You may have read about "Una Storia Segreta" before, but can you do it again 
without getting a lump in your throat?  
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A SECRET HISTORY 

The harassment of Italians during World War II has particular relevance today 
and serves as a warning of what could happen

By Patricia Yollin    
Sunday, October 21, 2001 
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Al Bronzini's father lost his business and his mother lost her mind. Rose 
Scudero and her mother were exiled. Doris Giuliotti's father ended up in an 
internment camp. And Anita Perata's husband was held in a detention center 
and her house ransacked by the FBI. 

They don't want reparations, apologies or pity. They simply want the history 
books rewritten to say that, almost 60 years ago, it was a crime to be 
Italian. 

During World War II, 600,000 undocumented Italian immigrants in the United 
States were deemed "enemy aliens" and detained, relocated, stripped of their 
property or placed under curfew. A couple hundred were even locked in 
internment camps. 

It's not something most people know about. 

"This story has legs because people are so stunned that this happened to the 
Italians," said writer Lawrence DiStasi of Bolinas, part of a group of Bay Area 
Italian Americans who have led a nationwide campaign to exhume this chapter 
of American history. 

"And we want to educate our own people, too, not just the rest of the public," 
DiStasi said. "Because if you don't know what happened to you, then in a 
certain sense you don't know who you are." 

The past year has been pivotal. After almost six decades of virtual silence, 
the issue has acquired a timeliness and sense of urgency - even more so since 
the Sept. 11 terrorist attack on the United States and subsequent backlash 
against people of Middle Eastern ancestry. 

"The targeting of certain groups is chillingly familiar," said DiStasi. 

Joanne Chiedi, deputy executive officer in the civil rights division of the U.S. 
Justice Department, said: "What happened to the Italians was based on 
wartime hysteria. We're trying to educate people so it won't happen again. 
The story needs to be told." 

Chiedi must produce a report by Nov. 7 on what did happen. 

For Chiedi, 40, it is perfect casting: The daughter of Sicilian immigrants, she 
was also in charge of the Justice Department's redress project to provide 
reparations to the Japanese Americans interned in concentration camps 
during the 1940s. 

The current investigation was ordered by President Bill Clinton when he signed 
the Wartime Violation of Italian American Civil Liberties Act last November. 
Finally, the government has admitted something went on. 

And, finally, too, people are ready to talk about it. 

Some Italians call this chapter of U.S. history "Una Storia Segreta," which 
means both a secret story and a secret history. 

After Japan bombed Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, the United States declared 
war and began a crackdown on those of German, Italian or Japanese descent 
that led, in its most extreme form, to the internment of 120,000 people of 
Japanese ancestry, two-thirds of whom were citizens. Germans managed to 
escape mass relocation but were subjected to internment and many 
restrictions. 

In the case of Italians - the largest immigrant group in the country at the 
time - noncitizens were targeted. About 600,000 of the country's 5 million Italians 
had not been naturalized - for lack of time, language skills or any sense of urgency. 

They were forced to register as enemy aliens, carry photo ID booklets and 
surrender flashlights, shortwave radios, guns, binoculars, cameras and other 
"contraband." There were FBI raids on private homes, arrests and detentions. 

In California alone, said the 64-year-old DiStasi, a lecturer at the 
University of California at Berkeley, 10,000 were evacuated, mostly from 
coastal areas and sites near power plants, dams and military installations. 
Prohibited zones were created. And 257 people - 90 from the Golden State - 
were put in internment camps for up to two years. 

Fishing boats were seized, and thousands of fishermen lost their jobs. In San 
Francisco, 1,500 were idled, including Joe DiMaggio's father. Another 52, 000 
"enemy aliens" lived under nightly house arrest, with a curfew from 8 p.m. to 
6 a.m. Noncitizens could not travel more than 5 miles from home without a 
permit. 

"A deliberate policy kept these measures from the public during the war," said 
the civil liberties act. "Even 50 years later much information is still classified, the 
full story remains unknown to the public, and it has never been acknowledged in 
any official capacity by the United States government." 

Gladys Hansen, city historian of San Francisco, said she still knows nothing of 
the saga - except for vague memories of curfews and people "getting thrown out 
of Fisherman's Wharf." 

"There's very little, when you come right down to it, about the Italians," said 
Hansen, 76, a native San Franciscan. 

During a Justice Department hearing in Oakland in April - one of two in the 
United States this year - Chiedi echoed that assessment. 

"We want to document that time in history through our report," she told the 
elderly Italians who had come to the Fratellanza Club to testify. "We're here 
today to say that it was wrong, that it was unjust." 

All day long, old Italians told their stories to Chiedi and three colleagues from 
the same Justice Department that made their lives hell back in 1942. Chiedi 
admitted to feeling intense deadline pressure to deliver the report by Nov. 7. 
The date had the opposite effect on Anita Perata of San Jose. 

"I'm kind of happy about that, because my birthday is in November. If I'm still 
around, I'll be 93," she said. 

Perata, all dressed up and brimming with life, was accompanied by a son, a 
granddaughter, a 13-year-old great-granddaughter and a 14-year-old great- 
grandson. 

"Even in the schools, people don't know," said Emily Michaels, of Saratoga, 
who listens attentively to her great-grandmother's tale. 

Chiedi, meanwhile, scribbled it all down: The FBI picked up Anita's husband, 

John Perata, at his San Jose appliance store, took him home in handcuffs to 
Campbell, turned mattresses over and took beds apart. 

He was locked up in Sharp Park, an Immigration and Naturalization Service 
detention center in Pacifica, for two months. Oakland-born Anita Perata 
visited her husband once a week. 

Their son, Saratoga resident Don Perata, 65, former chancellor of the Foothill-
De Anza Community College District, remembered only a few things: Getting 
off the school bus the day of the raid and seeing several large black cars in 
the driveway. Chatting with his father through a detention center fence on 
Easter Sunday. 

"Sometimes I'd take the little one with us," said Anita Perata, mother of  three. 
"We'd kind of straighten her up when we got out of the car and he'd be up at 
the window watching for us. We'd get up there, and he'd been crying when he 
saw what we'd been doing." 

On the day John Perata was released, he came home on the streetcar. 

"He was too embarrassed to have us take him home," his wife said. 

DiStasi said business owners like Perata, community leaders, newspaper reporters, 
radio broadcasters and other prominent people were among those targeted - 
anyone who might be suspected of propaganda and promoting fascism - along 
with the Ex-Combattenti, veterans who had fought for Italy during World War I. 

Ironically, 500,000 Italian Americans were serving in the U.S. armed forces at 
the time of the crackdown - the largest ethnic group in the military. One 
serviceman returned from the war to find his family's home boarded up. One 
woman received an evacuation order the day after she learned her son and 
her nephew in the U.S. military had been killed at Pearl Harbor. 

To win the legislation that Clinton signed on Nov. 7, DiStasi mounted an 
intense nationwide lobbying effort by Italian Americans that can trace its roots 
to San Francisco, with the 1994 debut of "Una Storia Segreta," an exhibit he 
helped organize at the Museo Italo Americano. 

The tattered display of artifacts and documents - which was supposed to have 
a one-month run - is still making the rounds, more than 40 towns and seven 
years later. 

The exhibit also rated a mention in the civil liberties act. Besides ordering the 
Justice Department probe, the act says the president should acknowledge 
what happened, the government should open its files and federal agencies 
should pay for conferences, seminars, lectures and documentaries to bring 
the wartime saga out of the closet. 

DiStasi, president of the American Italian Historical Association, Western 
Regional Chapter, has been researching the subject for years. The result is 
a book that has just come out: "Una Storia Segreta: The Secret History of 
Italian American Evacuation and Internment during World War II," published 
by Heyday Books in Berkeley. 

Now DiStasi's organization is collaborating on an unprecedented joint exhibit 
with the Japanese Peruvian Oral History Project and the National Japanese 
American Historical Society. The show, which opened Sept. 21 in Japantown 
and runs through Dec. 28, will detail the experiences of all three enemy alien 
groups. 

For Italians, DiStasi said, the legacy of the wartime years continues to this day. 
The Italian language was one of the main casualties. 

There is a government poster on his wall that was a familiar presence in 1942. 
"Don't speak the enemy's language," it warns, above a drawing of Adolf Hitler, 
Benito Mussolini and Emperor Hirohito. "Speak American." 

The children and grandchildren of the immigrants avoided this forbidden 
language, DiStasi said - one of many examples of a blossoming literary and 
artistic Italian American culture "iced," as he calls it, by the war. 

DiStasi's friend Gian Banchero, 60, a writer, artist and chef from Berkeley, 
agreed. 

"A lot of people from my folks' generation didn't want to talk about being Italian, 
about having Italian blood," said Banchero, leaning on his cane. "My father 
used to say, Gian, you're so lucky. You can pass for Irish.' " 

It maddens Banchero, whose bedroom became the hiding place for his family's 
new Philco radio, that so few "enemy aliens" will admit they're angry, 
instead blaming themselves for not becoming citizens. 

They worked hard to appear harmless, to blend in. 

"Twenty years ago, there was an orchestra conductor at the Fratellanza Club - 
Buzzy Buzzerino," Banchero said. "I went up to him. Can you play an Italian 
song or two? Nah, we don't do that,' he said. Hey, isn't this an Italian club?' 
I asked him." 

On the other hand, DiStasi said, many people have been "galvanized" by fresh 
indignation over old wounds and "it gets them active in other areas of their 
heritage." They become, in effect, born-again Italians. 

Rose Scudero, 71, of Antioch, went to Washington twice to testify at House or 
Senate hearings on the legislation. She raised money to place a bronze plaque 
at the foot of Railroad Avenue in Pittsburg honoring the "enemy aliens. " And 
she speaks to historical societies, church groups, schools and Italian 
fraternal organizations. Schoolchildren are her best audience. 

"They put themselves in my place," said Scudero, who at age 12 was among 
1, 600 Pittsburg residents evacuated on Feb. 24, 1942. 

"I tell them, Picture going home today and your mom tells you she got a letter 
from the government and because she isn't a citizen, she has to leave the house 
and your father and your siblings.' And you don't know where you're going or for 
how long. And they go Whoa.' They get the feel of it, and it scares them." 

Scudero, graceful and relaxed, sat on her couch, under a large painting she 
has done of Aci Castello, her mother's village in Sicily. Her father was 
building Liberty ships at the Kaiser shipyard in Pittsburg, her two brothers 
were working at nearby Columbia Steel. Her two older sisters lived at home. 
But children under 14 had to go with their parents. 

She and her mother ended up in Clayton Valley. They ate strawberries for 
breakfast, lunch and dinner, from fields left by the Japanese. 

"I didn't think we'd be coming back," said Scudero, a widow with two children. 
"I gave my collection of fancy pins - the kind you'd put on your sweater, little 
angora kitty cats and that sort of thing - to my classmates. My favorite - wish 
I had it today - was two jitterbuggers above a phonograph record." 

Later, they moved to downtown Concord. Her mother, lacking a radio, would put 
her daughter on the bus to Pittsburg in search of news. On Columbus Day, when 
the restrictions were lifted, Scudero ran through her neighborhood, knocking 
on doors. "You can go home now," she told them. 

And on Oct. 24, 1942, they all did. 

Despite their anguish, some of the elderly Italians whose lives were disrupted, 
insist that the government was justified in the context of the times - the 
United States and Italy were at war. Others counter with tales of absurdity. 

Mary Sabatini said her mother - who moved to the United States in 1919 - was 
among 1,800 evacuated from Alameda. 

Teresa Sabatini had Parkinson's disease and encephalitis and could not go out 
of the house alone. Nevertheless, being a noncitizen, she posed a risk, in the 
eyes of Lt. Gen. John DeWitt, head of the Western Defense Command and 
architect of the wartime restrictions. 

The Sabatinis had to leave Alameda. They moved to East Oakland, about 6 miles 
away. 

"My mother didn't speak the language, wasn't well and was not going to bomb 
the Alameda Naval Air Station," said Mary Sabatini, 71, who had to catch a 
streetcar and two buses to reach her school - which was four blocks from her 
old house. 

For most Italians, thanks partly to President Franklin Roosevelt's desire to 
hang on to their votes, the nightmare ended in October 1942. For Prospero 
Cecconi, it never really did. 

A member of the Ex-Combattenti held in an Austrian POW camp during 
World War I, Cecconi arrived in the United States in 1924, said his daughter, 
Doris Giuliotti, 71, who lives in San Francisco's Marina District. 

When he died 63 years later, Giuliotti found a small notebook among his 
belongings. It traces a journey from camp to camp, starting with his arrest at a 
North Beach macaroni factory through his internment at Fort Missoula, Mont. 

The diary's entries are spare and intermittent, alternating between English 
and Italian. 

"I was arrested at 5 p.m. and took to the Immigration Station 108 Silver Ave.," 
he wrote on Feb. 21, 1942. Six days later, there were merely "Questions. " And 
on May 28, he "received prisoner clothing." 

One entry, characteristically terse, is particularly poignant: "Morto il 
camarato Protto." His closest friend, fellow prisoner Giuseppe Protto, had 
died of a blood clot in the brain. 

At that time, Cecconi's family was living in a small village in the Apennine 
mountains, having left their house and alterations shop in the Marina a few 
years before. They knew nothing - just that they had no money from America 
and no news about Prospero. 

After the war, he went back to Italy, vowing to never return. And he never did, 
even when Doris moved to San Francisco in 1951. 

"He said, No, they've humiliated me so much.' He told us all about it, down 
to the nitty-gritty," recalled his daughter, her blue eyes welling with tears. 

For two years, Giuliotti tried to get her father's files from the government, 
last October finally asking Rep. Nancy Pelosi to help. A month later, 125 pages 
on Mr. Cecconi arrived, at a cost of $62.50. 

"I would have paid $500 because I wanted to know what they said. My father 
died with a thorn in his heart, thinking of why they did that to him," 
Giuliotti said. "He was a very bitter man." 

For others, the bitterness faded or never really took hold. 

"My parents became good Americans," said Bronzini. "My mother's favorite 
song was The Star-Spangled Banner.' " 

Scudero mirrored his words - her mother felt no outrage, just gratitude that she
hadn't been deported or treated as badly as her Japanese neighbors. 

"She loved this country, she loved Kate Smith, she'd sing God Bless America' 
every time she heard it on the radio," she said. 

Still, Scudero is convinced history could repeat itself. 

"It could happen again, to any nationality," she said. "Why not?" 
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Hitting Home 
Even those who lived through the crackdown on "enemy aliens" sometimes had no 
sense of its scope. 

Only a few years ago, Castro Valley resident Al Bronzini discovered the 
mistreatment of Italians extended beyond the Oakland world of his childhood. 

"I thought it was just an isolated thing," said Bronzini, a spirited and 
jocular man of 71. "How would I know? It's been a secret for 59 years. It 
just goes to show you they can keep secrets. Not atomic secrets or nuclear 
secrets, but these kind they keep. I knew about the Japanese because we had 
two Japanese kids in school, Suzy and Sugiyo Kato. They sat right behind me, 
and one day they're gone. They took them away because of the war, that's all 
they said, and I never saw them again. 

"I made a sign for my desk, To hell with the Japs,' and the teacher gave me 
an A.' That was the climate. So you can imagine how people must have felt 
about Italians. We were the enemy, too, weren't we?" 

The contradictions spill over Bronzini's dining room table, along with snapshots 
of the ancestral home in Tuscany and the tidy house in Oakland, his parents' 
passports and certificates bearing their names from Ellis Island's Immigrant 
Wall of Honor. 

Like most "enemy aliens," Bronzini's family had been in the United States a 
long time. 

His father had left a small town near Pisa in 1923, returning six years later to 
marry. By the time war broke out, Guido and Clara Bronzini had two sons, a 
thriving produce market, a new Pontiac and a home of their own in the Melrose 
District. They did not, however, have citizenship papers. 

On a February 1942 evening, 13-year-old Al Bronzini was eating dinner when 
two police officers knocked at the door and confiscated the family's new Philco 
radio because of its shortwave band. Not long after, Guido Bronzini had to close 
his produce market because it was on the wrong side of the street - the west 
side of East 12th, a prohibited zone because it was closer to the coast. 

"The women from the neighborhood would huddle together, they'd all be in the 
kitchen talking and crying," Bronzini said. "They would soak the dish towels 
with tears." 

A few weeks after resurrecting those memories, Bronzini took a "nostalgia 
walk" through one of his father's old haunts - the Oakland produce market 
near Jack London Square. He strolled past displays of tamarind pods, 
plantains, bok choy and tomatillos, shouting above the racket of forklifts and 
clamor in Vietnamese, Spanish, Korean and Chinese. 

"My mother used to tell me how the fascisti police in Italy would come and kick 
the doors down if you were not willing to fly the fascist flag," he recalled. "That's 
why they were so terrified during World War II - they just came from a land 
where you had to do what the police said." 

Afterward, the nostalgia tour headed south. Bronzini marveled at the number of 
Asian businesses along East 12th - "It's their turn," he said - before arriving at 
the spot where his father's market, the Fruitvale Banana Depot, once stood. 

Now it's the Blue Bird auto body shop. Up the block, day laborers lined the 
street. Almost nothing was recognizable. No matter. Bronzini remembered it 
well. 

"Across the street, we'd just sit in the truck. My father would park and gaze at 
his boarded-up building. He could drive north on East 12th because he was on 
the other side of the line, but on the way back he would have to take East 14th 
in order not to be in violation." 

After losing the market, Bronzini's father worked in a machine shop, plucked 
chickens, hauled timber. His mother had a "total mental collapse" and was 
hospitalized two months in Livermore. 

Bronzini said: "She used to repeat, over and over, 'Non e giusta. Non abbiamo 
fatto niente a nessuno.' (It isn't right. We haven't done anything to 
anyone.)" 
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E-mail Patricia Yollin at pyollin@sfchronicle.com. 
 
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