The Topaz Internment Camp

One of the less wholesome legacies of the Second World War in Utah is the memory of the Topaz Internment Camp, where more than eight thousand people of Japanese descent, many of them United States citizens who had lived in the country all their lives, were taken and held for three and a half years. They were placed behind barbed wire fences surrounded by guard towers manned by soldiers with guns. All Japanese, even those with just one-sixteenth blood, were considered potentially hostile.

Today, I went to a presentation by a survivor of that camp, a tiny woman with fluffy white hair, and a man whose parents had been in another camp. He introduced a number of black and white photographs taken from the National Archives, most of them about Topaz, as he told the story. At times, he would prompt the lady to tell a little of her own story. At the beginning, I had tears in my eyes, but I pulled it together before long and listened intently.

She had been seventeen and in high school when Pearl Harbor happened. She said she remembered going to school that next Monday and sitting in the back shivering, afraid of what might happen to her. Her teacher took her aside to tell her everything would be all right. Later, when they got the order to "evacuate" to the holding area they would stay while the camps were built, some of her friends from school came to see her off. As she described that to the audience, it was one of the moments she was genuinely touched with emotion.

She said they were first kept at a former racetrack in a stable with no windows that still reeked of animals. Later, they were moved by train to Utah. She had grown up in the San Fransisco area, so both the snow and the heat were new to her, and they were particularly bad because heating was by one stove. They lived in military-style barracks, with communal bathrooms, cafeterias, and laundry rooms. At first, there were no dividers between the bathroom stalls. She laughed when she said that they finally built shoulder-high dividers with curtains; it was a very sociable experience to use the bathroom. He told the story of one elderly woman who was so ashamed to be seen using the bathroom that she put a brown paper bag over her head with holes cut for eyes.

Many of the fathers were separated from their families. Because her father was a businessman who sold miso soup, he was taken away by the FBI to another facility.

Throughout the presentation, I was struck by her good humor and good will. She didn't express any bitterness toward the government, which, as the gentleman pointed out, she had every right to feel. Many of the stories he and she told were heartbreaking. High school and college students volunteered to teach elementary school. People of Japanese descent were called on to enlist in the Armed Forces to serve in the European theater; when they returned on leave, they had to visit their families behind barbed wire.

Topaz is now mostly abandoned, with just trash, foundations, and one re-built barrack at the site. There are plans for a permanent museum in the nearby town of Delta, though, and I do hope those plans come to fruition.

In the late eighties, the government offered formal letter of apology signed by the President to all survivors, along with twenty thousand dollars. As the gentleman pointed out, however, I doubt anyone would agree to live behind barbed wire under constant guard for three and a half years for twenty thousand dollars more than forty years later.

So often I forget that the past isn't just something in books and in videos. For someone, that was their present day, their experience in the passing moment, and they had to live with it. And they still do.