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Quotes About Internment

I was interned in Auschwitz for one year. I didn't bring back anything, except for a few jokes, and that filled me with shame. Then again, I didn't know what to do with this fresh experience. For this experience was no literary awakening, no occasion for professional or artistic introspection.
~ Imre Kertesz
Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States uprooted more than 100,000 people of Japanese descent, most of them American citizens, and confined them in internment camps. The Solicitor General was largely responsible for the defense of those policies.
~ Neal Katyal
Because the American federal government uses mercenaries in warfare and American state governments pay corporations to run prisons and internment camps, the use of violence in the United States is already highly privatized.
~ Timothy Snyder
It had taken me twenty-five years to reach the point where I could talk openly about Manzanar
~ Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston
The times I thought I had dreamed it were one way of getting rid of it, part of wanting to lose it, part of what you might call a whole Manzanar mentality I had lived with for twenty-five years. Much more than a remembered place, it had become a state of mind. Now, having seen it, I no longer wanted to lose it or to have those years erased. Having found it, I could say what you can only say when you've truly come to know a place: Farewell
~ Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston
Maybe Ã¢â'¬Â¦ an old story passed down on Mai's maternal side huddled together in the internment camps of '42, keeping themselves alive with the stories. But keeping separate even then, even there, the threads of the Japanese, Chinese, Filipino elders. Stories keeping the people in the camps alive while the bill in Congress to sterilize the women of the camps got voted down by one vote, one vote. And then the silence. A whole generation silent
~ Toni Cade Bambara
It was not known precisely how many labor camps there were in North Korea, although the international consensus was six. The fact that they were numbered and those numbers reached at least as high as twenty-two was an indicator of their pervasiveness. At least two hundred thousand North Koreans, or nearly one percent of the entire population, called these labor camps home.
~ David Baldacci
A molti, individui o popoli, può accadere di ritenere, piú o meno consapevolmente, che «ogni straniero è nemico». Per lo piú questa convinzione giace in fondo agli animi come una infezione latente; si manifesta solo in atti saltuari e incoordinati, e non sta all'origine di un sistema di pensiero. Ma quando questo avviene, quando il dogma inespresso diventa premessa maggiore di un sillogismo, allora, al termine della catena, sta il Lager.
~ Primo Levi
Wo sind die Andere? dove sono gli altri? - Forse trasferiti in altri campi ...? - propongo io Schmulek crolla il capo, si rivolge a Walter: - Er will nix verstayen - non vuole capire
~ Primo Levi
It was an egregious violation of the American Constitution. We were innocent American citizens, and we were imprisoned simply because we happened to look like the people who bombed Pearl Harbor. It shows us just how fragile our Constitution is.
~ George Takei
Leaving Wychwood gave him, as it did each time, the mingled anxiety and exhilaration of a rebirth. Womb-warm and sequestered, it was at once a sanctuary and a place of internment.
~ Unknown
My own family and thousands of other Japanese Americans were interned during World War II. It took our nation over 40 years to apologize
~ Michael M. Honda
Leading critics of the World War II evacuation and relocation don't just argue that the military rationale for Roosevelt's actions was insufficient. They make the extremely radical and historically dishonest argument that there was no military justification whatsoever for evacuation, relocation, or internment—and that America's top political and military leaders knew this at the time.
~ Michelle Malkin
In 1984, Fred Korematsu went back to federal court, seeking to have his conviction voided retroactively on the theory that the government had withheld crucial facts from the judiciary. The court agreed with him. The Department of Justice and the Army, it found, had distorted the record to make it appear that there was a legitimate security concern.113 A few years later, Congress granted reparations of twenty thousand dollars to each Japanese-American who had been interned.
~ Noah Feldman