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MA: So, going back a little bit, there was actually, Amache was a camp, a WRA camp in Colorado. Did you hear about Amache? Did you know what was going on there, or that they were building a camp in Colorado?
BK: No, that's quite a few miles away from us and I wasn't aware of it until I got older and started becoming interested in the history of the Japanese Americans and everything. But no, I wasn't aware of it. But there was a German POW camp in the San Luis Valley, not too far from us, in Monte Vista.
MA: Really?
BK: Yeah, and I wasn't aware of that until just a few years ago, when the museum, the local museum in Del Norte had some pictures that some of the German POWs had painted and they were displaying them in the museum.
MA: But you had never heard anything about it when you were young.
BK: No. And apparently they worked on some of the farms up in that area, and were treated good.
MA: Did people from Amache, or even from other camps, resettle sort of maybe during or after the war, in Alamosa and in the valley area?
BK: Yeah, there was one family in particular. He's a dental technician, and his family was in Granada, in Amache.
MA: Who came to --
BK: And he settled in Alamosa, uh-huh. And there might have been, yeah, there was another family too, they were in one of the camps and I don't remember which one.
MA: Did they stay, or did they generally move back?
BK: The daughter still lives there. And the man from Amache has passed away.
MA: It seems like just from what you were saying before, a lot more people came maybe before the camps opened in early 1942, and that came during that time then came after the war, during the war.
BK: And they're the ones that kinda stayed and they went back to California. We didn't have too many straight out of the camps. Did you know that Amache is the name of an American Indian?
MA: I didn't know that.
BK: Isn't that ironic? [Laughs] 'Cause we didn't treat the American Indians very well, either.
<End Segment 12> - Copyright ©2008 Densho. All Rights Reserved.