<Begin Segment 8>

Q: What was your most basic emotional response helping, seeing other people leave for the camps?

GH: Well, it was kind of a sad kind of an experience. Because the ones that I was helping primarily were those whose husband were picked up right after Pearl Harbor. They were community leaders, and so in the case of those people who still had young children, there was this wife with a bunch of little kids having to do all this packing and getting ready to move for, they didn't know where, with only what they could carry. And so it was a, really a tragic site. And the little that we could do to relieve that, we did what we could do in helping them pack and getting them to the pickup point where the buses were going to the Western Washington Fairgrounds, which was the first temporary concentration camp.

Q: You were with the, you saw your family leave for the camps also?

GH: No, I didn't. The valley where my parents were, were scheduled to leave about ten days after I was arrested. So, in fact, my friends who backed me up, went to the army and got a special permit so they could go and pick up my mother to come in for one visit before she left. So I actually got to see her in the corridor of the jail.

Q: Do you remember any of the exchange of words?

GH: [Laughs] Yes. I guess I was in about three or four days by that time, and I wasn't expecting her. And I was called out, and there she was with my friend. She had brought, like a Japanese mother would do, a box with rolls of sushi sliced, which was very nice, with the, compared to the jail food I had. But I ate just one or two while I was visiting with her, and then I asked the jailer if I could take these in, and he said, "Sure." So I didn't eat any more, 'cause there were three or four Japanese Americans in jail who were picked up right at the time of Pearl Harbor for, accused of sending scrap iron or something to Japan. They were import-export types. And so I saved it for them because they hadn't had sushi since the time of the evacuation.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 1983, 2010 Densho and Steven Okazaki. All Rights Reserved.