Home elsewhere: a novel of World War II

Home Elsewhere reopens the history books of  the most celebrated and written-about war in modern history to an unsung chapter. While America’s eyes were focused on Normandy and Midway, events were transpiring on the home front that went largely unnoticed by most of us.

Nearly half a million Italian and German soldiers, captured abroad as POWs, spent most of World War II in the United States in POW camps dispersed among forty-four states. 51,000 of them were Italian. 

One of those Italian prisoners was my father.

Home Elsewhere is a story about an Italian soldier captured in North Africa during World War II.

It relates how this he came to the United States as a prisoner of war, spending half the war years here in America.

Home Elsewhere is also the story of an Italian-American woman who in 1920 had emigrated as a child from Sicily with her mother. 

It tells how she grew up in a small Pennsylvania city, in the heart of her immigrant family. As the war progressed, with most young men away at war, this woman’s dream of marriage and a family of her own were fading.

Home Elsewhere is the story of how this man and this woman met under improbable circumstances, how they courted, corresponded, and eventually married. It is a love story, told against a familiar 1940s backdrop of war. But it is also a story of immigrant hopes and dreams, of heartbreak and hard work and courage. 

For more than three centuries right up to the present day, millions of people have dreamed the American dream, forsaking the comfort and simplicity of familiar landscapes and language for a strange new land that they make their own. Home Elsewhere stitches itself into the fabric of America, a colorful patchwork quilt sewn in the 20thcentury but one never more relevant than today.

Home Elsewhere is a story that embraces Italian-American culture. It pays homage to the humble but proud dialect that was preserved in immigrant households and neighborhoods.

It celebrates the Italian love of food, situating the flavors and aromas of the Sicilian-American table at the center of a story that observes both daily life and its more salutary moments.

 When I would tell people the story of how my father first came to this country and how my parents met, invariably I would get the reaction, “How interesting!” or “Really? That’s an incredible story.” I couldn’t believe that this story hadn’t been told before, certainly by historians, or that more hadn’t been written about these wartime visitors, soldiers of the Axis Powers just like those whom our troops were facing daily in the various theaters of the war. At the very least, I reasoned, wouldn’t these prisoners have attracted the attention – and likely the hateful scorn – of many patriotic Americans who would resent their unwelcome presence among us?
 

I found that precious little had been written about the hundreds of thousands of Axis prisoners of World War II who were brought to the U.S. for their internment. America's focus was perhaps naturally on the war abroad, where American sons and husbands were serving. Hollywood fed this appetite, too, documenting in newsreel footage and full-length films the experience of "our boys over there." I knew my father's story from his rare retelling of it, but I had little basis in fact with which to validate his experience.

That's when I happened upon the work of Flavio G. Conti and Alan Perry, two historians and scholars of World War II, who had written about Italian POWs during the war at Camp Letterkenny in Chambersburg. Pa.  Theirs was the first research that I'd found in print to corroborate my father's war stories. And it marked the beginning of a journey of discovery into what would ultimately become Home Elsewhere.