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The day they took his father away

Bill Fox

Bill Fox

By Bill Fox/Columnist

For over 25 years my friend Jim Marino has been the host at 10 a.m. on Saturday mornings for The Freewheelin’ Folk Show on CFMU 93.3 (listen on the Internet unless you live close to Hamilton). Jim recently sent me an article from the Hamilton Spectator. It features another example of disturbing behaviour from our past.

Nicholas Zaffiro, 91, a retired lawyer, helped to build one of the biggest law practices in Hamilton. Agro Zaffiro law firm is still operating with 28 lawyers.

Nicholas was born in 1930 in his parents’ second-floor apartment. As a boy, he spent time at his dad’s shoe repair shop and as a teenager he worked at a fish and chips takeout nearby.

After more than 80 years, a shocking memory is still vivid for Nicholas Zaffiro. He was coming home from school one day when he was in Grade 5. He went to report to his dad’s shop so that he could go out to play from there, but it was closed! Some kids told him that the police took his dad away because he was a spy! He was shocked. He did not know what to think. You see, Italian Canadians from Hamilton were boarded on a train en route to the Petawawa Internment Camp on June 10, 1940. As days went by, he hoped his dad would return, but he did not. The family received only censored letters from their dad, Francesco. As the years passed, his mom struggled to make ends meet as a seamstress. His older sister had to leave school to work to help support the family.

Now, Nicholas’s dad, Francesco, came to Hamilton from Sicily in 1926, but he was forced to spend nearly three years at camps in the early 1940s. He and the others were gathered up by police and interned after Benito Mussolini declared war against Britain and Canada in June 1940.

I never realized that following the outbreak of WW II, approximately 40 POW/Internment camps opened across Canada, from New Brunswick to British Columbia, including several throughout Ontario and Quebec. Most of those interned in the Canadian camps were comprised of three ethnic groups – Germans, Italians and Japanese.

Many German Canadians interned in Petawawa had immigrated to the Upper Ottawa Valley in 1876. Their hamlet, consisting primarily of farmers, was called Germanicus, located less than 10 miles from Eganville. (My father-in-law’s family could well have been included in that number as they settled about 20 miles from Eganville.) The federal government, with no compensation whatsoever, expropriated their farms and they were imprisoned behind barbed wire in the camp. The Foymount Air Force Base near Eganville was built on this expropriated land. Even though none of these immigrant homesteaders of 1876 had ever gone back to visit Germany after their arrival, nor had their children or grandchildren, they were accused of being German Nazi agents!

From September 1939 to July 1942, the Petawawa camp housed 645 German and Italian civilian internees. By August 1942 all civilian internees were transferred to other camps where they remained until released in February 1944. Italian Canadians were viewed as threats to national security because of their involvement in social clubs and other organizations that supported Mussolini before the war. But no charges were ever laid against any of those interned, and it is seen today as another sad chapter in Canadian history that was fuelled by prejudice, misinformation and overzealous law enforcement.

And next month, the name, ‘Francesco Zaffiro’, along with 74 other names will be included on a memorial plaque that will be placed at Immigration Square in Hamilton. The sign acknowledges the suspension of civil rights during the Second World War that saw nearly 600 Italian Canadians from across the country interned during the war as “enemy aliens.” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made a long awaited, formal apology in the House of Commons over the issue.

Nicholas’s dad died in 1996 at the age of 95. Eighty years was a long time to wait for an apology. The internees were long gone.

I’m at ‘bdfox@rogers.com” trying to come to grips with another Canadian example of racism and injustice.

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