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"As a member of President Roosevelt's administration, I saw the United States Army give way to mass hysteria over the Japanese...Crowded into cars like cattle, these hapless people were hurried away to hastily constructed and thoroughly inadequate concentration camps, with soldiers with nervous muskets on guard, in the great American desert. We gave the fancy name of 'relocation centers' to these dust bowls, but they were concentration camps nonetheless."
—Harold Ickes, Secretary of the Interior, Washington Evening Star, September 23, 1946 |
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Individuals arriving at a camp were shocked to find that they would live behind barbed-wire fences, watched over by armed military police in guard towers.
Morgan Yamanaka: Arriving at Camps (oral history transcript)
Mutsu H.: A Human Being (oral history transcript)
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"The sound of the camp gates closing behind us sent a searing pain into my heart. I knew it would leave a scar that would stay with me forever. At that very moment my precious freedom was taken from me."
— Mary Tsukamoto, We the People
Masao W.: Rejection is Very Hard (oral history transcript)
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" ...We had another violent dust storm... Soon barracks only a few feet away were completely obscured by walls of dust and I was terrified the wind would knock me off my feet. Every few yards, I stopped to lean against a barrack to catch my breath, then lowering my head against the wind, I plodded on."
— Yoshiko Uchida, Desert Exile: The Uprooting of a Japanese American Family
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