utterlychangedintofire

It’s more accurate. Lake Hurons a great lake. It’s pretty big it encompasses a lot. The further away from Toronto you get the more generalized things seem to become like: It’s not “Huntsville” or “Baysville” or the name of a lake or small town it’s “Algonquin” or “Muskoka” or “Simcoe” even though those are three very specific places and the small town or lake or what ever is close to there (some times actually more than a 20 minute drive) but people still call it “Algonquin”. Or it’s not the name of the hamlet in Nunavut it’s just “Nunavut” or “a village in Nunavut” or “The Canadian Arctic”. It’s not “Aamjiwnaang” it’s “Sarnia area”. You get the picture….

You're going "wait whaaaat?" those are whiteys too!

Italy was devastated by WWII, devastated. Makes sense right? it kind of sticks out right there under Germany and points toward that Africa Hitler wanted so badly.

My Italian grandfather will barely talk about the forties so all I have from him are bits and pieces. Italy was ravaged by the nazis when it switched sides (it's not a war until Italy changes sides) What I do know is that his family hid in the skull lined catacombs of a church in Porto Civittonova from nazi bombs that were being fired from the sea. At night his parents would send him (8) and his brother (10) out to cut rotting meat from their dead horses so the family wouldn't starve to death. This went on for months. Then the Americans showed up with more bombs and leveled all the bridges and fortified buildings so the Nazis couldn't hide in them. I watched La Vitta Bella with him once and at the part at the end where the little boy is going "rah rah the Americans are here!" he got so mad he got up and left the room.

Smashcut to his future wife (also Italian) growing up in a wooden shack in an Irish/Polish neighbourhood in Toronto. Her father along with thousands and thousands of German, Italian, Austrian and Japanese people were herded off at the declaration of war. One day My Nonna came home to two RCMP officers (whom she still describes as the "two biggest men I've ever seen") ransacking their tiny house. She describes staring at their "big shiny boots" stomping through the house and emptying all their drawers while her mother cried "Where have you taken him? Where is my husband?" They wouldn't know until months later when a friend of her's saw her father's face on a newsreel of Italian internees in Northern Ontario in a movie theatre downtown. Her mother and dozens of other Italian women had to sue the government  to get them to tell her exactly where they had taken her husband. All the RCMP ended up taking was my Great grandfather's scrapbook of political cartoons (He was a lifelong Liberal [and Atheist] who liked the send-up of the other parties) they used it to somehow accuse him of building an underground tunnel between an Italian club and a Catholic church that they said was being used to store weapons (all bullshit, the tunnel didn't exist nor did he know how the fuck to build underground tunnels, also he hated the Catholic church for ruining his childhood in the old country and refused to send his three daughters to Catholic school) they would hold him for two full years. His three daughters were forced to drop out of school and get jobs, they never returned to school. To make ends meet they would trade butter stamps to Anglo families for things like pig heads and lard. They would eat something my Nonna describes as "dandelion soup" almost every day. My Nonna-nonna started doing seamstress work on top of her day job so they could afford milk and shoes. My great-grandfather never forgave the Canadian government and never trusted the RCMP again. Toward the end of his two year internment they lost their humble little house and were briefly homeless and had to sleep in the church.

Sometime around 2009 the Harper government formally apologized for the internment of Italian Canadians and set up a bill earmarking 25 million for "education and remembrance" but almost all of that went to Japanese immigrants in BC (who deserve that shit, don't get me wrong at least they didn't take away the Italians' houses). The internment (read forced slave labour) of "enemy allies" and apparently scrap-bookers like my Nonno-nonno still goes untaught in Canadian schools. There's a monument somewhere in Montreal too but it is dwarfed by dozens of monuments for combatants in the same city.

Let's not talk about my Jewish great grandparents, not a fun time even if you're in Bath in England.

My Scottish great grandfather in Toronto seems to remember the forties as okay though...