Schools Behind Barbed Wire

Often overlooked in the infamous history of U.S. internment during World War II is the plight of internee children. Drawn from personal interviews and multiple primary source materials, Schools behind Barbed Wire is the story of the boys and girls who grew up in the Crystal City, TX internment camp and spent the war years attending one of its three internment camp schools. Visit our website for sample chapters!

A moving primary source sheds light on the experience of Japanese American children imprisoned in a World War II internment camp. A classroom diary created by Japanese American children paints a vivid picture of daily life in a so-called "internment camp." Mae Yanagi was eight years old when she started school at Topaz Camp in Utah. She and her third-grade classmates began keeping an illustrated diary, full of details about schoolwork, sports, pets, holidays, and health--as experienced from behind barbed wire. Diary pages, archival photographs, and narrative nonfiction text convey the harsh changes experienced by the children, as well as their remarkable resilience.

Most people associate concentration camps with Nazi Germany. Behind Barbed Wire examines how these notorious World War II camps actually reflected a previous use of the system, a system that began almost a century earlier. In truth, Adolf Hitler had studied the American Indian Reservations as he plotted his regime's attack on European Jews and other minorities. Remarkably, in the years between the reservations and the Nazi camps, the United States, along with several other Western powers, implemented concentration camps throughout the globe, each instance employing more and more barbaric measures with harsher and harsher outcomes. Behind Barbed Wire explains how these nations dubiously justified camp operations by citing military counterinsurgency tactics, containment policies, and simply the ability to prosecute war more easily. This brief history addresses the subliminal reasons for relocating hundreds of thousands of civilians, why the system became so prevalent, and how concentration camps existed under the cover of armed conflict. It argues that, most often, camps can be facilitated only under the guise of war. Anyone with an interest in military history, World War II, concentration camps, and the plight of the Jews will discover how all these topics converge into a compelling story of war, bigotry, and military might. Behind Barbed Wire also sheds light on the concentration camp systems that have been employed since the fall of the Nazi dictatorship. With current geopolitical issues focusing on elitism, xenophobia, deplorables, terrorism, and military necessity, this book offers some understanding about the unintended consequences of policy.

Introduction: Alice Nakamura, a senior of the Class of 1943 at Rohwer Center High School in Arkansas, read these words at the conclusion to her graduation speech. Substantively, it sounds like any other reflection on self-identity by a second-generation immigrant. In reality, Alice's speech stands out because it was delivered from a school located behind barbed wire, where the United States government had detained her because of her Japanese ancestry. Between 1942 and 1945, the United States government removed more than 110,000 individuals of Japanese ancestry residing on the west coast to remote relocation centers located in the barren mountainous states of the American west. Deprived of their freedom, these internees found themselves faced with the challenge of carrying on their everyday lives while surrounded by barbed wire. Parents concerned about the educational prospects of their children pushed for the development of primary and secondary schools, which the administrations provided. Adults seeking to occupy their time after work and alleviate boredom initiated education programs taught by internees who possessed relevant technical abilities and academic credentials. Despite the limited freedom and control the internees had over their squalid living conditions, educational programs emerged as one area in which they were able to establish a voice for themselves and collaborate with camp authorities. Due to the wartime shortage of teachers, many young Japanese teachers staffed the primary and secondary schools. The internees completely ran the Adult Education program with only perfunctory oversight from the camp administrations. In return for this degree of autonomy, the WRA requested the establishment of Americanization classes in all levels of camp schooling. These classes focused on the dissemination of American values and preparation for life after the war. Internees had mixed reactions to these government-mandated requirements but many valuable lessons came out of these classes. Primary and secondary students had an intensely personal experience learning about democracy inside barbed wire. As these students went on to attend colleges and find jobs after internment, they took these experiences with them and crafted new and deeply personal definitions of being an American citizen. The Adult Education programs gave internees English skills and new cultural knowledge that they used in their post-war communities and to communicate with their own children. Despite the horrid conditions that the Japanese experienced in the internment camps, the education program created relatively positive interactions between the internees and the camp authorities. Although suffering from supply shortages and a high variance in teaching quality, the educational programs challenged internees to think about democracy and what it means to live in America. Japanese internees provided staffing for these programs and worked with the camp administrators to implementing the curriculums, which allowed a degree of self-governance, an uneasy feat in government-controlled wartime internment centers. The Japanese-American internment process began on February 19, 1942, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing the military to create special areas within the United States from which "any and all" persons may be excluded. The exclusion order applied to both citizens and aliens, meaning that the government intended to remove both Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans. The former are issei, a term meaning "first-generation" in Japanese, and the latter are nisei, "second-generation." Throughout the internment process, more than 110,000 individuals of Japanese-ancestry were excluded from the zones of exclusion, often forced to sell their belongings, and relocated to barren camps established in the interior of the United States. The internment process had no pretenses of kindness - following Pearl Harbor, propaganda posters depicting Japanese as apes and other savage animals were widely distributed, and racist sentiments were openly published and distributed through the press. A selection from a San Francisco newspaper derided the Japanese during the onset of the internment process: "Herd 'em up, pack 'em off and give 'em the inside room in the badlands. [...] Let us have no patience with the enemy or with anyone whose veins carry his blood [...] I hate the Japanese." A propaganda poster distributed in 1943 titled, "How to Spot a Jap," described a Japanese as having "buck teeth" and being unable to smile because he "expect[s] to be shot...and is very unhappy about the whole thing." Even Americans from the interior expressed hostility. ...

Barbed Wire University tells the extraordinary tale of Winston Churchill’s internment of some of the most gifted Jewish refugee writers, professors, artists, and painters of their generation in a camp on the Isle of Man in the Irish Sea. These were men who had fled Hitler’s Germany, found refuge in Britain, and then, in the hysteria of 1940, were held in captivity as a perceived security threat. They turned the camp—Hutchinson Camp—into a school, concert hall, and artistic community. Using memoirs and diaries, some of which have only recently become available in archives, Dave Hannigan pieces together a richly detailed account of what these remarkable men did during their time in captivity. This is a forgotten corner of World War II, and the way these men constructed a Bohemian idyll in the middle of the Irish Sea, their freedom taken from them, is an extraordinary tale of grit and creativity.

"Behind Barbed Wire looks behind the façade to ask what it was really like to be moved to, and live in, a 'New Village'. Tan, who himself lived in New Villages growing up, combines archival sources and oral history to give us a rounded account . . . We need Tan's book, because up to now the outsider's view has predominated, and outsiders have their own agenda." Karl Hack, in the Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society This unique book revisits the moment in the Malayan Emergency when some 500,000 women, children and men were uprooted from their homes and moved into new settlements, guarded day and night by police and troops. A majority were rural Chinese: market gardeners, shopkeepers, rice farmers, tin miners and rubber tappers who had long made Malaya their home and had lived through the hardships of the Japanese Occupation. Based upon newly accessible archival materials and painstaking multilingual interviews with more than 80 informants in four New Villages, Tan Teng Phee rewrites the history of the Emergency, exposing the voices of those at the heart of this lauded ‘social experiment’. In Francis Loh’s words, these were ordinary villagers ‘caught in the crossfire between the British security forces and the Malayan Communist Party’ whose lives were turned inside-out and re-ordered completely, with daily curfews, body searches and food controls alongside the carrots and sticks of registration, (re)education, sanitation, psychological warfare and swift punishment. Highlighting the disciplinary aims of British policy, as well as the ways in which villagers resisted this discipline through ‘weapons of the weak’, this book forms a unique history from below of the Malayan Emergency, and of a resettlement programme which shaped the social and geographical landscape of Malaysia for generations to come.

"More than 110,000 ethnic Japanese Americans were forcibly removed from their homes at the start of World War II and transported to desolate detention centers after President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 in early 1942. Paul Kitagaki's parents and grandparents were part of that group, but they never talked about their experience. To better understand, Kitagaki tracked down the subjects of more than sixty photographs taken by Dorothea Lange, Ansel Adams and other photographers. This book is a result of that work, which took Kitagaki on a ten-year pilgrimage around the country photographing survivors of camps"--