Jingle bells, Batman smells
Robin laid an egg
Batmobile lost a wheel
And Joker got away

Nazis came to Texas in the 1960s. We could hear them just around the corner. My older sister Rosi would make the sound of their footsteps—would tap her hands on the pink carpet of the walk-in closet in her room (just like the one in mine). She would look up and say, "Listen, do you hear them?" I would hold my breath. We were in the woods with the partisans. Though we didn't know the exact meaning of the word. We sat around our (invisible) campfire. We were hiding from the Nazis. They would take us away. We had saltines and olives to live on.

Sometimes I would be the one to tap tap tap slap my palms against the pink carpet: "Listen, do you hear them?" Nazis coming through the woods. They had been tipped off, perhaps by paid informers, like the ones who had turned in Anne Frank.

I had read her diary. We had seen the end of the movie on TV though my mother had said, "Don't you think they should go to bed?" My father had said, "They have to learn." What we had to learn about was life. What had happened to the Jews crouched in silence.

On TV we heard the big Nazi boot against the door of the Secret Annex where the Franks had hidden. The Nazis bashed in the door the way ours had never been bashed, or my father's or my mother's. My father had fought the Nazis in the ocean. My mother had stayed home. She'd been a schoolgirl.

Once I asked her, "Have you ever had a raw potato?" I imagined her digging them from a field, getting through the war. She'd grown up in Dallas. She said, "Maybe once" — when her brother's barbecue project in the back yard hadn't turned out. Potato half-raw, half-burned. There was no starvation, no SS in Texas. No hiding with partisans. Nothing but two daughters in the 1960s with saltines and green olives stuffed with pimientos, and sometimes a strand or two of raw spaghetti to munch on.

For years I kept a getaway bag in my closet — saltines and a notebook, a change of clothes. An alarm clock, so I would know the time. I liked the big, friendly white and gold face of that alarm clock. One summer night the air conditioning didn't work and we opened the widows and I heard Nazis, scratching to get in to take me away and steal my glasses. In the morning my father claimed the noise had been mosquitoes, other night insects. June bugs. The same June bugs I would watch at night on the porch. I would turn over the June bugs that had landed on their backs, skittering. I wanted to right all the June bugs.

We liked playing in the closet. We liked the thrill of hiding. We were victims but we were never caught. Sometimes we played secretary instead. Sometimes we played that we were lizards on a ship hiding from the Nazis. The Nazis would take us to a concentration camp. They would take my glasses and asthma drugs and let death just come up and kill me, like that. At Hebrew school the teachers talked about Nazis. They showed us a film on a small screen. They showed us the small bodies and the striped prison outfits. But we didn't think of it as prison. It was a death camp and the Nazis took people there. Jews.

They didn't take us because we were quiet in the woods, we sprinkled sand and dirt over our fire in the closet in the woods before they were close enough to smell the smoke. The Nazis were stupid. They were thick and dumb like animals and wore big heavy boots up to their hips. We were good so the Nazis would never find us. We were smarter and darker than the Nazis. But we were bad, something bad about us or the Nazis wouldn't be after us in the first place.

When we played secretary, our office was out in the hall and we would hold papers up to the air vents that would suck them so they stuck. When we played school, the air vents held up the pretend tests we gave each other. Sometimes we would just play without having a name to it and slide across the terrazzo floor in our stocking feet. We didn't wear shoes when we hid from the Nazis. They would find us; shoes would make too much noise.

Sometimes at dusk we played capture-the-flag with the neighbor kids in the Shelbys' front yard. After a rain we'd play stand-in-old-shoes-in-the-mud-in-the-side-yard. Sometimes we'd go to the houses still being built and stand on the extra lumber and play island-in-the-ocean. There were brown rabbits in the "empty" lot behind the house and once policemen came with horses back there on a search for someone — a criminal hiding in the overgrown weeds.

At some point we stopped playing Nazi. It wasn't my idea to start or stop. Maybe Rosi stopped playing with me, started playing with her own friends, and no more Nazis. We outgrew Nazis. When I was twenty-one I went to Amsterdam and went, alone, to the Secret Annex. It was on the tourist map. Each room was small and there was a guest book to sign with a fancy gold pen, unattached to anything, no string or chain. There were the books Anne Frank had read while she was in hiding and her movie star pictures pinned to the wall. The place was small, it had no power, too many people walking through.

Ten years after that, on a layover in the Amsterdam airport, a Greek man saw me borrow someone's tour book of the Anne Frank house. The Greek man said to his American wife: "Of course she's interested in Anne Frank — she's Jewish." The man who'd bought the book wasn't Jewish. I said nothing. The Greek had been able to tell that I was Jewish.

There is a statue of Anne Frank in front of a church in Amsterdam. In the walk-in closets in Houston now are full-length mirrors and the shelves that Rosi and I covered in our favorite pink contact paper, ruffles that we tacked along the edges. The closets are shrines, and storage. In Rosi's closet are my mother's mink coat and the large bride doll too big to play with and the felt board with felt numbers.

Where I live now I don't sit in closets. The closets are full. I'm on the third floor. No Nazis bang against my screens at night. Around the world people are defacing Jewish graves, threatening pogroms. In my neighborhood Jewish Community Center I watched a slide show of someone's trip to Europe — pictures of Auschwitz-Birkenau, rust-colored gas chamber. "It was cold," the traveler told us, "so very very cold. Everyone told us to bring our sweaters, even though it was a warm day." Ghosts breathing out cold air, having absorbed the force of someone's bare hatred. About 175 miles from the camp, the traveler had seen two young boys spray-paint on a memorial to the Warsaw Ghetto. She said, "There is hatred for Jews where there are not even Jews any more."

Anne Frank was shipped from Auschwitz-Birkenau to Bergen-Belsen. I read about her all through my childhood. She never seemed like a child to me. At parties I eat olives and crackers. Alone at night, shadows brush against my face. At the JCC, one of the slides showed words in a foreign language carved into a wall at the concentration camp. The traveler thought it said to never forget. In my late twenties when I felt sad I would go to the public library and read Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl. It was warm and familiar. It would sooth me.

Reproduced from Holocaust Girls: History, Memory, and Other Obsessions by S. L. Wisenberg by permission of the University of Nebraska Press. © 2002 by the University of Nebraska Press.

For many chapters we have followed the lives of Samoan girls, watched them change from babies to baby-tenders, learn to make the oven and weave fine mats, forsake the life of the gang to become more active members of the household, defer marriage through as many years of casual love-making as possible, finally marry and settle down to rearing children who will repeat the same cycle. As far as our material permitted, an experiment has been conducted to discover what the process of development was like in a society very different from our own. Because the length of human life and the complexity of our society did not permit us to make our experiment here, to choose a group of baby girls and bring them to maturity under conditions created for the experiment, it was necessary to go instead to another country where history had set the stage for us. There we found girl children passing through the same process of physical development through which our girls go, cutting their first teeth and losing them, cutting their second teeth, growing tall and ungainly, reaching puberty with their first menstruation, gradually reaching physical maturity, and becoming ready to produce the next generation. It was possible to say: Here are the proper conditions for an experiment; the developing girl is a constant factor in America and in Samoa; the civilisation of America and the civilisation of Samoa are different. In the course of development, the process of growth by which the girl baby becomes a grown woman, are the sudden and conspicuous bodily changes which take place at puberty accompanied by a development which is spasmodic, emotionally charged, and accompanied by an awakened religious sense, a flowering of idealism, a great desire for assertion of self against authority—or not? Is adolescence a period of mental and emotional distress for the growing girl as inevitably as teething is a period of misery for the small baby? Can we think of adolescence as a time in the life history of every girl child which carried with it symptoms of conflict and stress as surely as it implies a change in the girl’s body?

Following the Samoan girls through every aspect of their lives we have tried to answer this question, and we found throughout that we had to answer it in the negative. The adolescent girl in Samoa differed from her sister who had not reached puberty in one chief respect, that in the older girl certain bodily changes were present which were absent in the younger girl. There were no other great differences to set off the group passing through adolescence from the group which would become adolescent in two years or the group which had become adolescent two years before.

Die Geschichte vom Daumenlutscher

"Konrad," sprach die Frau Mama,
"ich geh aus und du bleibst da.
Sei hübsch ordentlich und fromm,
bis nach Haus ich wieder komm.
Und vor allem, Konrad, hör!
lutsche nicht am Daumen mehr;
denn der Schneider mit der Scher
kommt sonst ganz geschwind daher,
und die Daumen schneidet er
ab, als ob Papier es wär."

Fort geht nun die Mutter und
wupp! den Daumen in den Mund.

Bauz! da geht die Türe auf,
und herein in schnellem Lauf
springt der Schneider in die Stub
zu dem Daumen-Lutscher-Bub.
Weh! jetzt geht es klipp und klapp
mit der Scher die Daumen ab,
mit der großen, scharfen Scher!
Hei! da schreit der Konrad sehr.

Als die Mutter kommt nach Haus,
sieht der Konrad traurig aus.
Ohne Daumen steht er dort,
die sind alle beide fort.

Story of the Thumb-Sucker

"Konrad!" cried his mamma dear,
"I'll go out, but you stay here,
Try how pretty you can be
Till I come again," said she.
"Docile be, and good and mild,
Pray don't suck your thumb, my child,
For if you do, the tailor'll come
And bring his shears and snip your thumb
From off your hand as clear and clean
As if paper it had been."

Before she'd turned the south,
He'd got his thumbkin in his mouth!

Bang! here goes the door ker-slam!
Whoop! the tailor lands ker-blam!
Waves his shears, the heartless grub,
and calls for Dawmen-lutscher-bub.
Claps his weapon to the thumb,
Snips it square as head of grum,
While that lad his tongue unfurled
And fired a yell heard 'round the world.

Who can tell mother's sorrow
When she saw her boy the morrow!
There he stood all steeped in shame,
And not a thumbkin to his name.

There was this girl babysitting in a two-story house in New York and she received a phone call from a man laughing and he tells her she better go check the children. She doesn’t believe him and she goes back to watch TV. She receives a second call and the man with a deeper voice is laughing and tells her she better check the children up stairs. And then she gets scared and calls the police and the police tell her if it happens again that they’re going to trace the next call. So, the third time, he called and he was really laughing hard and she got more scared. The police call her back and tell her to leave the house right away without going upstairs or anything. The police come over and told her the call was coming from upstairs and the man had been calling after he killed each child.

KK: But we were having fun and it was kind of enjoyable until the questionnaires came out.

AI: And that was in 1943?

KK: Yeah.

AI: And can you tell me what happened then?

KK: Well, of course, my folks and my older brothers -- I was a little young so I didn't have to answer those questions, but they all answered no because they were bitter. My father felt insulted being asked those questions 'cause he had no intention of going back to Japan or anything or he had no allegiance to Japan and here they asking them questions after they take all the property away and everything so he was bitter. And the other thing was he didn't know if -- where to go home to 'cause there was nothing left so the alternative was maybe Japan. We should go back to Japan 'cause there is nothing here. So that's why he answered no. I don't think it was any loyalty to Japan or anything.

AI: So he made that decision, but then how about your older brothers?

KK: Well, they felt, whatever they do, we should do it, too. We should stick together.

AI: So their decision was mainly based on, sounds like, wanting to stay together as a family.

KK: Yeah, uh-huh.

AI: Did you have any family discussion about that that you recall?

KK: Yeah, but I wasn't in on that discussion. I think my older brothers and sister was, but I stayed out of it.

AI: And did you have any sense, had you heard any rumors, or did you have any idea of what might happen because of their decisions?

KK: No. Well, I didn't know what was gonna happen. I didn't know why they asked the questions from the first place, but it kind of tore a lot of us apart because it separated families, it separated friends. I made good friends there and all of a sudden we had to part when the decision was made that we had to go to Tule Lake. There was a lot of divisions and things like that.

KK: But you want me to tell about Okamoto?

AI: Yeah. Who was Mr. Okamoto?

KK: He was, their family was from Heart Mountain, I think, and we knew them, my family knew them. And he was working, he was a truck driver working outside the fence, and when you go out through the gates, you have to show your pass to the guard. But he has been going in and out, in and out every day so this guard knew him so he just waves him on. But, this one day it was a new guard there who just came back from the Pacific war, and he told him to halt. So he halted and he told him to get out of the truck so he got out, and he said, "Show me your pass" or something, give me. . . so he -- this driver was kind of cocky, I guess, he just threw the pass on the ground. And this guy told him to pick it up and they started to argue and all of a sudden he shot him, the guard shot this guy. And this is what I heard 'cause I wasn't there to see it. I didn't see it, from their family story, but they said that they called the medics and everything, but this guard kept everybody away with the gun and so he bleed to death right on the ground. So we had a camp-wide funeral and one of those fire breaks they had, and there were thousands of people there at the funeral. And it was after that, even during the funeral, somebody was talking about how this guy murdered this guy. Anyway, it started, I think that was the catalyst to the riot that happened because people start talking and everything. And I'm not saying that was the only reason, but there's other reasons too, but everybody start talking, pretty soon everybody got all hepped up and started walking towards the administration building.

AI: And what happened next?

KK: Well, one of the thing that they found out was the WRA was stealing some food like meat and selling on the black market, which we were supposed to get. So I, as a kid, I said, "Well, we're going to go in there and steal the meat back." So we went in the cold storage, and we lug out all these meat and took it back to our mess hall, and we had steaks for a whole week. [Laughs] But in the meantime they were throwing tear gas at us and everything and pretty soon there was martial law. And then the army came in with their tanks and started shooting the guns and everything.

AI: Were you there during the shooting?

KK: Yeah. But they didn't shoot at anything, they were shooting at people's, up high, so they didn't shoot anybody, but they were scaring the hell out of everybody. And they were coming between our barracks, the tanks, and shake. Our whole barrack was shaking.

AI: What did you do?

KK: We were hiding under the bed scared. [Laughs] Anyway, we didn't know what was gonna happen. We thought they going to start killing everybody. Who knows.

AI: So people were really afraid for their lives?

KK: Yeah. So everybody stayed in and they wouldn't come out, but then the military start -- the other thing was the military start delivering the food to the mess hall. And we were watching 'em and they just drive up and threw the -- all the food down from the truck and a lot of the things broke, eggs broke and everything. They didn't care. They just drop everything and they just went. That's how they were delivering the food. And I thought at that time, "Well, what is this anyway."

AI: So during martial law lots of the normal operations were stopped and operations that were normally carried out by the internees, internees were not allowed to do that so the Army had taken over some of these, such as delivering and so forth.

KK: Yeah, and they closed the school and all that stuff and we were under curfew. But it was kind of a bad time for us.

AI: And do you recall what else happened during that time of martial law?

KK: Well, I heard -- this is from hearing -- that they arrested a lot of people through the FBI, and they arrested a lot of people and they put them in the stockade.

AI: Did you know anyone who was put in there?

KK: No, uh-uh. No, but then that kind of subsided.

KK: But we were having fun and it was kind of enjoyable until the questionnaires came out.

AI: And that was in 1943?

KK: Yeah.

AI: And can you tell me what happened then?

KK: Well, of course, my folks and my older brothers -- I was a little young so I didn't have to answer those questions, but they all answered no because they were bitter. My father felt insulted being asked those questions 'cause he had no intention of going back to Japan or anything or he had no allegiance to Japan and here they asking them questions after they take all the property away and everything so he was bitter. And the other thing was he didn't know if -- where to go home to 'cause there was nothing left so the alternative was maybe Japan. We should go back to Japan 'cause there is nothing here. So that's why he answered no. I don't think it was any loyalty to Japan or anything.

AI: So he made that decision, but then how about your older brothers?

KK: Well, they felt, whatever they do, we should do it, too. We should stick together.

AI: So their decision was mainly based on, sounds like, wanting to stay together as a family.

KK: Yeah, uh-huh.

AI: Did you have any family discussion about that that you recall?

KK: Yeah, but I wasn't in on that discussion. I think my older brothers and sister was, but I stayed out of it.

AI: And did you have any sense, had you heard any rumors, or did you have any idea of what might happen because of their decisions?

KK: No. Well, I didn't know what was gonna happen. I didn't know why they asked the questions from the first place, but it kind of tore a lot of us apart because it separated families, it separated friends. I made good friends there and all of a sudden we had to part when the decision was made that we had to go to Tule Lake. There was a lot of divisions and things like that.

KK: But you want me to tell about Okamoto?

AI: Yeah. Who was Mr. Okamoto?

KK: He was, their family was from Heart Mountain, I think, and we knew them, my family knew them. And he was working, he was a truck driver working outside the fence, and when you go out through the gates, you have to show your pass to the guard. But he has been going in and out, in and out every day so this guard knew him so he just waves him on. But, this one day it was a new guard there who just came back from the Pacific war, and he told him to halt. So he halted and he told him to get out of the truck so he got out, and he said, "Show me your pass" or something, give me. . . so he -- this driver was kind of cocky, I guess, he just threw the pass on the ground. And this guy told him to pick it up and they started to argue and all of a sudden he shot him, the guard shot this guy. And this is what I heard 'cause I wasn't there to see it. I didn't see it, from their family story, but they said that they called the medics and everything, but this guard kept everybody away with the gun and so he bleed to death right on the ground. So we had a camp-wide funeral and one of those fire breaks they had, and there were thousands of people there at the funeral. And it was after that, even during the funeral, somebody was talking about how this guy murdered this guy. Anyway, it started, I think that was the catalyst to the riot that happened because people start talking and everything. And I'm not saying that was the only reason, but there's other reasons too, but everybody start talking, pretty soon everybody got all hepped up and started walking towards the administration building.

AI: And what happened next?

KK: Well, one of the thing that they found out was the WRA was stealing some food like meat and selling on the black market, which we were supposed to get. So I, as a kid, I said, "Well, we're going to go in there and steal the meat back." So we went in the cold storage, and we lug out all these meat and took it back to our mess hall, and we had steaks for a whole week. [Laughs] But in the meantime they were throwing tear gas at us and everything and pretty soon there was martial law. And then the army came in with their tanks and started shooting the guns and everything.

AI: Were you there during the shooting?

KK: Yeah. But they didn't shoot at anything, they were shooting at people's, up high, so they didn't shoot anybody, but they were scaring the hell out of everybody. And they were coming between our barracks, the tanks, and shake. Our whole barrack was shaking.

AI: What did you do?

KK: We were hiding under the bed scared. [Laughs] Anyway, we didn't know what was gonna happen. We thought they going to start killing everybody. Who knows.

AI: So people were really afraid for their lives?

KK: Yeah. So everybody stayed in and they wouldn't come out, but then the military start -- the other thing was the military start delivering the food to the mess hall. And we were watching 'em and they just drive up and threw the -- all the food down from the truck and a lot of the things broke, eggs broke and everything. They didn't care. They just drop everything and they just went. That's how they were delivering the food. And I thought at that time, "Well, what is this anyway."

AI: So during martial law lots of the normal operations were stopped and operations that were normally carried out by the internees, internees were not allowed to do that so the Army had taken over some of these, such as delivering and so forth.

KK: Yeah, and they closed the school and all that stuff and we were under curfew. But it was kind of a bad time for us.

AI: And do you recall what else happened during that time of martial law?

KK: Well, I heard -- this is from hearing -- that they arrested a lot of people through the FBI, and they arrested a lot of people and they put them in the stockade.

AI: Did you know anyone who was put in there?

KK: No, uh-uh. No, but then that kind of subsided.

AI: Well, so now you're in Heart Mountain. It's fall of 1942, and you still haven't finished your high school. What happened then after, when you got to Heart Mountain then? Was there a school all ready for you to join in the, start going to class again?

MK: Yeah, at the, the early school was in the barracks. Later on, they built the high school there, and gymnasium and everything. While we were there, we went to the barracks. We had, some were teachers, some were teachers' aides, some were Caucasians from the outside, and they taught all the kids, I guess the best of their ability under the condition. A funny thing, when I went to school there, nobody talked about the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and the deprivation of our constitutional rights. We were taught school like a normal school, like on the outside. Probably wrote compositions "Why I'm proud to be an American," too. [Laughs] Isn't it ridiculous, but that's the way it was. I do remember a student writing, "Why We Are Prisoners in a Concentration Camp." I remember that. I, I thought, "Gee, that kid there is really bright and has a lot of courage to write a composition like that. But everybody else is, "Why I'm proud to be American," and you know, waving the flag and everything. Kind of ridiculous, but that, that's the way people thought in those days. This one kid wrote about the Constitution and the deprivation of our rights. And I said, "Wow." That put a kind of a seed in my mind, too. We're taking this evacuation and incarceration too lightly. It actually is a deprivation, like this student says, of our constitutional rights. Probably didn't hit a lot of people, but, because I had, because I went to detention and learned about the Constitution and all that. It really hit me, because I, I knew this kid was right. Why were we there? We didn't do anything wrong. We were denied due process of the law, which is supposed to be God-given right to all Americans, and I just couldn't understand it, why more people didn't fight it. Like the coram nobis cases. There was only three, three out of 120,000 that refused to be evacuated. You would think if everybody believed in the Constitution and all that, there'd be a bigger percentage.

AI: It's July 14, 2001, we're continuing our interview with Mits Koshiyama. And Mits, I wanted to ask you to back up a bit. In the interview, you had just mentioned about, learning about the Constitution when you were in detention.

MK: Uh-huh.

AI: And you were referring to a time before the concentration camp when you were in high school back in, at Fremont High School. So would you tell a little bit about what happened, how come you were in detention, and what, what you learned while you were there.

MK: Actually, it was in grade school when it happened. I think that was about the seventh grade. I would be called by the other kids, one day, "Jap." I resented it, so I kind of fought with them. First thing I knew I was called into the principal's office, and I was sent to detention class. I don't know if the teacher trying to help me or make, punish me. I, detention is for punishment. So I believe that she made me study all about the Constitution because that's the subject I, kids didn't want to study. So I didn't want to be punished anymore, so I studied the Constitution pretty hard. Then the teacher told me, she checked my papers and everything and, "What'd you learn? Don't you know that all Americans are supposed to fight for their constitutional rights?" And it'd kind of go through one ear and the other. But I read everything about the Constitution and how it should, it's supposed to protect all citizens. She told me, "It protects all citizens," she told me. "Don't you understand?" she told me -- [laughs] -- "It protects all citizens. It's for your own protection that the Constitution was written." I, it finally sunk into my head. It took a little while, but I didn't just go to detention one day. I had so many fights that it looked like I was there, oh, most of the time. Most every recess I had to spend in detention. But it, it did turn out to be real helpful to me later on. I did realize that, like she said, the Constitution is the main law of the land. It doesn't mean -- you know presidents come and go, teachers come and go, governments come and go -- but she says, "The Constitution be always there no matter what." She says, "You'd better learn all about the Constitution because sooner or later it's gonna help you." It sure did.

I, my soul was clean because I, I really believed in the Constitution, and I believed that they should protect me at, when I needed it the most. And that, the belief in that Constitution kind of pulled me through all this difficulties that I had during the war years. I, I knew that sooner or later -- I'm not a prophet or anything -- but I know by, let's say common sense, that sooner or later after the war that people were going to realize that standing up for constitutional rights is the most important thing. And it's proven to be true. Like I was telling somebody today, the resisters' story -- was that you? [Laughs] Resisters' story is like the Boston Tea Party -- "taxation without representation." Drafting us without rights is like taxation without representation. And that's why I call it the, draft resistance, the "Japanese Boston Tea Party." I guess a lot of people laugh about that, but there's lot of similarities.

AI: Well, so now you're in Heart Mountain. It's fall of 1942, and you still haven't finished your high school. What happened then after, when you got to Heart Mountain then? Was there a school all ready for you to join in the, start going to class again?

MK: Yeah, at the, the early school was in the barracks. Later on, they built the high school there, and gymnasium and everything. While we were there, we went to the barracks. We had, some were teachers, some were teachers' aides, some were Caucasians from the outside, and they taught all the kids, I guess the best of their ability under the condition. A funny thing, when I went to school there, nobody talked about the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and the deprivation of our constitutional rights. We were taught school like a normal school, like on the outside. Probably wrote compositions "Why I'm proud to be an American," too. [Laughs] Isn't it ridiculous, but that's the way it was. I do remember a student writing, "Why We Are Prisoners in a Concentration Camp." I remember that. I, I thought, "Gee, that kid there is really bright and has a lot of courage to write a composition like that. But everybody else is, "Why I'm proud to be American," and you know, waving the flag and everything. Kind of ridiculous, but that, that's the way people thought in those days. This one kid wrote about the Constitution and the deprivation of our rights. And I said, "Wow." That put a kind of a seed in my mind, too. We're taking this evacuation and incarceration too lightly. It actually is a deprivation, like this student says, of our constitutional rights. Probably didn't hit a lot of people, but, because I had, because I went to detention and learned about the Constitution and all that. It really hit me, because I, I knew this kid was right. Why were we there? We didn't do anything wrong. We were denied due process of the law, which is supposed to be God-given right to all Americans, and I just couldn't understand it, why more people didn't fight it. Like the coram nobis cases. There was only three, three out of 120,000 that refused to be evacuated. You would think if everybody believed in the Constitution and all that, there'd be a bigger percentage.

AI: It's July 14, 2001, we're continuing our interview with Mits Koshiyama. And Mits, I wanted to ask you to back up a bit. In the interview, you had just mentioned about, learning about the Constitution when you were in detention.

MK: Uh-huh.

AI: And you were referring to a time before the concentration camp when you were in high school back in, at Fremont High School. So would you tell a little bit about what happened, how come you were in detention, and what, what you learned while you were there.

MK: Actually, it was in grade school when it happened. I think that was about the seventh grade. I would be called by the other kids, one day, "Jap." I resented it, so I kind of fought with them. First thing I knew I was called into the principal's office, and I was sent to detention class. I don't know if the teacher trying to help me or make, punish me. I, detention is for punishment. So I believe that she made me study all about the Constitution because that's the subject I, kids didn't want to study. So I didn't want to be punished anymore, so I studied the Constitution pretty hard. Then the teacher told me, she checked my papers and everything and, "What'd you learn? Don't you know that all Americans are supposed to fight for their constitutional rights?" And it'd kind of go through one ear and the other. But I read everything about the Constitution and how it should, it's supposed to protect all citizens. She told me, "It protects all citizens," she told me. "Don't you understand?" she told me -- [laughs] -- "It protects all citizens. It's for your own protection that the Constitution was written." I, it finally sunk into my head. It took a little while, but I didn't just go to detention one day. I had so many fights that it looked like I was there, oh, most of the time. Most every recess I had to spend in detention. But it, it did turn out to be real helpful to me later on. I did realize that, like she said, the Constitution is the main law of the land. It doesn't mean -- you know presidents come and go, teachers come and go, governments come and go -- but she says, "The Constitution be always there no matter what." She says, "You'd better learn all about the Constitution because sooner or later it's gonna help you." It sure did.

I, my soul was clean because I, I really believed in the Constitution, and I believed that they should protect me at, when I needed it the most. And that, the belief in that Constitution kind of pulled me through all this difficulties that I had during the war years. I, I knew that sooner or later -- I'm not a prophet or anything -- but I know by, let's say common sense, that sooner or later after the war that people were going to realize that standing up for constitutional rights is the most important thing. And it's proven to be true. Like I was telling somebody today, the resisters' story -- was that you? [Laughs] Resisters' story is like the Boston Tea Party -- "taxation without representation." Drafting us without rights is like taxation without representation. And that's why I call it the, draft resistance, the "Japanese Boston Tea Party." I guess a lot of people laugh about that, but there's lot of similarities.

EO: So tell me about your pregnancy and giving birth, and about your daughter.

AH: All right. First my pregnancy. Since I was young, it was a pretty easy nine-months' gestation. It would have been easier if we had not had to have our meals, three meals outside of our own apartment. Our own apartment finally -- served as bedroom, living room, and of course, the main things we lacked were kitchen and bathroom facilities. So three meals a day we had to get in line for food and being pregnant and suffering what most pregnant women go through -- what is known as morning sickness and nauseous periods, waiting in line for our meals during that period was very, very difficult under the, the conditions that existed there: the dust storms, the heat, the cold.

Then when. . . I think the lack of real good milk at the time which was considered very important for pregnant women to have, that, I think, affected my fetus, the fetus, the embryo a great deal. When my child was born in the camp hospital, she was born with an allergy to the powdered milk that they permitted babies to have during that time. And it was not diagnosed that she had an allergy to this powdered milk and that she should have what was called at that time, Carnation milk in a can. I requested that for my child, but they said, "No, that, all those, that has to go to the army." To the men in the armed forces, and we would not be permitted to unless we could afford to send for it from outside. And, of course, we couldn't do that, we were earning minimum salaries which ran from twelve dollars a month, sixteen dollars a month and nineteen dollars a month at that time. Nineteen dollars for the professionals, sixteen dollars for semi-skilled -- for skilled, and twelve dollars for the unskilled laborers. We could not afford to buy canned milk. So my daughter suffered tremendously. She was hospitalized in the camp, went in and out, in and out, with stomach disorders because of her inability to, to get this milk, which was, of course, the lifeline for infants at the time. Most children double their weight, most infants double their weight, birth weight, at six months. My child had not doubled her weight in a year, she was so sick.

EO: How did this make you feel?

AH: Very angry. I was very angry and felt so responsible for my child. There's nothing, nothing at all that I could do about it. And I think the lack of this important nutrition at this time of her life has affected her whole entire life. She didn't have the basic ingredients to be a healthy person.

EO: What was the hospital like?

AH: Oh, the hospital, very sort of primitive. The doctors were mostly Japanese American doctors. The white, Caucasian doctors served as supervisors, overseers. The nurses and the doctors were primarily Japanese and they were skillful. We, I'm sure, although I didn't know anything about hospitals and supplies at the time, but I have read what Japanese doctors who served in the camps said, that they lacked medicine, they lacked the proper equipment to do the necessary work that they needed to do as doctors. I think the, we were probably very low down on the totem pole in terms of priority as far as the government was concerned at the time.

EO: So tell me about your pregnancy and giving birth, and about your daughter.

AH: All right. First my pregnancy. Since I was young, it was a pretty easy nine-months' gestation. It would have been easier if we had not had to have our meals, three meals outside of our own apartment. Our own apartment finally -- served as bedroom, living room, and of course, the main things we lacked were kitchen and bathroom facilities. So three meals a day we had to get in line for food and being pregnant and suffering what most pregnant women go through -- what is known as morning sickness and nauseous periods, waiting in line for our meals during that period was very, very difficult under the, the conditions that existed there: the dust storms, the heat, the cold.

Then when. . . I think the lack of real good milk at the time which was considered very important for pregnant women to have, that, I think, affected my fetus, the fetus, the embryo a great deal. When my child was born in the camp hospital, she was born with an allergy to the powdered milk that they permitted babies to have during that time. And it was not diagnosed that she had an allergy to this powdered milk and that she should have what was called at that time, Carnation milk in a can. I requested that for my child, but they said, "No, that, all those, that has to go to the army." To the men in the armed forces, and we would not be permitted to unless we could afford to send for it from outside. And, of course, we couldn't do that, we were earning minimum salaries which ran from twelve dollars a month, sixteen dollars a month and nineteen dollars a month at that time. Nineteen dollars for the professionals, sixteen dollars for semi-skilled -- for skilled, and twelve dollars for the unskilled laborers. We could not afford to buy canned milk. So my daughter suffered tremendously. She was hospitalized in the camp, went in and out, in and out, with stomach disorders because of her inability to, to get this milk, which was, of course, the lifeline for infants at the time. Most children double their weight, most infants double their weight, birth weight, at six months. My child had not doubled her weight in a year, she was so sick.

EO: How did this make you feel?

AH: Very angry. I was very angry and felt so responsible for my child. There's nothing, nothing at all that I could do about it. And I think the lack of this important nutrition at this time of her life has affected her whole entire life. She didn't have the basic ingredients to be a healthy person.

EO: What was the hospital like?

AH: Oh, the hospital, very sort of primitive. The doctors were mostly Japanese American doctors. The white, Caucasian doctors served as supervisors, overseers. The nurses and the doctors were primarily Japanese and they were skillful. We, I'm sure, although I didn't know anything about hospitals and supplies at the time, but I have read what Japanese doctors who served in the camps said, that they lacked medicine, they lacked the proper equipment to do the necessary work that they needed to do as doctors. I think the, we were probably very low down on the totem pole in terms of priority as far as the government was concerned at the time.

EO: So tell me, now, about having to move. How long did you have, and what did you decide to take, and how did you dispose of things?

AH: Oh. I was all of seventeen years old, ready to graduate high school, madly in love with this young Nisei man, a young man, who lived on the other side of town, other side of Los Angeles. We were all frantic about where each one of us would be moving to. Los Angeles was a big area, it was divided into different sections. Certain areas would be, were told they would be going somewhere, no name, but a certain section of, inland. And therefore, since the army did not notify each family exactly where they would be going, what kind of weather they would be encountering, or exactly when they would be moving, efforts within the, each family started to roll, to get rid of, to sell or to store their household goods. And then trying to separate out what they thought they would need and what they thought they could either store or sell. It was a hectic, frantic time for all the Japanese families. In our family, my father, as a matter of fact, destroyed all of his Japanese language books because rumors spread that if the FBI came to your home and found Japanese language books, your father or uncle, or mother would be taken away and fear just gripped the community over things like that. My father destroyed almost all of his Japanese language books, including a book that he had written -- he had a number of copies of a autobiography my sister said he had written. Also, he had been carrying around the ashes of one of my sisters, a half-sister, and my mother told me many, many years later that he had buried those ashes in the backyard of our home in Los Angeles. She didn't know where, what part of the yard. I've often thought of going back to that house, but I didn't know how to approach the occupant of the house to ask if I could dig up his backyard to look for the ashes of my sister my father had buried fifty years ago. [Laughs] So I've never done it. But I've passed in front of the house a couple of times, and wondered what could I do.

EO: And he had her ashes because -- why, why was he carrying her ashes around?

AH: I'm not sure. You know, I think that he thought perhaps -- she was born in Japan -- and I have a feeling he had hoped one day to take her ashes back to Japan. Either that or he was waiting for, to get settled someplace, in say, southern California, where he could feel, this is where we're going to set our roots, place our roots, and perhaps get our family plot, and bury her there. But I have a feeling it was that he was planning to take her ashes back to Japan.

EO: Did they bury anything? They burned these books. Did you leave anything else? I mean, where, what did you do with your things?

AH: Oh, all right. Many families owned their homes, so they had a lot more problems in terms of their economic situation and property. We were so poor, we didn't own the home, we were renting, so that, that was not as big a problem for us. Our problem was what to take, what to destroy, what to sell. And the neighbors, the persons, the non-Japanese who were not moving, being asked to move, knew that the shorter time we had to leave, the more willing we would be to lower our prices. So there were "vultures" all around, hanging around for days, waiting for the day that we would move, and that we would literally have to give things away. My mother, of course, had some small items, beautiful little dishes from Japan, and I think some heirlooms that she decided to sell -- brooches, obitome -- things like that that I, I know that she had to get rid of, to sell, because she felt we must take what is absolutely necessary as long as we were permitted to take only what we could carry, at the time. And I have heard many stories of mothers who were so furious at the insulting prices that were offered by buyers, that they rather, rather than sell them at these prices, they would break the dishes or the big platters that they cherished so much. I believe those who left for the camps early on did not have the opportunity, or the knowledge at the time, or the permission by the government, that they could store some things. That kind of information came later on and those who moved into these army-run assembly centers later on, say, June, July, they were told that they could store some things. So many of those families were able to keep household goods, furnitures, where those of us who left very early could not do that. I myself -- yes?

EO: At whose expense?

AH: The furniture could be stored sometimes in Buddhist churches, or community centers. The government itself offered in certain areas to store the furniture, but with a caveat: you store them at your own expense, at your own risk. And, of course, as, when many folks went back to that area later on, they found their homes and property vandalized, broken, stolen.

EO: So tell me, now, about having to move. How long did you have, and what did you decide to take, and how did you dispose of things?

AH: Oh. I was all of seventeen years old, ready to graduate high school, madly in love with this young Nisei man, a young man, who lived on the other side of town, other side of Los Angeles. We were all frantic about where each one of us would be moving to. Los Angeles was a big area, it was divided into different sections. Certain areas would be, were told they would be going somewhere, no name, but a certain section of, inland. And therefore, since the army did not notify each family exactly where they would be going, what kind of weather they would be encountering, or exactly when they would be moving, efforts within the, each family started to roll, to get rid of, to sell or to store their household goods. And then trying to separate out what they thought they would need and what they thought they could either store or sell. It was a hectic, frantic time for all the Japanese families. In our family, my father, as a matter of fact, destroyed all of his Japanese language books because rumors spread that if the FBI came to your home and found Japanese language books, your father or uncle, or mother would be taken away and fear just gripped the community over things like that. My father destroyed almost all of his Japanese language books, including a book that he had written -- he had a number of copies of a autobiography my sister said he had written. Also, he had been carrying around the ashes of one of my sisters, a half-sister, and my mother told me many, many years later that he had buried those ashes in the backyard of our home in Los Angeles. She didn't know where, what part of the yard. I've often thought of going back to that house, but I didn't know how to approach the occupant of the house to ask if I could dig up his backyard to look for the ashes of my sister my father had buried fifty years ago. [Laughs] So I've never done it. But I've passed in front of the house a couple of times, and wondered what could I do.

EO: And he had her ashes because -- why, why was he carrying her ashes around?

AH: I'm not sure. You know, I think that he thought perhaps -- she was born in Japan -- and I have a feeling he had hoped one day to take her ashes back to Japan. Either that or he was waiting for, to get settled someplace, in say, southern California, where he could feel, this is where we're going to set our roots, place our roots, and perhaps get our family plot, and bury her there. But I have a feeling it was that he was planning to take her ashes back to Japan.

EO: Did they bury anything? They burned these books. Did you leave anything else? I mean, where, what did you do with your things?

AH: Oh, all right. Many families owned their homes, so they had a lot more problems in terms of their economic situation and property. We were so poor, we didn't own the home, we were renting, so that, that was not as big a problem for us. Our problem was what to take, what to destroy, what to sell. And the neighbors, the persons, the non-Japanese who were not moving, being asked to move, knew that the shorter time we had to leave, the more willing we would be to lower our prices. So there were "vultures" all around, hanging around for days, waiting for the day that we would move, and that we would literally have to give things away. My mother, of course, had some small items, beautiful little dishes from Japan, and I think some heirlooms that she decided to sell -- brooches, obitome -- things like that that I, I know that she had to get rid of, to sell, because she felt we must take what is absolutely necessary as long as we were permitted to take only what we could carry, at the time. And I have heard many stories of mothers who were so furious at the insulting prices that were offered by buyers, that they rather, rather than sell them at these prices, they would break the dishes or the big platters that they cherished so much. I believe those who left for the camps early on did not have the opportunity, or the knowledge at the time, or the permission by the government, that they could store some things. That kind of information came later on and those who moved into these army-run assembly centers later on, say, June, July, they were told that they could store some things. So many of those families were able to keep household goods, furnitures, where those of us who left very early could not do that. I myself -- yes?

EO: At whose expense?

AH: The furniture could be stored sometimes in Buddhist churches, or community centers. The government itself offered in certain areas to store the furniture, but with a caveat: you store them at your own expense, at your own risk. And, of course, as, when many folks went back to that area later on, they found their homes and property vandalized, broken, stolen.