<Begin Segment 9>

TI: I want to go back to when the Japanese were leaving. First, for you, what kind of thoughts went through your mind when you saw your classmates, Pauline and your other classmates being removed from Seattle?

BS: Well, we thought that, our other neighbors, we had the Dodenhoelt family on our block and the Schmidt family lived on Fifteenth, and we always knew that they were gonna be next.

TI: So they're German?

BS: The German kids, I mean, the Japanese kids went, and then the German kids were gonna be next, and it never happened. They never talked about it. They were never, I know that they were a little bit hesitant, the families must've talked about it, about being, "Be careful what you do," "Behave yourself," and all this stuff, "Don't bring attention to yourself." But it never happened, and so we, the kids growing up, we started to see this pattern. We're saying the Asian kids, the dark kids are the ones that were uprooted. Our classmates, Japanese American, were uprooted and sent away, and then we're at war with Germany but our German playmates weren't, so we knew something was wrong there, something different was there. So we didn't know the word racism then or even segregation then, but we knew there was something different, something wrong with growing up with two different classifications.

TI: Or when you talk about sort of segregation, I was gonna ask, you mention how you had the Maryknoll school and two blocks away you had Immaculate. So it sounds like at Maryknoll you had the Japanese and Filipinos, and Immaculate before the war you had the whites, and so it was a form of segregation in some ways the Catholic Church did, in terms of school.

BS: Yeah. I think there were a few Filipinos that went to Immaculate, and there was African American families that also sent their kids to Immaculate, so it wasn't segregated that way. It was just neighborhood, it's a neighborhood, it was a parochial school in the neighborhood and the Catholic kids from that neighborhood went to that school whether they were black or white. They were mostly white, but it didn't look like it was segregated. It was sort of a, I think people wanted to go to Maryknoll. It was a classy place, classy school to go to. Not athletic wise or anything, but the school itself, the Maryknoll church and mission school just looked cool. I don't know if you've ever seen photos of it, but it was a cool, cool place to be, and they had bazaars and they had Christmas parties. It was a neat environment to grow up in. It was a really close knit environment with Japanese and Filipino families.

TI: Okay, good. So going back to when the Japanese were leaving, did any of the sisters or fathers or priests say anything about what was happening to you and the students as this was going on?

BS: No, as I remembered it, the nuns were devastated and they said, "Because of the war, your playmates will have to leave for a while." And that's, that in a sense is all I got out of it. Your playmates had to leave. I think they were trying to play down this hysteria and all this kind of stuff. Your playmates had to leave. That's all I remember our schoolroom teacher, Sister whatever her name was, saying.

TI: So no one -- go ahead.

BS: Father Tibesar, he, I think his sermons were pretty, it was probably a little bit more, little bit more sharp. As you're growing up, a first grader, you don't remember sermons, but I remember it as raising his voice about our neighbors, kids from our school and our neighbors being sent away for something someone else, some other country did. And that's, that's the only thing that ever resonated with me, was the anger in his voice. And he followed, I think he followed the families to internment, Father Tibesar and then the Baptist minister who lived around the corner from us.

TI: Reverend Andrews.

BS: Andrews, he lived on Fifteenth and Alder.

TI: Yeah, both Father Tibesar and Reverend Andrews were at Minidoka during that time.

BS: Yeah.

TI: Now, did they ever talk about, I mean, given that you're at a Catholic school, religion or God in terms of, how could this have happened and the fairness of it? Was anything like that?

BS: We thought that, little kids. You're talking about love your neighbor and all that, and it, no one ever, no one ever had to talk about that to us. It was just in our own minds that something was wrong here. The Japanese kids, German kids, brown kids, white kids, we, no one had to tell us that there was something different here, or we just sort of thought of it ourselves that something was wrong. Something's not right with this picture.

TI: And so when things like that happen, does that question religion, your concept of a God, like God's supposed to be sort of just and yet this injustice is happening right in front of you?

BS: You know, I wasn't that sophisticated then. I would've thought of that later on, probably, but at that time I never brought that religion into things until later on when I started saying it's not equal out there for some reason, and even if you're Christian it's not equal.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.