Last Friday, U.S. President Joe Biden signed the paperwork that created his first contribution to the National Park Service: the former Camp Amache in southeastern Colorado, about a drive from Colorado Springs.
It was another American president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who signed the deeply regrettable Executive Order 9066 in February 1942. That edict, a low for American values, legalized the seizure of American citizens, their homes, and businesses, simply on the basis of whether they had Japanese heritage.
The wartime measure swept some 110,000 people—including many children—into incarceration across 10 hastily established facilities in some of the countrys most desolate and forbidding locales. Amache (pictured above in 1942), the smallest of the 10 camps, imprisoned 7,318 detainees at its peak, making it the city in Colorado at the time.
This included my parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles. My Uncles were drafted, served in the MIS, and had to interrogate Japanese POWs in Japan!!!
As with most of the former Japanese internment camps from World War II, the infrastructure at Amache, known officially as the Granada War Relocation Center, is largely gone. Almost all of the long wooden sheds that were originally used as living and dining quarters
The newly established Amache National Historic Site includes a historic cemetery (for people who died while living there), a monument, some concrete building foundations, and several reconstructed or rehabilitated structures.
