I rise to commemorate the life of Joseph Facci. a life devoted to a selfless crusade against human misery. I met Joseph Facci during my years as chief of the Foreign Language Division of the Office of War Information in World War II. A Dantelike character in appearance. and a refugee from the Mussolini regime. he was in charge of working with the ItalianAmerican community in my division. Facci played a creative and decisive part in getting Italian aliens exempted from the enemy alien classification in 1944. in pushing for a separate peace with the Italian people. and in helping to bring our two great countries together. When America entered the war. aliens from Italy and Germany were officially labeled "enemies." They could not travel freely and could not take certain jobs. Loyal nativeborn and naturalized Americans of these ancestries. as well as the aliens. resented these restrictions. As the RomeBerlin axis began to falter and Italians became unhappy with their alliance with the Nazis. Facci came up with an idea designed to impose greater strains on the alliance and to solve the problems of these ItalianAmericans.
Keywords matched
refugee naturalized