Pearl Harbor Day: A Day of Remembrance

Today is December 7.  It's a day that always stands out in my mind as Pearl Harbor Day.  I wasn't even born then but I was raised by the generation that lived through it.  In one day their safe, secure world was turned upside down.  I don't think any of them ever took their freedoms and secure lives for granted again.  They lived their lives in quiet thankfulness that the time of world war and endless battles was over.  Although American troops would fight again, (and still do) it never reached the global magnitude of "their" war again.  They instilled in us, as children, a deep respect for our military and the men and women that served and continue to serve our country.

A book I just finished reading provided me with thoughts on another side of that fateful war.  The book followed the plight of the thousands of Japanese-Americans who were interred in what were basically prisoner of war camps in America.  These immigrants had arrived in America for various reasons  from being forced labor during the late 1800's to looking for a new life in a free world.  Many were first generation Americans, speaking English with a strong accent, but also many were second and third generation Americans who had never seen Japan, spoken Japanese, or known anything but their American lives. 

In the aftermath of the vicious bombing of Pearl Harbor, Americans were afraid.  They no longer felt that their shores were safe from invasion.  They were afraid of being "attacked" from within.  How did they separate the "good" Japanese-Americans from those with subversive ties to Imperialist Japan?  The answer was, they didn't.  They treated them all as the enemy and gathered them up and put them in camps.  Horrible?  Yes.  Understandable?  Some.  We were at war, something most of us really can't comprehend now.  For these Americans (and they were as American as my Swiss immigrant relatives) the war was an entirely different time for them.  They spent the war not fighting for their country as many earnestly wished, but waiting behind fences for it to be over.

Things were no different for the thousands of German-Americans who suffered the same incarceration.  I wonder how my mother-in-law's parents felt when they read about the round-up of these German-Americans?  After all even though they were from Switzerland (the side bordering Germany), they still spoke the language of their youth, German.  Would their neighbors turn on them and demand that they be locked up?  I'm sure there were some anxious moments. 

What happened when the war was over?  The detainees went home.  No, not to the country of their ethnicity but the country of their hearts--their USA homes.  They returned to their old neighborhoods, regained their old professions and started their lives again.  Even with the hardships, they were and remained Americans. 

We are a multi-cultural and ethnic country.  Let us never forget that we are the greater for the total of our parts.