Granada
She remembers the sand now, the biting sand blown by the fierce prairie winds and the way it stung her skin. She remembers her father racing to help them when the gusts came, bundling her and the other little ones in tattered clothes and all of them running then, running from doorway to doorway until they made it back to their tiny room in the barracks of the camp where the Americans had locked them away.
She was only a child. But she remembers her three years in the Japanese internment camp in this tiny town near the Kansas border. She remembers it so well that now, more than 60 years later, the clear images reappear in her mind.
And she cries.
Her name is Sachiko Nishida. She is 70 and lives in Culver City, Calif., part of the Los Angeles metro area where once she went to school and played and sometimes visited the corner grocery store owned by her mother and father.
She was happy then.
It was before Pearl Harbor. Before the U.S. government deemed Americans of Japanese descent to be likely spies. And it was before her family was loaded onto a hot, dark train for an excruciating three-day trip to the eastern fringe of Colorado and dumped into a 10,000-acre barbed wire enclosure known as the Amache Internment Camp.
“Sometimes,” she said this week, “I can see it all so clear in my mind.”
Saturday, government officials, former camp inmates and many from the town of Granada planned to gather as the Amache camp, now a dusty ghost town of concrete slabs where the barracks once stood, was to be designated a National Historic Landmark by the National Park Service.
She wanted to be there, to stand in the shadow of the tree her father planted in 1942 outside their crude barracks, a tiny sapling then but now a majestic tree that reaches 50 feet toward the sky. She wanted to make the trek once again to the camp, to the place where her life was forever changed. But her doctors told her not to go. The thin air wouldn’t be good for her ailing heart. A blocked artery was diagnosed about a month ago.
But Sachiko Nishida’s heart actually began to ache a long, long time ago. Back in 1942.
“A rifle pointed at us”
In Feb. 19 of that year, President Franklin Roosevelt gave in to the anti-Japanese hysteria that had swept the nation in the weeks since Pearl Harbor. He signed Executive Order 9066. Quickly, often with just 48 hours to sell their homes and businesses and pack one suitcase each, some 120,000 Japanese and Japanese-Americans were rounded up. Ten prisoner camps were hastily built. The Amache camp opened on Aug. 24, 1942. At its peak, 7,318 people were held there.
“My father told me we were going to Colorado,” said Nishida, who goes by the American name Helen. “His store in California was on Colorado Boulevard. I thought we were going to the store.”
When Helen and her older brother Hank, father Ben and mother Susan (like Sachiko, all had given up their Japanese names) exited the windowless train three days later, she said, they were greeted by dirt, sand, sagebrush and tumbleweeds.
And there’s another image, too, the one from that first day that looms brightest in her head today:
“There was a soldier,” she said. “He had a rifle pointed at us.”
The town of Granada, led by high school teacher John Hopper, has fought tirelessly to keep the memory of the Amache camp alive. Each year, about a dozen students water and mow the grass they and previous students have planted around the camp and care for the trees they’ve also planted.
“The barracks were sold and used by local farmers to house migrant workers,” Hopper said. “Now we’re about to get some of the barracks back and return them to their original foundations.”
Inside one of them, until their release in September of 1945, Helen’s family found ways to survive. And grow. Her mother gave birth to two more children at the camp.
The camp residents farmed and raised cattle. They built schools. About midway through the three-year detention, the rules of the camp were loosened, Helen said. There were occasional trips outside the barbed wire.
“One of my teachers, Miss Biggs, would take about five of us on a weekend to her home in Lamar about 20 miles away,” she said. “We had little picnics, and she gave each of us a bag of lemon drops to bring back to camp.”
Nephew travels for her
She has hundreds of memories like that, she said. And a living memory too. She met her husband, Roger Nishida, in California many years after she returned home from Colorado. Neither knew it when they met, but both had been in the Amache camp from 1942 to 1945.
And in a corner of a room in their home, she has something else – a tiny piece of furniture.
“It’s a little set of wooden drawers that my father made from scraps of wood at the camp,” she said, pausing as the words come harder. “He made it with his hands and painted it with nail polish. He made it just for me.”
Her father and mother died many years ago. Older brother Hank died in 2002. Hank’s son, Derek Okubo, lives in Denver and planned to attend Saturday’s ceremony.
“My grandparents got back up,” he said. “They began a new life. They started a new grocery store, like the one in Los Angeles, here in Denver.”
Ben’s Groceries still stands at the corner of East 28th Avenue and York Street.
“I think,” Okubo said, “the internment camp wasn’t the defining moment for their generation. The defining moment was their resilience, their refusal to give up.”
A few years ago, when her health was better, Helen Nishida went back. She stood inside the dusty camp.
“Certain memories just hit me so hard,” she said. “I could see my brother Hank playing.”
And then she walked across the camp to the foundation of the barracks where she lost a part of her childhood.
“I stood there,” she said, her voice now a whisper, “and for a few minutes I saw them. I saw my mother and my father.”
Staff writer Rich Tosches writes each Wednesday and Sunday. He can be reached at rtosches@ denverpost.com.
