Far in the southeastern corner of Colorado is a tiny cemetery. It is a patch of gratefully tended green in a sea of brown dust, a refuge of remembrance in an ocean of dry despondency.
This is the Amache Internment Camp near Granada, which in May became a National Historic Landmark. During World War II, Amache housed more than 7,000 Japanese-American internees. It is out of the way and easy to overlook, but not so easy to forget.
What happened at Amache should have never taken place in a nation we like to think of as civilized. One group of people dehumanized another group. They declared them unworthy and categorized them as “others,” seeing them somehow as less of a person because of how they looked or where their ancestors were born. It was wrong. It was evil. And we knew it.
Out of fear, bigotry and sheer hatred, so many Americans shook off the teachings of the Bible. In the Book of Exodus, we read, “You shall not taunt or oppress the stranger, for you were once strangers … .” In building Amache and all the other internment camps, we taunted, we oppressed and we forgot that we were all once strangers.
I attended the National Park Service’s ceremony in May, during which Amache was dedicated as a National Historic Landmark. I wanted to see it with my own eyes, lest anyone ever try to deny what happened there.
I hoped my grandpa Mayeshiba, who the U.S. government put in a Wyoming internment camp during the war, was proud I was there. He doesn’t talk much about this part of his life, but I know he can never forget. I wanted him to be certain that I would always remember.
A few months later, I would be standing thousands of miles away, in rural Poland, visiting another camp built on hate: Auschwitz. There, too, we were told to never forget what took place. The guide told us that we must see this haunted place with our own eyes so we can tell our children, and counter those who seek to deny the Holocaust. This time I hoped it was my grandma Forshner who would be proud to see me standing there, a 16-year-old, strong in body and spirit.
I wrapped around me a tallis (Jewish prayer shawl) in that most unholy of places. Grandma Forshner was 16 years old when she hobbled out on frostbitten feet into the arms of her Russian liberators. She was weak in body, dazed in spirit, barely alive. She could have never imagined she would live to have a grandson, much less one who would return 61 years later to bear witness. I saw it all, permanently etched it into my memory and in the name of all my murdered relatives, vowed to never forget.
What happened to her and to so many others should have never happened in a nation that saw itself as civilized. She was one of the inhuman, one of the “others” who looked different from the ideal, who had ancestors from a different place, who had different beliefs. The laws called upon ordinary people to turn against their neighbor, and being good, patriotic citizens, they complied. Madness and mayhem reigned, and the stranger was taunted, oppressed and, more often than not, murdered.
Unlike those targeted Japanese-Americans or Jews, no one has thrown me out of my home, moved me across the country or killed my parents. However, these massive tragedies all had their seed in much smaller acts of cruelty. That kind of petty hatred is well known to me, as it is to so many others who have been thrown onto the heap of otherness in our early years. Kids know all about the name-calling at recess, the shoving, the pushing down the stairs, the exclusion from birthday parties and the graffiti on the social studies project.
The unimportant others are hurt, excluded, taunted and oppressed, while the larger group looks away. Because I know this has happened, on scales both grand and small, I know it can happen again, and so I must somehow stand in the way of history’s hostile repetition.
My challenge, and it is a formidable one, is to never descend to that level of behavior, to remember every day that no matter how confident or secure I may feel, tomorrow could be the day when we are all, once again, strangers.
Sammy Forshner attends Herzl/Rocky Mountain Hebrew Academy in Denver.
