<Begin Segment 6>

TI: So you walked to Memorial Auditorium in Sacramento. What was that like?

KG: The whole place when we got there was just cluttered with bundles of bedding and suitcases and stuff like that, with nametags, family tags and all. And it's funny, my sister says she remembers the nametag, and she remembers the number the family had, which surprised me. And she was just about seven, and she says that number has stuck in her mind. And she says sometime she ought to play that number on the lottery and see what happens. [Laughs]

TI: I'm guessing that at her age, too, someone probably told her that that was a really important number, and if she ever got lost or something, that number was probably important.

KG: Well, yeah. But there's something that happened in camp that kind of hit me. She was a child, seven when she went in, ten when she got out. And the first time we got off the bus, she looked around and she said, "This town doesn't have a barbed wire fence around it."

TI: Oh, so this is after you left Tule Lake and you were in Pennsylvania?

KG: No, we were just on the road leaving. And that hit me, and then I realized when you think of children's art, all they drew were barracks and barracks and towerhouses and barbed wire fences. And that's the other thing about the government not wanting to publicize the fact that there was a camp. Well, they called it a "relocation center" rather than camps. And when visitors came, they were not allowed to take pictures of the barbed wire fence or the towerhouses and the guns and all that. And those were things that just stuck in my sister's mind, and she just thought that's the way the world was.

TI: Yeah, that is interesting. That's powerful when you think about it, because all she knew, really, or could remember...

KG: Yeah, she completely forgot about what the outside was like. And she says, "How come this town doesn't have a barbed wire fence around it?"

TI: Yeah, that's powerful. So going back to Memorial Auditorium, was it hard to find your parents and your sister?

KG: No, no. There were people milling around, but no.

TI: And so from there, what happened? So you're there with your luggage and now together with families, you had tags...

KG: So we had soldiers with guns put us on the bus, and we went to camp.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2015 Densho. All Rights Reserved.