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ES: My name is Eiichi Edward Sakauye, born January 25, 1912, and still living in the place where I was born, San Jose, California, born and educated here. You're about to see my experience in one of the ten relocation centers. The entire two and a half years that I've been there at Heart Mountain, Wyoming, which is a concentration camp located between the town of Cody and Powell, on a plateau with elevation of a little over four thousand feet, the most desolate, barren country. The camp comprised of about 11,000 evacuees. Their tarpapered buildings where evacuees were interned, in between this opening that is the recreational fields, where we have baseball and ice skating and other community activities, outdoor activities. I was standing on, on the guards, that was a guard tower just now, went by so fast, and I had permission from the guard to be able to take picture.

This is run after one of the snow blizzard. This is, snow is only about a few inches, and there isn't too much snow. The mountain on top in the center is called Heart Mountain, Wyoming.

This is the warehouse area, you can see the frozen icicles hanging. This is the wire fences frozen, this is the, under the office building was icicles hanging. They'll hang for days. That shows that temperatures was way low.

These, on one Sunday afternoon, the Caucasian personnel's youngsters had just enjoyed themselves skiing down one of the slopes.

WH: What about the Japanese kids?

ES: Japanese people, unfortunately, did not have the privilege having ski or sleds down its slope.

WH: What is this?

ES: A Caucasian personnel had his personal dogs.

This shows the view between the barracks. It snowed. On the right you see a flower garden that has been frozen over.

<End Segment 1> - Copyright © 2005 Densho and The Japanese American Film Preservation Project. All Rights Reserved.