<Begin Segment 14>

TI: So let's go back to thinking about what the National Park Service is, is doing. What do you think they should do out there?

DK: Well, as far as -- they only got seventy acres, so they can't recreate the camp, which I'd be against. But a monument and telling both sides of the story is perfectly all right with me. And I think that down the road, busloads of kids from schools and same thing as the interpretive center in here in the Oregon Trail, I worked on it for twelve, fourteen years, and that's, they had dozens of kids there telling about that. And so consequently, Native Americans and European Americans are better, getting along better now than they have in the last two hundred years, or hundred and fifty years. So that's what needs to happen with this, is people having conversations -- just like we have, or are having, or in your workplace. Now, I was disappointed in -- and I never talked about this much, he hasn't either, most of us didn't talk about the hardships, because it was just what you had to do. But my daughter works in a place where there's a Japanese American there, and he's got her convinced that we didn't treat the Japanese Americans right. And I feel bad about that, said that Germans and Italians didn't get picked up. Well, they did get picked up, not en masse. They got, like, forty-four thousand of 'em on the West Coast of German, and twenty-seven thousand, or maybe it's the other way around.

TI: Twenty-seven hundred, I think. It was like forty-four hundred and twenty-, I think the numbers I've seen in terms of the actual internment, there were, yeah, roughly about three thousand Italians, about forty-five hundred Germans, and then, actually, in that same sort of roundup -- this was done by the FBI -- there were about fifty-five hundred Japanese aliens. And so what happened right after Pearl Harbor was the FBI picked up, oh, roughly eleven thousand people throughout the United States, and they were put in Department of Justice internment camps. What I think Japanese Americans are saying, though, what happened only to, to this other group, which primarily were U.S. citizens, was this round-up and put into places like Minidoka, that was, that a different part. But you're right that German nationals, Italian nationals, along with Japanese nationals were all picked up, because they were viewed as potentially the most, as the potentially "dangerous" ones, I think.

DK: Uh-huh. There was, in fact, just ten miles east of Hunt, in Minidoka County which this isn't, it's called Minidoka but it isn't, there's a German and Italian camp, right there in ten miles of each other.

TI: So an internment camp was there.

DK: Yeah, internment camp, yeah. I mean, it was more like a, treated a little different than the Japanese got treated. There was more guards per person and all that.

<End Segment 14> - Copyright © 2005 Densho. All Rights Reserved.