Sal Pantalone looks at a photo of his father, who was posthumously reinstated to the Ottawa Fire Department.
Francesca L’Orfano, a Little Italy resident, says she is happy to see Frederick Pantalone posthumously reinstated to the Ottawa Fire Department.
“This is something that is long overdue. There are cases of this happening in various cities all over the country. When these men were released, things did not go back to normal for these families,” says L’Orfano.
Pantalone was stripped of his job in June of 1940 soon after Italy joined the Second World War on the side of Nazi Germany. The Italian immigrant was arrested and sent to an internment camp on suspicion of being an “enemy alien.”
L’Orfano is a visual artist and professor who has worked on projects that bring light to the struggles Italian immigrants went through during this dark chapter in Canadian history.
After Mussolini joined Hitler in the Second World War, Mackenzie King’s government signed an order labelling thousands of Italian-Canadians as “enemy aliens.” More than 500 were then arrested and sent to an internment camp in Petawawa.
Although some of the men in the camp were connected to Italian fascist groups most of them, like Pantalone, were falsely accused.
He was released eight months later, after a judge found that he posed no threat. But the firefighter’s union had lost trust in him and unanimously voted against taking him back.
His son Sal Pantalone, 88, says that what hurt his father the most wasn’t the arrest, but the fact that he couldn’t go back to being a firefighter. So last year, he started fighting for his father’s rank to be restored.
In a small ceremony at city hall last month, Sal Pantalone was presented with a plaque officially declaring his father was part of the fire department. He is also making arrangements to have his father’s rank be engraved on his tombstone.
Last year, a memorial wall commemorating members of the Italian-Canadian community who were affected by the internment camps, was put up at Piazza Dante park on Booth Street.
It holds the names of four local Italian men who were interned at camp Petawawa. Among them, is Frederick Pantalone.
At the same time, L’Orfano, along with other members from the Italian community, put together a booklet titled Memories to Memorial: The Internment of Ottawa’s Italian Canadians during the Second World War.
The booklet tells stories about the families of the men who were sent to Petawawa.
Sal Pantalone says that after his father’s internment many family members went their separate ways.
“It ruined the family,” he says.
He also says that he doesn’t blame the Canadian government because it was what any government would do in their situation.
Frederick Pantalone was among the men who fought the great fire at Parliament Hill in 1916 that destroyed the Centre Block. It was rebuilt in 1926 with the Peace Tower, replacing the Victoria Tower that used to stand in its place.
“My father always felt Canadian. I remember when my father took me to see the Parliament buildings for the first time. There was great pride in him when he showed me the Peace Tower. I guess because he was there for the demolition of the first one and the building of the new one, he felt that it was very much his own,” says Sal Pantalone.
Bay Coun. Mark Taylor, chair of the protective services committee, apologized for the treatment of Pantalone, on behalf of the city and the Firefighters Association.
“Whenever there’s an opportunity to right a wrong, no matter how old it is, it should be done,” says Taylor.
He says the reason it took more than 70 years to correct the mistake is because people have a tendency to want to leave the past in the past.
“A lot of the time people are hesitant to go back and second guess the decisions that have already been made,” says Taylor.