One of this year's winners of the Nobel Peace Prize could not speak any English and had never been to school when he arrived in the US at the age of 9. Why do schools work to divide this country by teaching Spanish?
The prize is a particularly striking accomplishment for Capecchi (pronounced kuh-PEK'-ee). A native of Italy, he was separated from his mother at age 3 when the Gestapo took her to the Dachau concentration camp as a political prisoner in 1941. His mother, a poet, and his father, an Italian military officer, were not married.
Capecchi spent a year with a peasant family, until the money his mother left for his care ran out. At age 4, "I started wandering the streets," he recalled Monday. For about four years, he lived on the streets or in orphanages, and he ended up in a hospital with malnutrition.
Dachau was liberated in 1945 and his mother survived.
"Then she set out to find me," searching through hospital records. "I was in a hospital and when they keep you in a hospital, they didn't want you to run around. They took your clothes away. She came and bought me an outfit."
She showed up on Capecchi's 9th birthday. Soon thereafter, "we were on a boat to America ... I literally expected roads to be paved with gold. What I found was, it was a land of opportunity," he said.
In the United States, he went to school for the first time, starting in third grade despite not knowing English.
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