<Begin Segment 5>

SY: So do you actually remember the transition from Shonien to Manzanar, how you got there?

KS: That part there I wasn't fully aware, other than that, in fact, I don't even recall the long bus trip that was supposedly -- I know we gathered what little we had, got in the bus, and took this long trip into the middle of the desert. I'm not conscious of all that time period of being in the bus, and I'm not even conscious of getting there and then having, being able to see the barracks for the first time. It doesn't, it didn't stay with me.

SY: Do you remember your quarters though, what your quarters were like?

KS: Yeah, I remember the quarters. I remember, I don't remember which bed it was, but then I remember, I can pinpoint the room. The barrack is full of, full length of the barrack. I was standing on maybe four or five feet of height from the ground where the first floor was, and the one section of the barrack on the one end is one whole room with a little room, private room for the supervisor, I mean this [inaudible] supervisor. And then the central area, there was the bathroom section. They had the showers, both, two stalls, big showers, and stalls and sinks for... and then the other room section was for the teenagers, and we had this hallway in between. And I think there was, the bathroom was on one side, so I imagine, now that I'm thinking about it, possibly there was two other supervisors' rooms or quarters there.

SY: On the other side.

KS: Yeah, on the other side, down the, down the way. So like, much like the military barracks at that time, as far as pattern's concerned.

SY: But it was very self-enclosed. In other words, you didn't have outdoor bathrooms like the rest.

KS: No, it was enclosed.

SY: So it was part of the barracks, the bathrooms.

KS: Yeah. Well, for kids they needed that. I mean, otherwise the, like Block 18 and all these others, they had a whole series of buildings and maybe five, four or five individual apartment-like rooms in this one hundred foot barrack, and it had one faucet, as far as I can recall, they had one faucet in the corner of the barrack outside, which froze over during the cold weather. But in the middle of that you had, I think it was minimum three or maybe four small barracks. One was the showers for the males, next one was the showers and bathroom stuff for females, and then the next one was the, as I can recall, was the laundry room and the furnace room for the hot water supply. Now, far down at the other end of the barracks it was, one barrack was reserved for, like a playroom, not for, I mean for the normal people that were out in the barracks.

SY: You're talking about the general population, not so much...

KS: Right. And then among the grouping of these barracks were set up a double barrack, double buildings, which was mess, central mess hall. So all the people'd come there for the...

SY: But in the Children's Village --

KS: The kitchen, we had the, our quarters, then we had the children's quarters, and then we had the adults, I mean the senior, the storage area for the food and the kitchen area and then the dining, for all the kids, go to the one dining room area.

SY: And there was, so there was really no intermingling with the people in the regular barracks.

KS: No. It was an isolated area.

SY: And so you only --

KS: If we, we weren't even allowed to go outside the border of the orphanage. Otherwise, kids'd disappear. [Laughs]

SY: And was it fenced off?

KS: It wasn't necessarily fenced off. There's just imaginary fencing, says, "Don't go beyond this line here." [Laughs]

SY: Did it make you want --

KS: The pear orchard is also off limits, so we...

SY: Did you sneak out?

KS: We'd sneak out a little bit, but at that time we weren't that adventuresome to go, nowhere to go, really.

SY: Yeah.

KS: And they keep telling us, says, "Don't go near the fence or they'll shoot you there."

SY: Really? They actually told you that?

KS: But we were far enough from the fence, it would've been a long walk to get there.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 2012 Densho. All Rights Reserved.