Quotes About Internment

Paris had by now extended its internment decree to include Austrian and Czecho-Slovakian refugees, so in the days that followed hundreds of new arrivals appeared in our camp.

Suddenly the following came: "All German nationals residing in the precincts of Paris, men and women alike, and all persons between the ages of seventeen and fifty-five who were born in Germany but are without German citizenship, are to report for internment.

There I had been for three-quarters of a year caught in that mousetrap of a France, unable to get permission to leave the country. Now, for a second time, I was to taste the pleasures of an internment camp.

The French indiscriminately interned any women who had at any time had anything to do with Central Europe.

My secretary was interned though she was of Swiss citizenship, and her sister, though a British subject.

Even French mothers of French soldiers were interned if they had been born in Germany or were wives of Germans resident in France.

I have two passions in my life. One is to raise the awareness of the internment of Japanese-American citizens. My other passion is the theater.

Growing up, I didn't know about the Japanese internment camps until I saw a movie of the week as an adult. I remember going, 'How come that wasn't covered in history class?' Moving to California, you run into people whose grandparents lost everything and their businesses and were put in these internment camps.

I'm for catching every Japanese in America, Alaska, and Hawai'i now and putting them in concentration camps.

I remember reading one of those big history texts in elementary school, and in that whole book there was one paragraph that mentioned that Japanese-Americans were interned. I went home and asked my father, 'You weren't, were you?' He said, 'Yes, I was.' I was shocked.

I have two passions in my life. One is to raise the awareness of the internment of Japanese-American citizens. My other passion is the theater. And I've been able to wed the two passions.

Before that bomb was dropped—right over here in the United States, what about the one hundred thousand loyal naturalized and native-born Japanese-American citizens who were herded into camps, behind barbed wire? But how many German-born naturalized Americans were herded behind barbed wire? They were white!

You know, I grew up in two American internment camps, and at that time I was very young.

But when we came out of camp, that's when I first realized that being in camp, that being Japanese-American, was something shameful.

Newcomers from Paris transmitted to us Goebbels' ironic congratulations on our cordial reception in the Land of Freedom. Voelkischer Beobachter, the official Nazi organ, published a list of anti-Nazi authors interned in France, asking them whether they still clung to the blessings of democracy. It was cheap irony, but it cut to the quick; it hurt and stung and burnt.

February 19, 1942, is the year in which Executive Order 9066 was signed, and this was the order that called for the exclusion and internment of all Japanese Americans living on the west coast during World War II.

During World War II, law-abiding Japanese-American citizens were herded into remote internment camps, losing their jobs, businesses and social standing, while an all-Japanese-American division fought heroically in Europe.

I could never understand how we could put 120,000 Japanese behind a fence in World War II. I remember being bewildered about that.

The thing about World War II is that everyone knows about the concentration camps in Europe - in Nazi Germany and Poland and Auschwitz and the other camps - but, no one really talks about the camps that were here in the United States.

The United States has tried for years to live down President Franklin D. Roosevelt's order during World War II to move Japanese-Americans on the West Coast to inland detention camps on grounds that they might be disloyal.

The detention of Japanese Americans during World War II would qualify as an example of majoritarian tyranny and misuse of executive prerogative, driven by fear and racial bias.

The use of torture on suspected terrorists after Sept. 11 has already earned a place in American history's hall of shame, alongside the Alien and Sedition Acts, Japanese internment during World War II, and the excesses of the McCarthy era.

Our country undergoes periodic episodes of extreme intolerance and fear of foreigners, refugees in particular. Not only were people of Japanese descent placed in internment camps during World War II, but so were some Italians and Germans.

My mother's family was among the 120,000 people of Japanese descent on the West Coast who were dispatched to internment camps during World War II.