Journal Entry: Japanese Internment

Fall 1942
Dear Diary,

When we first heard of being put in camps I immediately went home and began to pack. I was at the grocery store when I read the flyers saying what we could and could not bring. A week later Mother and I found ourselves on a train headed to northern California, completely unaware of what was to come.
We were ushered in to a small shack sandwiched between other shacks that leaned slightly to the sun. The nails stuck out of boards as if the people building them had stopped half way through. The tiny shack didn’t shield us from the harsh desert climate, and many times we would find sand in our food.
The water was brown, and the first few days I refused to drink it until I became so dehydrated that I was forced to. It tasted gritty with mud mixed inside it. Mother and I grew thin as we worked in the camp, being paid to sew dresses for the women in the camp, along with me going to school.
I always wondered why we were there. What we did to deserve being put like cattle in to camps. I considered myself an American, and loved the country I belonged to. But inside those camps, drinking the gritty water and peeling sunburned skin from my shoulders: I began to hate it.
My brother who lived in Minnesota had joined the army, and now fought for the country that had imprisoned his sister and mother. We would receive letters of the harshness the other soldiers would give him because of his ancestry.
The war is over now, though. I cannot wait for Mother and I to be freed from this place so we can forget it and move on.

Bye.