Quotes About Internment

Protesting against the coalition government, they advocated conscription up to fifty, closure of all German-owned businesses, internment of enemy aliens, conscription in Ireland and counter air raids against German towns.

I look at my grandparents and what they dealt with in the Japanese internment in Arizona. That sense of perseverance, of making the best out of an incredibly bad situation, has always been something I drew inspiration from. I always ask myself, 'What in the world do I have to complain about?'

Japan had held 132,134 western POWs and 35,756 of them died in detention, a death rate of 27 percent. In contrast, only 4 percent of the POWs held by the Germans and Italians died.

Most Japanese-Americans have that legacy. The camp experience is something of a calling card between them. They say, 'So, where were you interned?'

I was six months old at the time that I was taken, with my mother and father, from Sacramento, California, and placed in internment camps in the United States.

The government has a history of not treating people fairly, from the internment of Japanese Americans in World War II to African-Americans in the Civil Rights era.

His conclusion, preserved for posterity, was that the experiment of interning families of suspected nationalities—German, Japanese, Italians, and others—was a failure. Nonetheless,

As they bore witness to their experiences behind barbed wire in Crystal City and to their brutal transport into war in Germany and Japan, the former internees did not ask why they were made to suffer but how could suffering be endured. The

While internees had "first accepted with philosophical understanding the decision of their government," Ickes told Roosevelt that these imprisoned Americans, charged with no crimes, were now bitter. "I do not think that we can disregard the unnecessary creation of a hostile group right in our own territory." As

In the challenging desert terrain, internees raised livestock and produced enough vegetables to feed the entire camp. On-site

The Quakers were the only group in America that consistently opposed internment and offered protection for internees.

But other countries have gone the other way. Australia is now building internment camps for Covid quarantine. It calls them "centers for national resilience."14 George Orwell would be proud.

One of the boys asked if the fences around the camps had been electrified, and then someone else had said how strange it must have been, living in a place like that, where you could commit suicide any time you liked just by touching a fence.

That day, we were all interned in the "S" barracks (the punishment barracks)—the Frank family, too. We all had our own problems, of course. I found my sister again there, and my parents and my brother, and we didn't pay very much attention to what was going on around us. But still, a family like that, with two children. We knew that they were there, that they had been in hiding. What a shame to have been caught at the last minute.

My childhood memories include a time when the government confiscated my family's possessions and exiled us to a camp in the B.C. Interior, just because my grandparents were from Japan.

Estelle Ishigo

I spent my boyhood behind the barbed wire fences of American internment camps and that part of my life is something that I wanted to share with more people.

They didn't incarcerate the Japanese-Americans in Hawaii. That's the place that was bombed. But the Japanese-American population was about 45 percent of the island of Hawaii. And if they extracted those Japanese-Americans, the economy would have collapsed. But on the mainland, we were thinly spread out up and down the West Coast.

Morale problems could be seen in the decision of nearly ninety U.S. crews in March and April to fly to neutral countries, usually Sweden or Switzerland, to be interned for the duration. The

Under the shabby pretext that Japanese Canadians needed protection from their angry neighbours, the government evacuated nineteen thousand men, women, and children to the B.C. interior, auctioning their property for derisory prices. It was an inexcusable act, born out of half a century of racial prejudice. Generals, admirals, and the RCMP protested that there was no military need for the internment

The words of Hannah Arendt, written to describe her own sense of statelessness and exile in the turmoil of World War Two, ring as true in the supposedly new reality of the "global village" today as the day they were written. "Contemporary history," Arendt wrote, "has created a new kind of human being—the kind that are put in concentration camps by their foes and internment camps by their friends."22

I lost everything when they put us in prison. I was an enemy alien, a man without a country.

Those who came from internment camps in Belgium told how they had been transported across France in sealed cars. No one had paid any attention to the trains and the occupants had been left without food or water. Their Belgian guards had robbed them of everything they possessed.

Absurdly enough, not even Central Europeans who had served in the Foreign Legion had been exempted from internment.