concentration camps Quotes

“When a private talk over a bottle of wine is broadcast on the radio, what can it mean but that the world is turning into a concentration camp? […] A concentration camp is the complete obliteration of privacy.”

“There came the news, at first somewhat guarded, then, a few days later, clear and outspoken, of the German concentration camps.”

“The simple truth is the camp was no more ready for us when we got there than we were ready for it. We had only the dimmest ideas of what to expect.”

“They cannot deprive us of our homes and our fishing boats and our automobiles and lock us up for three years and then just turn us loose into the cities again. They have to help us get a new start.”

“The name Manzanar meant nothing to us when we left Boyle Heights. We didn’t know where it was or what it was. We went because the government ordered us to.”

“The people who had it hardest during the first few months were young couples like these, many of whom had married just before the evacuation began, in order not to be separated and sent to different camps. Our two rooms were crowded, but at least it was all in the family.”

“A couple of years after the camps opened, sociologists studying the life noticed what had happened to the families . . . My own family, after three years of mess hall living, collapsed as an integrated unit.”

“Moving under what appeared to be government protection, to an area less directly threatened by the war seemed not such a bad idea at all. For some it actually sounded like a fine adventure.”

“We woke early, shivering and coated with dust that had blown up through the knotholes and in through the slits around the doorway. During the night Mama had unpacked all our clothes and heaped them on our beds for warmth.”

“I couldn’t understand why he was home all day, when Mama had to go out working. I was ashamed of him for that and, in a deeper way, for being what had led to our imprisonment, that is, for being so unalterably Japanese.”

“You might say it would have happened sooner or later anyway, this sliding apart of such a large family, in postwar California. But there is no escaping the fact that our internment accelerated the process, made it happen so suddenly it was almost tangible. Not only did we stop eating at home, there was no longer a home to eat in.”

“All the coldness and darkness and infinite loneliness of the world filled David’s mind until it seemed ready to burst.”

“Violence and cruelty were just a stupid person’s way of making himself felt because it was easier to use your hands to strike a blow than to use your brain to find a logical and just solution to a problem.”

“She was burning…the girl! It was not the shed, it was the girl they were talking about—the little who looked so like a flower was inside that fire!”

“For a moment David was tempted to think that perhaps there were no good people at all outside concentration camps, but then he reminded himself of the sailor and Angelo and the English people who might have been ignorant but were certainly not bad.”

“Everyone had a story about a family member who’d had to go in to hiding, or a friend who’d been dragged off to a concentration camp, or a house that had been destroyed by a bomb. Then they moved on to rumours about the war- about Patton, the American general who was making such good progress on the Western Front...”