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TI: Okay, Ruth, we're going start the second section and we had just finished talking about Santa Anita and you were just about to talk about going to Poston. So your mother had just delivered your baby brother and like two weeks later you're now going to Poston. So why don't you pick up the story here.

RO: Okay, well on the train my mother and little baby brother were put in the train where they put all the sickly people. I can't remember what they call that train or that car.

TI: So was it like a Pullman car?

RO: Yeah, it's very dark, all the windows are drawn and there's beds in there and that's where my mother was with my little brother, two week old brother. And apparently it had gotten very stuffy in there and Dan was having a hard time breathing. So I get a tap on the shoulder and my father says, "Yoshiko, you go there and let your mom and Daniel come out." So they took my seat and got fresh air, I was sent into this dungeon for the rest of the trip to Poston. But I was glad that my mother, I knew that she needed to get out, it was awful in there, very dark and anyway we arrived in Poston in Parker. And then they put us on a truck and sent us down to Camp III. I know that it was a truck because I've seen pictures of it, not that I remember it myself 'cause once we arrived in Camp III, the memories I have of Camp III is our room, our twenty by twenty-four foot "apartment." And my father was handy with his hands so he built a little kitchenette for my mother because Dan was just two weeks old and my mother's milk was drying up and so she needed to heat up milk. And what we did as a family, the three of us kids, we would go eat at the mess hall and at each meal one of us would bring our milk back to the apartment or place so my mother could heat it up and feed Dan. So I teased Dan about, "You know, we sacrificed our milk for you," so every the three meals one of us would bring our milk back.

TI: So it's interesting, they didn't really have any like special provisions for babies or things like that where they would have formula or something?

RO: To make the formula put it... right, no they didn't.

TI: So everyone just had to fend for themselves.

RO: Right, at least that's how I remember it 'cause I sacrificed my milk once a day.

TI: And so a little kitchenette so a little like hot plate?

RO: Right, there was a hot plate that on one of my father's trips out to Chicago, he would get permission to go out and do some church business, conference business because he was the conference secretary apparently. So he came back with a hot plate one time and that caused a terrible accident. My mother was heating up something on the hot plate and unfortunately the only kind of pot she had was a Corning glass pot. And she put it on the burner and she lifted it up and the bottom fell out and just scorched her leg just totally, her skin just all peeled off. So she was sent to the hospital of course and I remember that because it was awful for my poor mother. Then Dan, I forgot how old... he was two years old, came down with pneumonia so he was sent to the hospital and my poor mother, every time if she went to visit him he would cry and scream when she'd leave. So the nurses there asked her not come but she wanted to have Dan checked on so she had our neighbors go up there and check to make sure, you know, see Dan every day. So it was pretty tough on my mother, I mean, she's in her forties, early forties, I mean to first of all lose all the skin on one leg and then having a baby that she couldn't go to see at the hospital when he got pneumonia, it was tough. I think that her early death, the cancer, must have been started during those turbulent years, 'cause she died ten years after we came home or eleven years almost.

TI: So you think maybe the stress or just the --

RO: I think so 'cause she's young, she was only fifty-five, fifty-six.

<End Segment 10> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.