Wolfgang--what a wonderfully evocative piece. I have take the libery of printing it out to pass on to some friends. I salute you and your courage in sharing your experience.

M.Ted, it IS important to note that those murdered WERE Jews, and were Gypsies, and were homosexuals. People who happened to be Jewish or the other proscribed classes were murdered SPECIFICALLY because they were what they were. To gloss over that fact is to lessen the horror of it all.

Frogprince, I was a two year old in southern California at our entrance into WWII. I lived in the West Los Angeles area where there were numerous Nisei nurseries and truck farms during my high school years. I even knew the liquor store owner who fought in the Nisei division in Europe, and had Nisei friends in school and the 'hood'. But nobody ever spoke of the internment camps. It wasn't until my senior year at UCLA that I first heard about that blot on our history; it was a paper presented by a fellow (caucasion) student in our historiography seminar. BTW the California attorney-general who requested the internment was Earl Warren, whose Supreme Court broke educational segregation in the U.S.