Oddly proud I know these things... and of my friends

As I have spoken of often, I went to an (LA School District) elementary school in Gardena, CA. (For the Brits, elementary is the first 6 grades after kindergarten.) This comes up either in my conversations all the time, primarily because it was a particularly different school experience than most people's.

Gardena, where my elementary school was, was one of the two places in Los Angeles where the Japanese people were relocated AFTER internment. So I learned about Japanese internment about 4 decades before most Americans. My many Japanese classmates and friends were the first generation kids of the kids who were interned.

An aside. A common stereotype, which was based on fact, used to be the high educational standards held by the parents of these kids. They were very strict about studying and performing, so the school was a different experience for me than most of the LA elementary schools. It was perfect for me. I'm smart, but I need to be challenged, and that happened early in this school.

Anyway, this is another story we all learned in elementary school. 

Despite the Japanese people being interned in camps, many of them volunteered for the military.  Because the US government was worried they would defect in the Pacific Theater, they were put into segregated units and sent to the European Theater. The men who made up these units were intent on proving their worth to the country, and they fought valiantly.  Like the black military units, the Japanese units suffered more injuries than traditional units because of their location and their refusal to surrender.

And this unit was the first American unit into the concentration camp of Dachau. The Washington Post has the story - but I will pull and excerpt here.

WAAKIRCHEN, Germany — Eighty years ago, Abba Naor was among several thousand Jews and other prisoners evacuated from Nazi concentration camps and forced to walk for days on the notorious Dachau death march — without food or water, often in freezing temperatures. Many perished on the way.

On the eighth night, as snow fell and covered the exhausted prisoners, their SS guards — fearing the fast-approaching Allies — vanished.

The following morning, American soldiers appeared. But when Naor looked up, the faces he saw were unlike any he had seen before. They were Japanese American soldiers, part of a storied military unit that faced down prejudice and suspicion to fight Adolf Hitler’s armies in Europe. Some of them had family members imprisoned in internment camps in the western United States. 

I want to share one other thing. My generation of Japanese children and parents all but refused to speak about the reality of internment. The desolation and isolation of the camps, and the hatred and racism of the time, were too much to even think about. They were determined to raise Americans who would never be questioned again.