Trina Costantini-Powell gazes wistfully at two hand-drawn portraits of her grandfather, Guiseppe Costantini, who was interned as an enemy alien during the Second World War.
The six Costantini children could do nothing but watch as their home was ransacked and their father was taken away. Not one of them was told why he was being taken. Not one was told where he was being taken to. Not one knew if he was ever coming back.
Having already suffered the loss of their mother, on June 10, 1940, the children of Giuseppe Costantini were left effectively parentless by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
Costantini was forced to spend the night in Ottawa county jail alongside four other Ottawa men – Gino Tiezzi, Carlo Scarabelli, Fred Pantalone and Vittorio Sabetta.
The next day the five Italian-Canadians were sent to Petawawa Internment Camp west of Ottawa. They were forced into hard labour, given prisoner-of-war numbers and made to wear jackets with large red circles on the back – a shooting target if they tried to escape. Surrounded by armed guards and barbed wire, the men had limited contact with their families and no idea when, or if, their imprisonment would end.
Not one of these five men was a criminal.
In June 1940, hundreds of Italian-Canadians all across the country were being forced from their homes and sent to internment camps . After Canada declared war on Italy, more than 600 Italian-Canadians were labelled as “enemy aliens” and consequently interned.
Among the detained were the five Ottawa men: Costantini, Tiezzi, Scarabelli, Pantalone and Sabetta, each of whom served between eight months and three years in Camp Petawawa, west of Ottawa. Their families were left to fend for themselves without any explanation of what was happening.
Giuseppe Costantini was taken from his seven motherless children, six of whom were still living in the family home.
The oldest of the six was a daughter who, at the age of 20, was forced into the role of mother for her five younger siblings. The youngest of the children was only eight years old when his father disappeared so suddenly from his life.
His daughter, Trina Costantini-Powell, today says that it was thanks to the Italian-Canadian community that the family was able to survive this difficult time.
“The small community rallied around them,” she says. With only about 200 Italian-Canadian families living in Ottawa at the time, most of the men and women worked and socialized with each other, while the majority of the children attended school together at the Dante Academy, now known as St. Anthony School, on Booth Street.
One of the first Italian teachers at the Dante Academy happened to be one of the five interned Italian-Canadians Gino Tiezzi.
Of the five Ottawa men, Tiezzi was held longest, serving a total of three years in internment.
His son, Italo Tiezzi, says his father and the people interned with him “were not enemy aliens, but British citizens. The men were law-abiding citizens who contributed to their country before and after their ordeal.”
In fact, in 1977 Gino Tiezzi received the Queen Elizabeth Medal for his significant contribution to the community, followed by his son who was also awarded the medal 25 years later.
Francesca L’Orfano hopes to tell these untold stories of the interns’ families in a booklet being written to complement a memorial plaque honouring the detained Italian-Canadians.
The plaque will be placed at Piazza Dante park on Booth Street, and is expected to be erected by June 2011.
The booklet is to be written directly from interviews with descendents of the Italian-Canadians who were interned in Ottawa in 1940.
Although the interviews will be “framed with a historical background,” says L’Orfano, the main focus of the text will be the impact on the families that has never been documented.
“It has never been addressed that the wrong done to individuals” in June 1940 “resulted in wrong doing to families and the community as a whole,” she says.
Italo Tiezzi says the memorial plaque and booklet will have significant historical value and serve a purpose in familiarizing future generations with the events of 1940.
Ariella Hostetter, a committee member of the Ottawa Italian Women’s Filo, agrees. She says the plaque should entice people to look further into what happened and encourage a deeper interest in the community’s Italian-Canadian history. The only complication is the amount of historical detail to be included on the plaque.
“It started as a plaque,” Hostetter says, “but it’s turning into a wall!”
The accompanying booklet will feature many of the historical details which cannot be included on the plaque.
However, L’Orfano says one booklet cannot do justice to the enormity of the issue.
“The booklet is part of a multiple step plan,” she says. “We are hoping to continue the story in a second issue.”
Having received less funding from the government than was originally requested, L’Orfano hopes that an appeal for a second grant will be more successful and enable the second publication.
There is a larger plan, says L’Orfano, to create a website of curriculum resources relating to the Italian-Canadian interments and eventually get these resources into high schools.
Through her teaching experience, L’Orfano is familiar with the curriculum guidelines for Canadian history and realizes that what is taught in schools is often decided by the available resources. If there is nothing concrete to refer to, she says, things are much less likely to be taught.
L’Orfano says her booklet will serve as concrete documentation of the families’ stories which have never before been recorded and made available to the public.
By presenting the accounts of real people, she hopes to add a human dimension to the history.
Putting a human face to a trauma, she says, offers people a greater understanding of the issues surrounding human rights, both in 1940 and more recently.
Events such as the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, says L’Orfano, have the potential to cause social minorities to be discriminated against, much in the same way as Italian-Canadians were during the Second World War.