<Begin Segment 29>

AI: Did... before we go up to Tule Lake, I wanted to ask one more thing about Walerga, at the assembly center. You had mentioned that when you were first coming in on the bus and you saw this place and you felt "they can't put us in a place like this," well, once you were actually in there, what happened to your, how did you feel toward the government that... and did you... how, what did you feel about yourself as an American now that you were being kept in this place?

EH: Well, you know, I think the times are so frantic, you don't have time to think about the government and your status. I think eventually you do, but... and I, I guess maybe it's part of our nature. It's certainly kind of part, somehow instinct of mine that you're always looking for something to do. "There's a lot to do, I know," kind of feeling. So you go looking. But that's how we happened to be assigned a stack of tasks of making an alphabetized file. And that never got completed. It was so hot, for one thing, and we would start asking about all our friends and have you seen them and where did they go? And it's not really gossiping, but we really... and we knew we were getting scattered. In fact, I think I have to admit that after evacuation there were only one or two friends that I really con-, knew where they were constantly. All the other friends I had... you know, it takes reading. There's a Tule Lake directory and several, several pages of copies of the newspaper and social events particularly. And until I got that Tule Lake directory maybe ten years ago at the most, I didn't remember that I had, they gave me a farewell party or that I attended somebody's shower or... and, and where people went. They, they told my story, they said I was going to Estes Park to... and, and so everybody else, they went to different cities -- Cleveland, St. Louis -- and so for the first time, fifty, sixty years later, you realize where people landed. And it, it's, that kind of reference material is, is significant. I don't know, some of it is mental sanity to know. It's kind of stabilizing life.

AI: But at the time, things were in kind of --

EH: Well, and Sacra-, and Walerga was so primitive. There wasn't much time. We really didn't do much of any kind of work. There wasn't... I think the feeling was there wasn't any time to organize a, a miniature city or go through personnel interviews and, and decide what to do. There was... there were church services, I'm sure.

AI: In fact, I think I remember reading that people were not held in Walerga as long as in some other assembly centers. That it was... I think I read that it was somewhere toward the end of June that almost everybody was moved out.

EH: No.

AI: No?

EH: We didn't leave until I think... I'm, I'm pretty firm about (August 7th) or something like that, that we got into Tule Lake.

<End Segment 29> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.