 years before. Mario Ghislieri was the organizer, the Hotel Vancouver was the venue and some of the waiters were undercover RCMP officers there to observe who among the Italian community attended. Citing the ratification of the Pact of Steel by Hitler and Mussolini, Marino Culos refused to attend, and Angelo Branca was otherwise occupied founding an organization designed to assure the government that Italians in Vancouver were loyal to Canada.
The RCMP was now keeping a very close eye on Italian Canadians, especially those in Ontario and Quebec, where the majority lived. Rumours from those provinces—of plans among the fasci to join the enemy, of Italian veterans being threatened with the loss of their pensions unless they supported Italy and of Italian agents moving across the country contacting Fascist leaders—were feeding the unease in Italian-Canadian communities.
When the phony war ended on May 10, 1940 with Germany’s invasion of Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg, many Canadians, who were obsessed with the idea of fifth-column activity within the country’s borders, began to report suspicious activities to the RCMP. A police security bulletin reminded officers that many of the hundred thousand people of Italian origin in Canada, even those who were Canadian citizens and had lived most of their lives in Canada, were ardent supporters of Mussolini and had given money to the Fascist Party. “The Italian has a volatile nature,” the bulletin warned, “and can be expected to go to any extreme on behalf of the party to which he owes allegiance.”
Ines Petrin was bewildered by the change that had come over Vancouver’s Little Italy: families still sat on their porches in the evening but they sat quietly.
There was not much conversation because quite a few Italians belonged to the fascisti, but not the fascisti like they had in Europe. It was just a little club they had in Vancouver. They called themselves the Blackshirts and they had an Italian school. I remember going to that school . . . We sensed the worry that a lot of them would be sent to concentration camps . . . All I know is that everybody was so sad and quiet.
On the evening of May 30, Selwyn Blaylock, president of Cominco in Trail, called a meeting of five hundred Italian workers and told them that even though Italy would soon enter the war on the enemy side, not one of them would lose his job. If, however, just one of them committed an act of sabotage, everyone would be fired.
In Vancouver, on June 4, Angelo Branca called a meeting of leaders of the Italian community, including businessmen with no ties to any organized group, and told them it was time for Italian Canadians to declare their loyalty to Canada. Then he sent out thousands of flyers inviting Italians to attend a mass meeting of the newly constituted Canadian Italian War Vigilance Association on the evening of Monday, June 10.
But on the morning of the planned meeting day, Mussolini stepped from his office in the Palazzo Venezia onto his balcony and told the thousands of cheering Italians who crammed the piazza and the streets feeding into it below him that Italy was at war with Great Britain and France. At five o’clock that same morning, nine time zones away in Vancouver, before Prime Minister Mackenzie King had even announced over the radio that Canada was at war with Italy, the RCMP began to round up the Italians on its list.
They came without warrants to search homes and offices, made arrests without laying formal charges and took men to police stations for interrogation. Meanwhile, the vice-consul was uncharacteristically late for work at his office in Vancouver’s Marine Building. When he finally rushed in, Brancucci shouted to his staff to gather up his personal papers and diplomatic documents and burn them in the furnace in the basement. There were still boxes full of unburned papers when the RCMP arrived, but by then Brancucci was on his way to seek refuge in the Italian consular offices in New York.
British Columbia’s Italians fared much better than those in eastern Canada, where broken windows and vandalism, bridge closures and car searches created a much more heated atmosphere. But having policemen arrive at front doors first thing in the morning to take fathers and adult sons away to an unknown fate was frightening enough. Branca spoke calmly at the meeting of the War Vigilance Association that evening. The almost three hundred men before him swore allegiance to Britain, Canada and King George VI and voted to assist the authorities in any way possible, including identifying subversive elements, disclosing information about any Italian organizations and arranging registration of Italians who were British citizens by birth or naturalization or resident Italians who were not naturalized.
ACROSS THE Strait of Georgia on Vancouver Island that evening, Alderman George Muir seized an opportunity at the regular Nanaimo city council meeting to turn the furor raised by Italy’s declaration of war to his advantage; he made a motion on the topic of “the alien and enemy alien situation in Nanaimo.” His motion directed city staff to find out how many aliens were working in the coal mining city and how many British workmen were on relief because aliens had taken their jobs. In addition, the worthy alderman wanted the coal company to tell its employees to speak English or be fired.
Alderman W.T. Grieves called the motion silly and childish. There were many nationalities working in Nanaimo, he said, “and it is natural for them to speak their mother tongue.” But Grieves cast the only dissenting vote. The motion contained no strong directive in its wording and seemed merely to be an expression of the enduring prejudice against foreigners that had existed in the Vancouver Island coalfields since Robert Dunsmuir had hired the first Italian strikebreakers sixty-seven years before.
On the same evening in Michel, the manager of the coal company called a meeting to discuss the matter of English-speaking miners worried about sabotage who were refusing to go underground with Italians. When the manager told the English miners that refusing to work made them no better than fifth columnists, they changed their minds. The next day in Trail, where police had arrested eight Italians and taken them to Vancouver, Blaylock told a Rotary Club meeting that there were 396 Italian-born men working peacefully in Trail and that Italian Canadians in Trail had formed an anti-fifth-column organization and planned to form their own Red Cross unit, donations for which had already exceeded $450.
WHEN CONDUCTING the arrests in Vancouver, the RCMP had focussed on the Sons of Italy, the Afterwork Club and the fasci. As current president of the Sons of Italy, Marino Culos expected the worst, but the RCMP did not come banging on his Union Street door. They tried to call him instead, but he didn’t have a telephone, so they asked his mother-in-law to convey a message.
The mother was afraid to even tell me because of this knocking on doors and taking away, but she had to. And I said, “Don’t worry. If they called you instead of coming to our house and saying, ‘Mister come out,’ we can’t have too much to worry about.”
By the time Culos turned himself in, the RCMP inspector had already examined the lodge’s records and concluded that Vancouver’s version of the Sons of Italy was “properly organized and not of the fifth column type.” As Culos remembered it, the policemen said, “Now look. The society can stay put if you want, but our suggestion is that you don’t have any meetings together.”
Culos avoided arrest because he had come to Canada as a child long before Mussolini came to power in Italy and had distanced himself from the vice-consul’s plans in the last months before the declaration of war. As a leader in the Italian community, however, he focussed on the men who had been detained. He knew the police had taken the first detainees to cells in the Immigration Building at the foot of Burrard Street.
And no one, their wives or anyone else, could get near them at all. They couldn’t talk. “Incommunicado,” they called it. And then there was sadness, such a cloud then. Boy—some of the best men were taken.
The RCMP detained no Italians in Nanaimo, but “Italo-Canadians of Nanaimo and District” placed an ad in the Nanaimo Daily Free Press reaffirming their loyalty to Canada and the empire. Alex Gusola, who had left the valley of the Natisone in 1912 and had taken out naturalization papers as soon as he arrived in Nanaimo, gave the newspaper the following quote:
The Italian people in Nanaimo are against the present stand taken by Mussolini and feel that the situation is largely a result of one man’s ambition and certainly cannot be accepted as being the beliefs and ideals of Italians living in Nanaimo and District. I have never returned to Italy and have no desire to do so.
The government detained 576 Italians across Canada, fifty-three of them from British Columbia. Forty-one of the fifty-three were from Vancouver, eight from Trail, one from Summerland, one from Greenwood and two from Youbou. In a series of departures during June and July, police transferred the detainees in shackles from the Immigration Building to special cars on CPR trains, which travelled east through the night past sites that echoed with the history of Italians in British Columbia: the CNoR grade across the river in the Fraser Canyon where the Wobblies had taken a stand in 1912; the CPR mountain grade east of Kamloops where, in 1884, Father Coccola had said Mass for any Italian navvy who would deign to come; Kicking Horse Pass, where Italians had followed the Dago Driver beyond the end of track in that same year. The trains carrying the detainees pressed onward out of the Rocky Mountains into the foothills of Alberta and came to a halt at Seebe, a whistle stop on the CPR main line forty-eight kilometres east of Banff.
They left the train in single file and climbed into the open backs of army four-by-four trucks for the eleven-kilometre drive to the Kananaskis prisoner of war (POW) camp, a collection of one-storey bunkhouses surrounded by barbed-wire fences. Searchlights, armed guards, Nazi songs and the outrage of the Nazi salute marked their arrival.
Mario Ghislieri arrived on July 2; his sons, Herman and Federico, on July 20. Willie Ruocco had been in the camp since June 20. This brilliant and forceful man had only recently buried his father-in-law and mentor, Angelo Calori, and had still to serve as the executor of his large estate. He performed this task from within the barbed-wire boundaries of the Kananaskis internment camp with the help of a fellow internee, Ennio Victor Fabri, a lawyer from Trail.
A federal forestry camp had occupied the site before the war and would again after 1945, and it was forestry jobs that kept the inmates—Ukrainian-, German- and Italian-Canadian internees and German POWs—occupied. The others were already there when the men from British Columbia arrived. They watched as the guards took the Italians away to surrender their clothing and personal effects and submit to searches; each received a pair of jeans, a shirt, underwear, socks and a jacket with a thirty-centimetre-wide red target sewn on the back.
Despite the Nazi songs that had greeted them, the Italians were willing to be friendly with the Germans at first. Not all of the Germans were Nazis, after all. But after the Germans challenged them to a soccer match and the Italians won, the two groups had nothing further to do with each other.
The Italians settled into the camp routine, observed the rigid curfew and complied with the rule that limited their correspondence with their families to four censored postcards or letters per month. The work was not onerous, they could buy as many items at the commissary as their twenty-cent-per-diem wages would allow, they had evenings and Sundays off, there was plenty of food, the showers were hot and the toilets were indoor and flushable. But they had lost their freedom and were separated from their families, and now they could do nothing but wait for whatever fate brought them while their loved ones in Vancouver and men like Angelo Branca fought for their release.
Even with their breadwinners interned, some families still found the money to buy Italian food from Tosi’s on Main Street, parcel it and send it to Kananaskis where, in keeping with the Italian ability to live in the present, Emilio Muzzatti and the restaurateur Nino Sala prepared delicious meals and the baker Santo Pasqualini made pastries.
Pasqualini’s arrest had been the result of his doing the wrong things for the right reasons. He had joined the Circolo Giulio Giordani in the 1930s because it was good for business and because he thought he would get a free trip to Italy during the Holy Year celebrations in 1940. But the Circolo Giulio Giordani required its members to pledge allegiance to Mussolini and the RCMP knew that, just as it knew who had attended the organization’s banquet at the Hotel Vancouver the previous April. The policemen disguised as waiters had been taking names, including Pasqualini’s, and so he had been among the first to be detained in the Immigration Building at the foot of Burrard Street.
It had taken his wife, Alice, two weeks to find out where he was, and when she did, she and her two young children walked all the way to the Immigration Building and took up a position across the street. When her six-year-old daughter caught a glimpse of her father in a window, she broke away from her mother and ran across the street, only to be stopped by a guard with a rifle.
Alice didn’t speak English well and she didn’t know how to run the bakery. When the business went bankrupt she sold it for a very low price. It was all too much for her; she soon became sick and required hospitalization.
THE GOVERNMENT of Canada patterned its internment methods on those of Britain but with one difference: the British planned to deport their enemy detainees to the colonies. Those British detainees who were sent to Canada were confined in four of the twenty-five internment camps spread across the country, bringing the number of Italians interned to a total estimated at six hundred to a thousand. At the same time as the RCMP was rounding up Italians in Vancouver, a shipment of their British counterparts left Britain on board the former luxury liner Arandora Star, now painted grey and wrapped in barbed wire to prevent escapees from going overboard. One of the sixteen hundred people on board a ship meant to accommodate half that many was Giuseppe Aniballi, a native of Amatrice, Lazio, near Rome, and a husband and father who was the maître d’ at London’s prestigious Savoy Grill.
In a small chapel in the Italian village of Bardi in the Lunigiana, the valley that straddles the border between Liguria and Tuscany, Giuseppe Aniballi’s name appears among those of the passengers—Jewish refugees, German POWs and almost five hundred Italians—who drowned when a German torpedo sank the Arandora Star on July 2, 1940, just off the Irish coast. The Bardi memorial chapel honours its forty-eight native sons, all former shepherds, and, on typewritten pages framed and hung on the walls, the other passengers and crew, no matter what their nationality or political beliefs.
For the bereaved Italian families whose fathers and husbands had come from every region of Italy to work in Britain, there must be a measure of consolation in a visit to the small chapel. Aniballi died leaving a six-year-old boy without a father. Had his journey not been interrupted by a deadly German torpedo, he would have become an unwilling resident of Canada. His son, Emidio, grown to young manhood, willingly left England for Canada to make his life in British Columbia. As a retired man with a keen interest in his Italian roots, he travelled to the Lunigiana to see the chapel at Bardi where his father is commemorated and to visit a part of Italy that has close connections to British Columbia.
The Lunigiana cuts through the Apennines to connect Tuscany with Italy’s industrial north. A history that goes back through medieval and Roman times to a probable connection with Etruscan culture makes this a valley full of stories, including the ones connected with the hundreds of castles that once commanded every rampart, many of them built by the Malaspina family.
A scion of this family, Alessandro Malaspina, in the service of Spain and using the Spanish form of his name, Alejandro, landed briefly in Nootka Sound on the west coast of Vancouver Island in 1791, giving him a strong claim to having been the first Italian to see British Columbia. He met Nuu-chah-nulth Chief Maquinna and made notes on the area’s inhabitants and geography. His visit was part of a five-year-long voyage around the Pacific Ocean that ended with a triumphant return to Spain. But his enemies soon sent him to prison for crimes against the state. Six years later he returned to the Lunigiana, and he died eight years after that in Pontremoli, close to the village of Bardi.
Malaspina was not poverty-stricken, but his family had lost most of its possessions as a result of the same inheritance laws that divided farmland into parcels too small to support a peasant family. But no Italian family, whatever its financial status, has left its name on British Columbia as often as the Malaspina family has. Its famous son is remembered in the straits, inlets, mountains, rock formations and even a college and a theatre that bear his name.
IN THE summer of 1940 in British Columbia, Italian names were on yet another list, the one of people required to register with the police. At a time when Canadians were considered to be British subjects and naturalization was the term applied to the process required for a foreigner to become one, the War Measures Act enabled the federal government to demand “registration of enemy aliens and prohibition against the possession or use of firearms to all persons of German or Italian racial origins who have become naturalized British subjects since September 1, 1929.” This date was soon changed to include all nationals of enemy countries naturalized after 1922, the year Mussolini came to power. A Justice Department official described registration as keeping track of the “sheep,” implying that the voracious wolves, in the guise of dangerous aliens, were already safely confined in Kananaskis.
The notices posted in German and Italian included a warning: “It is the law, not a request.” And most of the Italian community was eager to comply. They reported to police stations for fingerprinting and surrendered scores of firearms and explosives by the June 20 deadline. Angelo Branca offered to collect the guns of those “too timid to go direct to the police station.”
On reflection many years later, Italian Canadians made wry comments about the inconsistency of the order to register. Anti-Fascists and long-time residents of Canada with sons in the Canadian armed forces were treated the same as all other Italians, as were naturalized British subjects. Antonio Quarin had been in Canada for twenty years, had paid the twenty dollars required to become naturalized and was waiting for a date with a judge when the decree came down. Not only did he not get his meeting with the judge, but he was fingerprinted, ordered to report to the police station in Natal once a week and required to get permission if he wanted to visit his sister in Alberta.
There were inconsistencies and injustices all over the province. Jim Gava was a miner in Nanaimo who was so proud of being Canadian that he made his wife and children stand at attention whenever “God Save the King” came on the radio in their home. But Gava’s gun was confiscated. Teresa Gigliotti, who was born to Irish parents, had to register as an alien because she had married an Italian. Ines Anderson, who was born in 1918 to Italian parents in Michel, had to register because her husband was Italian, but her husband didn’t have to register because he was born in neutral Switzerland. Vincenzo DeVito was a Canadian citizen, but he still had to surrender his rifle to authorities in Trail. Ben Gigliotti, on the other hand, didn’t have to register because he had enlisted in the Italian army in Canada at the beginning of World War I. Butcher shop owner Louis Maffioli had to register, but the Fernie game warden offered to keep his gun for him so he could use it to kill cattle for his shop. Marino Culos had been in Canada for thirty years, since he was six years old, but he had to register and report at RCMP headquarters in Vancouver. And there were also known Fascists who escaped any restrictions.
The rules were inconsistent and the effects unpredictable. Undercover RCMP officers reported: “All this has had a most chastening effect on temperaments . . . still[ing] their boastings and, in many cases, causing them to avoid the public.” Italians didn’t know who to trust and so they trusted no one. Some families were shunned, others suspected of disloyalty. But barriers that had impeded adaptation to Canadian culture began, of necessity, to break down. Wishing to be less noticeable, more Italians chose to speak English. Italian priests stopped conducting services in Italian. More Italians anglicized their names. The distinctive culture was becoming diluted.
Many of the community’s leaders had been arrested, including those who had not complied with the RCMP request to let the lodges go inactive. The request might as well have been framed as a direct order for all the options it allowed. Despite the efforts of people like Marino Culos and Angelo Branca to help the families of the interned, the men in Kananaskis were disappointed with the Sons of Italy, and after the war few had anything more to do with the lodge.
Like the appetite for interning Italian Canadians, the appetite for requiring them to register diminished in direct proportion to the fortunes of the Italian army. In December 1942, as Italy slid toward defeat in North Africa, newspapers Canada-wide carried notices saying that the withdrawal of restrictions imposed on Italians was meeting with “great favour in Italian circles.”
Within months, most of the detainees were released from Kananaskis, the reasons for their arrest deemed flimsy or doubtful. It was as if the federal government had acknow-ledged the innocence of those who were interned. But Santo Pasqualini, who still did not understand why he had been arrested, was not among them. He was one of the few deemed dangerous enough to be kept in captivity and transferred to Petawawa, Ontario, in the spring of 1941. By the time the forty-three-year-old came home a year later, his hair had turned grey and his wife, who had been ill during most of his internment, was in hospital again.
Willie Ruocco had a moustache when he returned from Petawawa in December 1941 and a belief that he had been treated unjustly by the government and by the Sons of Italy, which had suspended his membership. So strong was his outrage that he rebuffed repeated attempts to lure him back into the society. Years after the war ended, he finally accepted an honorary membership, but he still refused to forgive the people he considered responsible for his suspension.
Mario Ghislieri was bitter, too, when he returned in April 1943. This Italian patriot and admirer of Mussolini was one of only seven or eight B.C. internees judged dangerous enough to be kept in captivity, first at the Petawawa camp and then at Gagetown in New Brunswick. By 1942, the reverses suffered by the Italian army were making the threat of an Italian fifth column in Canada unlikely. And when Mussolini resigned in June 1943 and Italy surrendered, all other interned Italians were released.
Internment and registration had affected Italians all over the province. Most of those who are still alive have a story of name-calling or exclusion to tell, even though the same things had also happened before the war. Memories of minor humiliations linger—the name-calling and the English-only rules on school playgrounds in Fernie; the refusal by a long-time customer to buy any more shoes from an Italian shoemaker in Trail; the demand by some people in Cumberland to have all Italians shipped out; the sudden absence of an Italian family in Powell River; the refusal by non-Italian neighbours to acknowledge the fact that Italian sons were serving and dying in the Canadian armed forces.
And it was not easy to forget that the majority of Canadians had applauded the internment, or that families had not been allowed to accompany the internees as Japanese families had, or that some enemy aliens who were not interned had lost their jobs or their businesses and had their assets frozen, a restriction that forced their wives to find work outside the home. Having women working outside the home was especially upsetting in a culture that had, of necessity, allowed women to make money only by running boarding houses and doing laundry in their own homes. And important communications from Italy—notification of the death of a parent, the payment of a veteran’s pension—were delayed or never came. Money sent by migrants to their families in Italy no longer reached them.
For those in Italy, in need of financial help for generations and now cut off from family overseas, life presented new hardships. But it was worse in the cities than in the small towns and villages where most families of emigrants lived. Iris Origo, a writer and Tuscan landowner, described the atmosphere as “queer” but not as hard as in the city, where danger was always present. The war years, she said, were ones of “tension and expectation, destruction and sorrow.”
CASTELSILANO WAS a typical southern town—ancient, sun-faded, with rough stones showing in the narrow streets where plaster had fallen away from walls—situated close to the forests of the Grand Sila on a flat mesa nine hundred metres above sea level, where the air was cooler and less humid. With no running water in the houses, the women filled jugs at the central water tower and carried them home on their heads. Strict tradition governed courtship: a young man could not introduce himself directly to a young woman who caught his fancy. His only recourse, sometimes for months on end, was to do favours for her family and stand in the street below her window, serenading—if he had the voice for it—until her father allowed him to introduce himself to her.
Pietro Aiello had courted a young woman in this manner for two years and never got within five metres of her. By the time he tired of the chase, he was the right age to join the army and fight in Mussolini’s war. He was home on leave in 1941 when he met sixteen-year-old Giuseppina Gerimonte, but war had made him impatient. He went to her parents’ house and said, “I’m going to marry your daughter and I’m going to take her out for a walk.” The story went down in the family that her mother started screaming and tearing out her hair, but Pietro was determined to have it his way. He took Giuseppina out of the house, she put her arm through his and they walked a short distance. Then, having made his point, Pietro brought her back to her family.
By the time his leave was over, they had agreed to write to each other. Two years later, in May 1943, when he was once again home on leave, they married. Like all new husbands during the war, he had been looking forward to receiving a “prize” from Mussolini, who had for years been taxing bachelors and rewarding newly married couples and those who went on to have a large families. But two months after Pietro and Giuseppina married, Mussolini resigned in the wake of the Allied invasion of Sicily and the groom never received the prize.
After Allied armies conquered Sicily and crossed the Strait of Messina to the mainland in the fall of 1943, towns and villages all over Calabria expected to see enemy soldiers parading through their streets. But the only enemy presence for most people was the German and American bombers overhead. And since the Italian government had been spreading propaganda about the bad men who were coming, the people below were confused regarding the nationality of the men crewing these planes.
Anna Felice was twelve when the Germans bombed Cosenza, twenty kilometres from her village. She could hear the sirens screaming and the church bells clanging to warn people to take cover. “We were scared of the Russians. They were telling us that they were coming and do bad things to us and people built . . . little caves and stuff like that to hide the young people.”
As the Allies began to move northward up the peninsula over land and by sea—Americans on the west, British and Canadians on the east—they found a country whose infrastructure and economy were in ruins. The black market was flourishing, cholera and malaria were endemic and no one seemed to be in charge. When the Italian government signed an armistice with the Allies in September 1943 and declared war on Germany, the German army moved in from the north to fill the vacuum. Italian soldiers in the Allied zone were demobilized, and Pietro Aiello was free to come home to his wife of three months.
FARLEY MOWAT was twenty-three years old, a lieutenant in the West Nova Scotia Regiment and already hardened by the fight in Sicily. He remembers little of the monotonous slog around the Grand Sila and up the coast of the Adriatic Sea that brought his unit “well up the leg” by mid-October. But a letter he wrote to his parents includes vivid evidence of how quickly the attitude of Canadian soldiers changed toward Italians and how each side had been spreading lies about the other.
Before the war we’d been taught to believe . . . [the] Wops were a bunch of cowardly good-for-nothings who wouldn’t get their asses off the pot for love or money. Now it turns out they’re the salt of the earth. The ordinary ones that is.
Each of the Canadian soldiers he knew had an “Eyetie” family of his own. When each man got together with his “family” for a meal, he provided flour, sugar, bully beef and margarine from his rations; the family provided homegrown fresh ingredients and homemade wine and the mother did the cooking.
By early December 1943, the Germans had occupied defensive positions across the width of the peninsula south of Rome, and Canadian soldiers were preparing to face them at Ortona in what came to be called the “Christmas Battle.” On the west coast, in a village near Salerno that the Americans were bombing in preparation for the taking of Naples, thirteen-year-old Antonietta Luongo had nothing to complain about even though she had seen a lot of death and suffering. “The first time when we see the plane, [for] young kids it was nothing, but for the older people they cannot understand. They cry. Close to us we have a lot of bombs, but not on our village. They was scared. We saw soldiers but they didn’t do nothing.”
Eighteen-year-old Assunta Segreto was afraid because she knew what to expect. In the spring of 1943 months before the Allied invasion, she had been in the Cosenza train station when a bomb dropped nearby.
I was in a bomb. We go catch the train to go home and the bomb right in that time drop. And my mom go one way, I go another way and one lady . . . she dead. I was so scared. Oh my. In school they teach us in case bomb go, lay down right in the floor. Lie down. You no stand up. I remember I be down and this lady is die . . . Oh disaster.
Now that the allies were nearing Naples, Segreto could see the flares the pilots were using to light their targets over Salerno, two hundred kilometres from her village near Cosenza. “[It was a] light more like the sun.”
Allied armies met fierce German opposition as they slowly fought their way up the mountainous terrain of the peninsula. Meanwhile, the Germans had rescued Mussolini from his hotel prison on the Campo Imperatore in Abruzzo and had taken him to see Adolf Hitler at the German leader’s headquarters in East Prussia. Hitler informed Mussolini that he was still the leader of Fascist Italy, and he would lead what was left of his country from his new headquarters on Lake Garda in Lombardy. But Mussolini would be nothing but a hapless puppet of Hitler.
In the villages and towns of the north, most Italians embraced the Allied cause. Downed airmen and escaped Allied POWs could count on refuge in almost any farmhouse “because they, being persecuted by the Germans, had somehow become honorary Italians.” But many Italians had been proud to live in Mussolini’s Italy, especially before he invaded Ethiopia in 1935. The so-called Pact of Steel he had signed with Hitler in 1939 and subsequent events soured his relationship with many of his people.
“ERNESTO BASSO” is a pseudonym for a man who was a school-aged boy under Mussolini’s rule in a village in Veneto, the source of so many immigrants to British Columbia and the region where the last battles of World War I had been fought, on the slopes of Monte Grappa. As an elderly man sitting in his modern kitchen in a B.C. city, he brews tea and recites a poem in Italian that lists the important details of Mussolini’s life. His delivery is mechanical, as if he had learned the poem by rote to be chanted with his classmates. He knows the exact date on which Mussolini founded the Fascist Party and remembers that he, Ernesto, wore a uniform to the regular Saturday children’s parades.
Then he has second thoughts about what he has said. He doesn’t want his name to be in anything public. A day later, he says it again and makes special reference to Mussolini. A similar thing happens in Kamloops: an interview goes from cordial to cold when the conversation turns to growing up under Mussolini’s rule. And in Nanaimo, at the end of a relaxed and informative conversation, an elderly woman who was a child in the 1930s in Italy asks that her name not be published. Tony Sedola, another child of 1930s Italy, provides a possible explanation: Italians are very conscious of their good names and they might worry that others in their new homeland would think ill of them for having once admired Mussolini. Efrem Specogna feels free to talk about his life under Mussolini’s rule, but he knows that in the 1930s people who didn’t like living under Mussolini had no choice but to remain there because of restrictions in both Italy and Canada.
Most northerners are not afraid to reveal details of their youth lived under Mussolini’s rule. They tell of the laws against killing their own animals, how they could go to jail if they killed a pig and had to pay a tax if they killed a chicken for Christmas dinner. Factory workers could lose several days’ pay if they failed to show up in their workclothes to see Mussolini parade by. But southerners are prepared to give Mussolini the benefit of the doubt. He was good to the south and they defend him still.
Mussolini he think about Italian people. He do better, but all the rich people was against him . . . They no like it so that’s why everything go wrong, see . . . Mussolini try the best he can, but he no got good people to go with him. That’s the big problem. Everybody traitor him.
Whether they wish to talk about him or not, Italians haven’t forgotten Mussolini or the war. In the town of Santa Margherita, south of Genoa, the conversation turns to the war and the ugly modern bridges that have replaced the ones bombed by the Allies during the war to interfere with the German supply lines. Roberto Gnocchi, who was a child at the time, has vivid memories of the day Allied planes jettisoned their leftover bombs over his town, carving a deadly swath that destroyed his mother’s and grandmother’s houses and killed twenty-seven people.
DURING THE eighteen months between the Italian surrender on September 8, 1943, and the German capitulation to Italian partisans on April 25, 1945, the Italian peninsula was divided into two countries. In the south, King Vittorio Emanuele III and his new government had gone over to the Allies. In the north, during the period history has called the War of Liberation, German soldiers, fierce fighters even in a lost cause, maintained control as they retreated. Letters written by Italians to their relatives in Canada reveal that conditions on both sides of the front were terrible, but for different reasons.
In the Allied-occupied south, there was little food, clothing or work; taxes and inflation were climbing—the cost of beans in Naples had gone from 30 lire per kilogram to 150 lire—and there were no lights in the streets of Rome after dark. Various factions struggled for control. A letter written in the fall of 1944 from Piano Crati, Cosenza, says, “In our small town of only 1,000 inhabitants there are four or five parties fighting against one another.” From Sora, Frosinone:
It frightens one even to tell how things are—a black market, lack of everything. We hope things will soon be arranged. If not, Italy will be in the worst state of all. Here everything is going from bad to worse.
But conditions behind German lines were much worse. Partisans sabotaged German property and killed German soldiers; German firing squads lined villagers up in piazzas and shot ten or a hundred for every German killed. The Gestapo lurked around every corner. Italians risked everything to transmit information and hide munitions, partisans and downed Allied airmen and escaped Allied POWs in their homes. Families yearned for information about their fathers and brothers, soldiers who were trapped in Russia or the Balkans or imprisoned in German labour camps. Anti-Fascists of all descriptions—Socialists, Communists, priests—fought with one another and jockeyed for position.
During the War of Liberation in Platischis, high in the pre-Alps where the Natisone River begins its course to the Adriatic Sea, sixteen-year-old Antonio Sedola had seen no Germans before Italy surrendered. After the surrender, however, the village and the border country where he lived became a no-man’s-land.
The Germans made many passes through the village and lots of underground. Italians. Yugoslavs. Being on the border we had both to deal with. And it wasn’t funny . . . The partisans they were staying and cooking in [the] school . . . and when the Germans come, they find they were there and so the only building they burned in our village was the school.
The biggest problem for Platischis, however, as far as Tony was concerned, was the anti-Communist Cossacks who had left Russia and allied themselves with Hitler, who had in turn sent them to the border country of Friuli to deal with the Yugoslav partisans. “They were thieves. They could find anything . . . like a sniffing dog.”
In the river valley below, Efrem Specogna was also sixteen. He remembered the chaos during that time. “Anyone that has guns, he was the boss. The Germans would come sometimes; everybody else would escape. Sometimes Yugoslavs would come. Some Italians. Nobody was the boss.” But the fire and smoke from burning villages were a frequent reminder that the Germans were still around. The village of Subit burned twice; the second time, they also detonated the church, but the tower remained standing.
On the Friulian plain there were plenty of Germans wherever there were highway junctions, bridges or railways: Tarcento, Cividale, Udine, Casarsa della Delizia. Idana Cividina was a little girl when the war drove her family out of France, where her father was working, and home to Friuli in 1940. To keep him from joining the underground, the Germans had kept him busy building small bridges.
We didn’t know who was in the underground . . . and they were coming at night to create some confusion and my father spent a month [in a German concentration camp] because . . . they blew up a bridge in which he was involved.
Casarsa della Delizia was a crucial transportation hub in the middle of the Friulian plain. Elio Cossarin lived nearby in Prodolone as a teenager. Because they were farmers, the Cossarins had enough to eat and were able to protect their food supply from the Germans by such tactics as burying cooked veal in pots sealed with a layer of grease. The fat became rancid, but the veal underneath remained edible. When Allied bombers raided, however, the only thing the Cossarins could do was hide in a dugout and hope the bombs from the airplanes missed the village.
Five-year-old Luciano Culos worried about the bombers too. They were causing heavy damage to the railway tracks between San Giovanni, where his family lived, and Casarsa. Locomotives pulling freight cars full of Allied soldiers and Italian partisans bound for prison camps in Germany had to slow down as they went through San Giovanni, making it possible for the POWs to pass notes out to anonymous hands, notes to their mothers to tell them they were still alive.
When the Germans were passing through in retreat, the Culoses took their animals into the fields to hide them; they dug a deep hole in the dirt floor of the stable and hid their linen and clothing—their most valuable possessions. When partisans shot at the retreating army as it passed through Casarsa, the Germans caught them and executed them in the piazza. Culos remembered that and the fact that unlike his brothers’ hair, which was dark, his hair was white. His family called him il bianco. The Germans patted him on the head, assuming that he was of Aryan blood.
FARTHER WEST, in Veneto, the Germans ordered the people to stay inside their houses. Angelina Scarpolini would have been happy to comply—to avoid the sight of partisan bodies hanging from trees—but her mother had a terminal illness and needed medicine. She left the house and slipped by a small group of intrepid villagers who were taking the body of a dead woman covered with a blood-soaked blanket to the cemetery. When a German soldier stopped her, she used the few words of German she knew to explain her errand. The soldier ordered her to turn back. “Everyone was afraid of dying,” Angelina said, “because there was no mercy . . . everything was haywire.”
Angelina’s fiancé and her brother were POWs. The two friends were Alpini and had served together in France. When they came home to Monte Grappa after Italy surrendered, the Germans captured them and sent them to a prison camp. For six months, their families were unable to find out where they were. Then they received a small piece of paper folded in half that said, “We are alive.” Attached was another piece of paper with a stamp and a return address on which the family could write, “We got your letter and we are glad you are alive.”
The two men were in a German prison for two years, labouring twelve hours a day in a factory and barely existing on potatoes and dirty water. They were emaciated and unrecognizable when a sympathetic foreman warned Angelina’s fiancé that he was scheduled for the ovens. Whatever the foreman did after that—and he never found out what it was—the fiancé didn’t go to the ovens and started to get some of the food parcels his family had sent through the Red Cross. When the two Italians were released at the end of the war they spent two months with the Americans, eating good food. By the time they came home, the last in the village to do so, they had gained enough weight for their families to recognize them.
Angelina’s mother had despaired of ever seeing her only surviving son again. She had lost two others, one a soldier, the other an emigrant who perished in Australia. Now the dying woman cried, “He came home. He came home. Our son came home.” As the house filled with people and the women prepared food and poured wine for the celebration, she said, “This is the miracle I wanted. Now I don’t mind if I leave this world. I have seen my son once more.”
MUSSOLINI CAME to an inglorious end on the very day the Germans signed the armistice and the war ended in Italy. Partisans found him hiding in a truck dressed as a German soldier. They shot him and his mistress, took their bodies to Milan the next day and hung them by the feet from the roof of a gas station. He left his people in a state of “prehistoric squalor.” Most of the problems Italy had endured for hundreds of years—illiteracy, organized crime, a socially and politically backward south, unequal distribution of income, high taxes and primitive methods of agriculture—were unsolved or had grown more serious. And because Mussolini had stopped his people from leaving Italy and had encouraged a high birth rate, one of the age-old reasons for Italian emigration—too many people, too little land—was even worse than before.
In Castelsilano, Calabria, Pietro Aiello’s father had anticipated Mussolini’s call for more babies by a generation. He had had at least six children with his first wife—Pietro wasn’t sure how many—and nine with Pietro’s mother. Some of his older sons had emigrated in the 1920s, but there were dozens of Aiellos still in Italy looking for a way out of the extreme hardship after the war. Pietro and Giuseppina, having married just before Italy’s surrender, were expecting their first child in 1946. He was an experienced bush worker, but he couldn’t make a living, even with only one person to support. “My wife and I, we couldn’t live and I worked every day. I could not progress. It seems that the people who owned the bush or leased it were the ones who made money. They didn’t pay their workers enough.”
When their first child, Maria, was only four years old, the little girl would search the alleyways of Castelsilano for bits of cloth, glass, twigs and metal. It was all reusable. “Everything was so precious.” At about the same time, in San Giovanni in Fiore, which was just down the road, Serafina and Giovanni Ferrarelli had decided to leave Italy for British Columbia. “Well, Italy is nice, but not for the work man, you know. For the rich people, yes, ma per the work man, no good.”
In Veneto, Giovanni Campagnaro was young and had an education from the priests and a training in the trades, but there were no construction jobs available. He summed up his decision to emigrate in this way: “Well, Old Country, life at that time was impossible to dream. My age, you was no going nowhere. There was no job whatsoever.”
For northerners, their land was “rich in everything but opportunity.” There were far more farmers than could make a living on the land. This generation of young people, like so many before, had grown up believing that the only solution to the problem lay in leaving Italy. “Emigration was in their history and in their hearts.”