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VY: Okay, so when it was time to leave Minidoka, let's start talking about that. What happened and why did you leave and where did you go?

DS: I think the story begins in 1943 in the spring of 1943 shortly after we arrived, less than six months after we arrived, the government, the War Relocation Authority had a program allowing people to leave the camps to places other than the West Coast. It was called an indefinite leave program, and one stipulation was that you would have a sponsor that would receive you if you left the camp. My aunt Rae (Nakamura), who I described to you as being opportunistic, entrepreneurial, risk-taking, was one of the first to leave Minidoka in the early spring of 1943, and she was sponsored by the Catholic church in Bloomington, Illinois. And she left the camps, left her sister, my mother and three children, took her two children to, and her husband, Bloomington, Illinois, where they lived in a church rectory and also found work for the bulk of them. And they settled briefly in Bloomington, Illinois, and shortly thereafter, within the year, my aunt Rae was on a train to someplace, traveling through Chicago through Milwaukee, got off the train in Milwaukee. And at the train station there's a beautiful little park called the Red Arrow Park. The Red Arrow Park was (named after a U.S. Army) division that fought bravely in World War I, and it was a memorial to those that perished in World War I. It's a beautiful park right adjacent to the train station. And the story goes that my aunt Rae got off the train, walked through the park, and she said, "You know, if this is a community that has these nice parks, I think I'd like to live here." So before you knew it, she moved her family to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where her husband got a job at the Firestone Tire company.

And Milwaukee, Wisconsin, if you don't know, is a very Germanic community. It's like eighty percent German and twenty percent Jewish. And it was middle class, it was, if you read the novel Buddenbrooks about middle-class German families in Germany, this is what you had in Milwaukee. Heavy industry, lots of work, and a different attitude because they were of German descent. Their politics were different, the mayor of Milwaukee was the last socialist mayor in the United States. So it was, in a way, fortuitous that my aunt got off the train after leaving Minidoka, and decided on the spur of the moment to move to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. So let's go back to Minidoka where my mother and three children, she applied for an indefinite leave, and in the spring of 1944, (...) almost two years in the camps, she applied for indefinite leave and got, was arranged by the American Home Baptist Mission group to move to a farm in Wisconsin, in Madison, Wisconsin. The community is called Black Earth, and the farm was owned by a socialist farmer who was widowed and needed some household help. So my mother got permission under the indefinite leave program to leave the camps, take the three boys, and travel by herself on a troop train moving eastbound to a farm in the middle of the state of Wisconsin.

<End Segment 15> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.