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HH: Do you recall the day you moved out of Minidoka to leave camp, and where did you go?

KI: Yes. We left... my father left first. He left in 1943, and he left for New York. And he was given some help by a Catholic priest that was in the camp, who bought him a ticket, gave him a box lunch, and my dad said he gave him five dollars and told him to go to New York and see a priest in New York who would help him find a job. Well, he got to New York and picked up the paper, and he found himself a job. And he worked for a clothing company, Jewish owned clothing company, it was a chain store as a bookkeeper, he got a job as a bookkeeper. And when he got enough money, he sent back to camp for us to come out of camp, and that's how we left camp. My mother brought us myself and two of my brothers, one of my brothers who had been born in camp, and brought us out of camp. We went first to Chicago by train, left from Chicago to Cincinnati. And I have some interesting memories of the train ride to Cincinnati because they had a prisoner of war, German prisoner of war on the train, and I can remember they brought him into the car that we were sitting in. And just before we got into the Cincinnati train station, they marched this guy into our car and they were getting ready to jump off. And one of my younger brothers and I, we ran up to the prisoner. We didn't know who he was, and we would just tell him, three MPs there, and this other man, he had chains on his feet, chains on his hand, and he was shackled up. He was carrying some candy, caramel candy, and I can remember the caramel candy. Because he asked the guards if he could give us the candy, pieces of candy. He brought out the candy, it was little round caramel candy and it had little swastikas on it. And so I can remember that. I didn't know what a swastika was at the time, but later on as I grew up, of course, I learned what that was. So I have memories of that.

But going back to my days in camp, I did have some interesting memories there. Because one of my birthdays, an aunt who lived in a different compound had a friend who worked in the kitchen would bake a cake. So another aunt took me to the compound gate. And my other aunt in the other compound brought this cake over and they'd send it through the guard, I can remember that, I must have been three years old. Because I remember the guard taking his bayonet out and he cut the cake. And I thought he was just going to take a piece of my birthday cake for himself, so I thought that was nice that he would want to share my cake with me. He hacked the cake up, so I can remember him chopping the cake up, and I was really very upset. I can remember as a little kid being upset about that because I thought he was just going to take a piece of cake to eat, and instead he just hacked the cake up. So what was, to me, a really beautiful cake, turned out to be all cut up. So I have memories of that. Also I have memories of my mother being in the camp infirmary for a period of time, quite a period of time. And, of course, one of my brothers was born in camp, but I think she had some illness, too, and so she was in the hospital there for quite a while, maybe six months. So she was in there a long time. So my dad took care of us and our aunts who were in the camp, they took care of us until my mother got out. When my mother got out, that was the time my father left to come to New York. And eventually, after living in Cincinnati for a couple of months, he sent for us out of Cincinnati. And we went to New York, my uncle who lived in Cincinnati, he put us on a train to New York. So my mother with three little kids traveled all the way to New York City by ourselves. And my father met us at the train station in New York and took us to a motel or hotel that he was staying in. I can remember walking up the stairs to the hotel, and I can remember we had two rooms, and my mother said that the place was really, was like a flophouse. And she says that at night there was bugs all over the place, she was telling me how she and my father stayed up all night killing the damn bugs crawling all up the bed. And they had three of us little kids in one bed and they slept in another bed. Then eventually from there we moved into a hostel in Brooklyn, and from Brooklyn we moved to an apartment in Manhattan.

HH: What kind of household was that? A Japanese-run household?

KI: No, it was a Quaker-run hospital, it was run by the Friends. So the Friends helped us in New York, they gave us the first place to stay, and I have memories of playing with the kids in the hostel there, and neighbor kids, and none of us could understand. My brother and I could not understand what other kids were saying, they were speaking a foreign language. And we didn't realize at the time that they were speaking English and we were speaking Japanese. [Laughs] So today it's the other way around.

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 1994 JACL Philadelphia. All Rights Reserved.