<Begin Segment 5>

TK: Before we get to the commission itself, do you remember some of the responses that people made in terms of testimony and some of your reactions to them, the ones that you sent out as rough drafts and they came back? Do you remember some the things that came back that struck you?

AM: Well, you know, more than anything else, is just this heart-rending sense of loss. I mean, people who had spent fifteen, twenty years, in a way in quite routine lives and occupations. I mean, truck farmers, people who ran small stores. Just very solid, unexceptional members of a town or of a city and the way in which their lives were just completely disrupted by the exclusion and the shock of it all. And then a lot about life in the camps, which frequently had two sides to it. There's the deprivation and the psychological battles that camp life produced, and in the loyalty oath's the most obvious example. There were (...) places where people had to make very real difficult choices about what they were going to do, vis-a-vis the government, vis-a-vis other people in the camps. But on the other side of it, too, life goes on. And human beings are going to make the best of bad situations, so that there are these other stories about the baseball teams and the gardens and so on. And there is again, just a very, very touching and powerful side to people who make a genuine and rich human life out of very barren and very adverse human conditions. And there's a lot of that in the testimony.

BF: I was going to ask about what other duties did the staff perform for the commission? You talked about preparing transcripts. Was there also -- was the staff compiling the research and actually sort of summarizing it in memoranda, or simply passing on what they had found, as they had found it?

AM: I think that we -- this is primarily me and maybe one or two others -- gave one or two oral briefings of what we were finding in the documents, but (...) we moved pretty rapidly. One -- let me back up. Because there's one thing that explains the situation a little bit. The life and funding of the commission when I came was uncertain. I mean, I may not remember the dates properly, but I think that as the statute stood when I arrived, all the work was to be finished within about five months, which is a very short period of time. [Laughs] And there was not really anything on paper. So that we -- obviously the statute got changed, of course, that autumn because we started into this, we didn't feel we had the time to do anything extra as it were. And so we had some of the oral briefings and discussion, and we may have had a couple of brief memos, but nothing, nothing very extensive, and then (we) tried to move very quickly into providing drafts of (parts) of what the report would be. And those didn't necessarily come in the order in which the final report was written and presented, but it -- as we got them done, obviously, there were some that pretty much stand on their own like the discussion of the situation of Hawaii, or the German Americans, for instance -- the basic history, I think we tried to present in a chronological fashion, but there were other parts that clearly weren't like that and we sort of went on from there.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 1997 Densho. All Rights Reserved.