<Begin Segment 7>

KL: What was your school on Terminal Island?

MS: Yeah, our school was unique in the way, in the sense that the students were all children from the Japanese families, so they were all Japanese Americans. Except I remember two persons, brother and sister, whose parents were from Russia. However, the son and the daughter who mixed in with the rest of the student body learned to speak Japanese so they could communicate with everybody else in that school.

KL: Did they teach you any Russian?

MS: Pardon?

KL: Did they teach the other kids Russian?

MS: No, I don't think they went the other way. They adapted. So they were just like the other Nisei kids. I don't know what happened to the daughter who was close to my age, and I think she probably was in one or two of my classes, same classes.

KL: That's interesting. I hadn't heard that before.

MS: Yeah, I don't know what happened to her after the evacuation.

KL: Do you know how their family got to Terminal Island or why, or how it was?

MS: No, I never inquired into that.

KL: Yeah. Did you meet their parents ever?

MS: No.

KL: But everybody else was Japanese American?

MS: Yeah.

KL: What was the school's name?

MS: It was... I don't know what the original name was, but the name I remember is a woman's name, Mildred Obarr, O-B-A-R-R, Walitzer, W-A-L-I-T-Z-E-R, I believe.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 2013 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.