<Begin Segment 3>

JA: So how long, from the time that people were first moved to Manzanar, how long did it take you to get qualified and get up there?

MS: I didn't get there until February of '43. As soon as I got my teaching credential, I left. I got my credential one day, and I left the next.

JA: What did you find there? What did that place look like when you first arrived?

MS: Well, the first time I saw it, it was at night, and I had the flu -- [laughs] -- I was sick as a dog. But I was met there and taken off to one of the mess halls where they were having a dance, and the UCLA band was at one end of the room, and USC band was at the other, and they would take turns playing, and then the next day I went to the hospital. But I was shocked, because when we went up, we moved into barracks also, and the barracks were... well, we had, sometimes they weren't even completely finished. They didn't have their plasterboard up, so they'd put a nail in the, in the beams, and that was your closet. We didn't get the closets, they came later. And they had these cots with real thin mattresses on 'em, we didn't have beds yet, either. It was quite different from what I was used to. It was sort of like camping out with, with a roof over your head.

JA: What, what did you observe about the, sort of the daily flow of life there amongst the people who had been there?

MS: Well, my, most of my association there was with the children, but the children would talk to me, and they would ask questions like, could I leave the camp? And I said, "Yes," he says, "Won't the soldiers shoot at you?" And I said, "No." And that rather surprised them because I think they thought that I would have been, since I lived in the camp, that I would have been treated the same. But that didn't happen that way. And I think they had a hard time accepting that. But I know later on, that the high school boys and girls would have debates about "Why We are Here," and they seemed to have a fairly good understanding of why they were there, and what had happened. And I've talked to some of the women later, at a reunion forty years later. They said, "Well, you know, that's the first time we ever had a chance to visit with each other. We didn't have to go to work," so they had coffee klatches and would go visiting. And from that point of view, and the children had somebody to play with, which before, they might not have had.

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 2002 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.