News-Info-Alerts

Re: Trail to Become Tourist Attraction

To: ALL

From: Andi Wolos & Bob Necci

(POW-MIA InterNetwork)

Date: November 21, 2002

"Effort may save WWII camps
Organizers hope to preserve sites where Japanese Americans were interned.

By TOM HARRIGAN The Associated Press

LOS ANGELES – Just one of the internment camps where 120,000 Japanese-Americans were held during World War II has come under a National Park Service program, prompting an effort to seek preservation status for what remains at nine other camps.

The preservation efforts were outlined during a three-day All-Camps Summit, which ended Sunday.

The series of workshops included participation by at least 400 Japanese-Americans who were forced to live and work behind barbed-wire fences and guard towers between 1942 and 1945, when they were considered possible security risks.

Organizers also expressed the urgent need to gather as much information about the camps as possible from surviving internees, most of whom now are in their 70s and older.

Efforts to preserve and in some cases reconstruct the Manzanar Camp, 200 miles north of Los Angeles, have been the most successful so far. Fifty buildings are still standing from the 1,300 built to house entire families brought there, mostly from Southern California.

"It's probably one of the most important parks in the national system (because) ... it tells a different story, one of social justice," said Frank Hayes, the National Park Service superintendent at the Manzanar National Historic Site.

State and national officials continue to study the proposed preservation of as much of the internment camps as possible, including 13 centers in California where internees were assembled and held while the camps were being prepared.

Copyright 2002 The Orange County Register "