A bus will leave Denver Saturday to make a four-hour drive to a place called Amache. It’s where some 7,000 people lived, worked and called home during much of World War II.
Ten weeks after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed executive order 9066, creating internment camps for people of Japanese descent.
One of them – Amache -- was in Colorado. This will mark the 40th year that Japanese Americans have made a formal pilgrimage there.
Amache was one of 10 major camps across the U.S. that held more than 120,000 Japanese immigrants and Japanese-Americans.
They lived in barracks. They formed their own schools, planted gardens and had beauty parlors and Boy Scout troops.
Their sons volunteered to fight and die for the country that imprisoned their parents.
This year, something new has been added to Amache: signs manufactured by the National Park Service.
That’s in addition to a barrack building built with money from grants to preserve these sites and a research building.
Fifty people will board a bus to take the pilgrimage to Amache early Saturday morning. They are everyone from college students to people in ther 90s.
Most are elderly, but with them are their children and descents who are urged to remember and commemorate this tragic chapter of U.S. history.
Also there will be the 1943 Amache Senior High School valedictorian, Marion Konishi. It’s her first visit since she left the camp more than 70 years ago.
Konishi will read the speech she gave when she first graduated high school. It’s a glimpse into the mindset of the people who were placed behind barbed wire fences and guard towers.
You can read it in full below:
Can’t see the speech? Click here: http://bit.ly/1TnlLDa
