Today I want to tell you about my visit to the Heart Mountain War Relocation Center. If you are like me, then as soon as you saw the word “war”, you felt the immediate desire to stop reading… Don’t do this! My story will be not about the war (you know, these boring dates, names and stuff like that). No. My story will be about people.
So let me start. During World War II, after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, the government started seeing all the Japanese as a threat. As a result ten concentration camps for Japanese Americans were built across the U.S. One of them was located close to Heart Mountain, Wyoming.
- 467 military-style barracks
- 9 surrounding guard towers
- August 1942 - the camp was opened
- 13,997 Japanese Americans
- November 1945 - the camp was closed
Now it’s time for the trickiest thing. Probably, you can think that it was rather rational to separate Japanese people from the Americans so they couldn’t support their native country by making subversive actions in America. But there is one very important thing: 2/3 of them actually WERE the Americans.
At that time in the U.S. there were three generations of Japanese Americans:
1). the Issei - the first Japanese to immigrate (since 1880’s)
2). the Nisei - the Issei’s children (born in America)
the Kibei - born in America, educated in Japan (after that came back to America)
3). the Sansei - the Nisei and Kibei’s children
During the war the average age of the Issei was around 40-60 y.o., the Nisei - 20, and the Sansei were little kids. All of them were sent to the camps. I still remember the story of a man who in despair put a large poster on his store: “I am an American”. But nobody listened to him. People were too frightened. They didn’t want to understand that what they saw were not true signs of cultural loyalty, but racial features, something that nobody can change. They refused to admit that those people did for America not less, but even more, as Japanese immigrants had rough times having to work much harder than an average American. They were underpaid, they were disrespected, they were foreign. But they didn’t give up and eventually they earned the right to be proudly called the Americans. Or they thought they did… As soon as difficult times came for America, everything was forgotten. They, and their children, and their children’s children - they were foreign again, never the Americans, as if their race defined their minds…
The government was afraid. People were afraid. In Russia we say: “the fear has big eyes”. It means that when you are scared, even usual things seem terrifying, like through a magnifying distorting glass. There were hundreds of messages coming from everywhere, spread by the word of mouth. “Beware of those Japs” was floating in the air, seeping through every crack. Adults forbad their children to play with Japanese, “Japs stay away” was written on the walls, Japanese Americans were losing jobs and getting visits from the police. They had to carefully hide everything related to Japan, but that didn’t help. Eventually ten concentration camps were built.
In August 1942 first Japanese Americans arrived. They were told to take all they could carry, and as no one knew what to expect, rarely more than one or two suitcases were packed. They left everything they had: houses, properties, pets, businesses. They took with them only the most important, most significant things. One woman remembers that she put a big American flag in her suitcase. She says she felt really proud to be an American.
So they started their way. Nobody knew where they were going. On the way they were told to close the curtains on the windows, as there were so many people full of hatred towards them that otherwise they were in a danger of being pelt with stones. When the trains arrived, the Japanese people saw dull rows of grey military-style barracks, a tremendous mountain on the background and a barbed wire fence separating them from the whole world, as if they were prisoners.
They came into hastily put up empty rooms. There was no furniture except for a simple metal bed, a mattress, a heater and a lamp hanging down from the ceiling. That was all, and they had to make this their home.
The first problem Japanese Americans faced in the camps was Wyoming climat. Dry, windy and awfully cold. The rooms were full of dust seeping through the cracks, and when the winter came, people couldn’t find any clothes that could be warm enough.
Secondly, people had no privacy. It was embarrassing to sit in the restroom doing your things facing another person doing the same. And when there were up to six people living in one room, everything you could come up with was to hang a curtain near your bed, as if it could provide you some privacy (though it couldn’t)
In the daytime and at night - they were always watched by the guards. Imagine waking up in the morning and seeing a “wonderful” picture through the window: a dull liveless desert, a huge mountain and strict rows of grey boxes called blocks. Now add to this a guard tower and a wire fence around, and you will feel exactly like they felt. A prisoner.
But they had no choice, so they tried their best not to think about the cruel reality. They married, raised children, planted crops, worked and even celebrated holidays and organized national festivals. Moreover, a lot of young men were sent to be soldiers in the war.
After the war was over, the camps started to close. The people were given $25 and a train ticket. That’s all. You are free. After three years of living behind the fence, separated from the world, now they could go anywhere. Anywhere and nowhere. Their homes and properties were stolen, they had neither job, nor place to stay in. In addition, most Americans still felt dislike towards them. Where would you go if everyone hated you and the only things you had were one or two suitcases and a train ticket?.. It was several years before people finally could manage to start their life again, their new life. Many of them were so stressed out during these years, so they just couldn't accept everything that had happened to them and died within several years.
I found out about all of this while walking in the museum for about two hours, reading all the information boards and watching all the short videos about the life in camps. Of course, it’s impossible to feel the atmosphere of these events through a five-minutes movie, and that’s why I decided to tell you everything I know.
I decided to do this, because I’ve heard some of my classmates saying that all those relocation centers were not so awful as they are shown. My classmates compared them to concentration camps for Jews, where the latter were killed with extreme brutality. They told me, as long as the Japanese could live in the camps and even organize holidays, it was okay and actually not a big deal. While hearing this I felt a strange feeling. The anger bubbling inside me, but I couldn’t fully understand why I felt that way... Because I know more than my classmates. Because I read about all this, I saw it, I heard people’s stories. I FELT it, deep inside my heart. But nobody else could do it, they simply didn’t have enough time.
That’s why I told you this story. The story not about the war, but about people. And about evil and cruelty that can never be measured. Remember yourself coming to the U.S. How did you feel? Did you feel foreign, lost, alone? Did you feel that it was a mistake to come here?.. Following your logic, I must say that you didn’t need any support at all, and that all your feelings are bullshit, as long as you were given a nice fully furnished room, enough food and even taken on interesting trips and excursions! How could you feel alone or lost? You just think too much about yourself!..
But I won’t say this. Because I understand you and your feelings. And there is no big or small sadness, as well as there is no big or small evil. We can’t just compare evil and say which event was a true cruelty and which was insignificant. Evel is incomparable. Every evil, every cruelty, every fierceness is bad, and that doesn’t matter if “it could be worse”. We should never forget about human feelings and the price of life before we say that it’s okay if 20 people died, because it’s not 200. It’s not okay. And it was not okay when people were forced to leave everything they had in their lives, to be hated and unwanted. To be forced to live behind the wire fence like prisoners.
Think about it next time you want to say that one evil is worse than another. Remember: there’s no degree of comparison.
