<Begin Segment 7>

MA: So how, how did your family then end up leaving camp? Did you go to Salt Lake City after Topaz?

AH: You know, that's, I wish I could talk to my mom. I could probably ask Grace, I should do that while she's able to... there's so many questions I should ask her. But I have to kind of back up a little bit. You know, I grew up knowing that I was in Topaz, but so what? Nobody talked about it. It wasn't a big deal, you know. But I'm finding out lots of things that happened now that I'm just, right now I'm reading a lot of books, I listen to a lot of speakers, scholars, and found out that there were 129,000 of us, that we were completely homeless. And I didn't know this until about four years ago.

MA: You mean coming out of camp?

AH: Camp, you know. We were given twenty-five dollars, and we didn't know where we were gonna eat or sleep that night, but no one talked about it. In our situation, I don't know how, but I sort of... what happened to us is that we had a family that went to Topaz with us, it's the Yamamoto family, we were very close. And they left before we did, and I'm not sure why. They found a duplex in Salt Lake City, and they made arrangements for our family to live with them when we left camp, so we were fortunate, one of the very few fortunate ones. So we lived with them for a year and then went back to San Francisco, but I never questioned why or how or anything. But I'm looking back on it, and I think that's how it happened.

MA: So you moved to live with this family in the duplex in Salt Lake City?

AH: Salt Lake City.

MA: What are your memories of leaving camp? Do you remember that day?

AH: You know, I don't remember that day or anything, but I remember the duplex that the Yamamotos, who owned the other side, were wonderful people. Lessie Yamamoto, she's one lady that no one ever forgets. [Cries] Hard time again. She's the type of person that had no ill toward anybody. She had a smile for everybody, she never talked bad. It's almost like, how can people be so positive? Never gossiped or anything, she was just good, good, and she was just a beautiful person physically, too. But she married a husband, his name was James, and he had diabetes. Eventually that took his life, but she took really good care of him. And I remember, gosh, I've got vivid memories of living in that duplex. My father... see, that goes into another part of my life where my uncle, I talk about Grace all the time...

MA: Grace Oshita.

AH: Uh-huh, Oshita. Her father was able to start a business in Salt Lake City after camp at the miso, it was called the Kanemasa miso company. And so my father, when he came out of camp, he worked for him for that year. And I remember Mom will pack up his, a lunchbox, and I think my uncle picked him up early in the morning, about seven in the morning. I was still, we'd all be still in bed, but sometimes I'd be awake and then I could see that he's waiting. And my sister was born during that time. So my mom must have been pregnant when she was in Topaz, because she was born in 1946, May of 1946.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright ©2008 Densho and the Topaz Museum. All Rights Reserved.