Enemy Aliens Research Articles

Wolfgang Kurt Hermann Panofsky

Wolfgang Kurt Hermann Panofsky

“Enemy Aliens” and “Silk Stocking Girls”: The Class Politics of Internment in the Drive for Urban Order during World War I

This article focuses on the two national internment programs developed in the United States during World War I from the vantage point of Portland, Oregon, and argues that they unfolded locally. Both the male enemy aliens at risk of internment and the girls and women who experienced confinement due to sexual activity tended to be poor. Authorities deemed that they were, or were likely to become, radicals or prostitutes—but that they were not to be prosecuted as such. Officials could banish or track them more easily as threats to the war effort, rather than as threats to urban social stability and economic development. Scholars of the home front have ignored the evolution of local-federal partnerships to track or intern these two groups and have so far failed to establish how local perceptions of the dangerous poor shaped cooperation with wartime federal authority.

Prisoners of the Home Front: German POWs and 'Enemy Aliens' in Southern Quebec, 1940–46 (review)

Prisoners of the Home Front: German POWs and 'Enemy Aliens' in Southern Quebec, 1940–46 (review)

A Lacanian Reading of No-No Boy and Obasan : Traumatic Thing and Transformation into Subjects of Jouissance

A Lacanian Reading of No-No Boy and Obasan:Traumatic Thing and Transformation into Subjects of Jouissance Fu-Jen Chen Two months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order No. 9102 on 18 March 1942, "Establishing the War Relocation Authority in the Executive Office of the President and Defining its Functions and Duties." The act made it legal for the United States to "relocate" Japanese American families from their homes, mainly on the West Coast, and forced them into concentration camps, also known as relocation camps, in Idaho, Arizona, Utah, California, Arkansas, Colorado, and Wyoming. Approximately 120,000 Japanese Americans, viewed in their homeland as "enemy aliens" or, worse, "the enemy," lived in barracks with the barest essentials. The U.S. government justified its action on the basis of national security. Similarly, immediately after the outbreak of World War II in the Pacific, Canada passed the "Order in Council PC 1486" and announced a policy of mass evacuation of Japanese Canadians from the coast. The Canadian government removed 23,000 persons of Japanese ancestry, 75 percent of them Canadian citizens, from a designated protected zone within a one-hundred-mile radius of British Columbia. The Canadian "Interior Housing Project" was crueler and more drastic than the United States' relocation. Unlike in the United States, where families were generally kept together, male Japanese Canadians were separated from their families and sent to road camps in the British Columbia interior, to sugar beet farms on the prairies, or to internment in a prisoner-of-war camp in Ontario. At the same time, women, children, and older people were moved inland to internment camps in the interior of British Columbia, many of them ghost towns that had originally sprung up during the gold rush. Japanese Canadians were not allowed to join the military until after 1945, and until 1949 it was illegal for displaced Japanese Canadians to return to Vancouver or even to western Canada.1 But the internment camps of World War II question both the United States' and Canada's often-stated commitment to a multicultural society. Until a movement toward redress began in the 1980s, Americans and Canadians alike were unwilling to face the existence of concentration camps in their own lands, wanting to continue to regard their nations as likable and admirable. These repressed traumas maintain the ontological consistency of the United States, Canada, and other [End Page 105] nations as democratic nations. A traumatic thing such as slavery or internment camps is relegated to national unconsciousness. Slavoj Žižek argues that "national identification is by definition sustained by a relationship toward the Nation qua Thing. This Nation-Thing is determined by a series of contradictory properties." For Žižek, what unites a nation is not simply a shared set of values or beliefs, but "a shared relationship toward a Thing" (Tarrying 201). Likewise, human history can be seen as "precisely the way we are implicated in each other's traumas" (Caruth 24). The traumatic thing, in the words of Jacques Lacan, is "characterized by the fact that it is impossible for us to imagine it," and becomes "the cause of the most fundamental human passion."2 In Lacanian theory, we all start with a structural trauma, and, says Paul Verhaeghe, "the way in which this trauma becomes elaborated through the relationship with the Other determines our identity" (8). Verhaeghe explains that "besides this structurally determined trauma . . . , there might be an accidental real trauma as well, caused by an external agency. This trauma will inevitably come into interaction with the structural trauma caused by the subject's own drive" (58). The interaction between external traumas and internal conflicts complicates the process of our subjective construction. The Lacanian Thing In Lacan's three orders—the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real (which have nothing to do with imagination, symbolism, or reality respectively as we generally understand them)—the thing is firmly situated in the Real order. Different from mental forces in Freud's three agencies, Lacan's three registers in conjunction indicate three psychic levels and form a topology of subjectivity. The Imaginary corresponds to the formation of the ego as the result of...

Blatant Injustice: The Story of a Jewish Refugee From Nazi Germany Imprisoned in Britain and Canada During World War II (review)

Reviewed by: Blatant Injustice: The Story of a Jewish Refugee from Nazi Germany Imprisoned in Britain and Canada during World War II Gregory Baum (bio) Walter W. Igersheimer. Blatant Injustice: The Story of a Jewish Refugee from Nazi Germany Imprisoned in Britain and Canada during World War II McGill-Queen’s University Press. xxix, 232. $39.95 Walter W. Igersheimer, a German Jew born in 1917, sought refuge in England in 1933 where he studied medicine. In June 1940, after the outbreak of the war, he was interned as an enemy alien and shipped with other German refugees to internment camps in Canada, where he was released in July 1941. He then went to Cuba where he waited two years for [End Page 581] an entry permit to the United States. While in Cuba, deeply troubled by his past experiences, he decided to write the story of his internment in order to denounce both the injustice of arresting refugees as enemy aliens and the inhumane conditions of the internment camps in Canada. The manuscript, tucked away in a drawer, was published sixty years later, edited and introduced by Ian Darragh, a young friend of the author. The book's title, Blatant Injustice, reveals the author's anger. In the introduction we read that two books on these internment camps have already been published by former inmates: Eric Koch's Deemed Suspect: A Wartime Blunder and Mark Lynton's Accidental Journey: A Cambridge Internee's Memoir of World War II. The titles of these books reveal that the two authors, both former inmates of the same camp as Igersheimer, did not experience their internment as blatant injustice. The introduction quotes Koch's assertion that 'most refugees accepted their arrest and internment as a reasonable precaution.' Igersheimer did not. He suffered greatly under the fate imposed on him by the British and Canadian governments and by the military staff in charge of the internment camps. I read the book very carefully to discover why Igersheimer's experience was so different from my own. I too was a German refugee in England, interned in May 1940, shipped to the Canadian internment camps and released in Canada – later than Igersheimer, in April 1942. Igersheimer's emigration to England in 1933 had not interrupted his middle-class standing. His father, a famous doctor in Germany, had been offered a professorship in Turkey, from where he eventually moved to a university position in the United States. His son Walter became a medical student in England, had English friends, felt part of British society, and looked forward to graduating as a medical doctor. As a doctor he wanted to serve in the British army as his part in the war against German fascism. For him the internment was a cruel interruption of his life and his life's purpose, and the lack of respect and the harsh conditions experienced in the camps were an insult to a decently brought up middle-class person. My experience was quite different. I arrived in England in May 1939, a boy not yet sixteen, working for a living for a poor farmer, leaving behind education and middle-class standing. When the police came to intern me, I leaned the manure fork against the wall, stepped out of the barn, and laughed as I was driven to the local prison. In Canada I spent the greater part of my internment in Camp A at Farnham, Quebec, where most of the inmates were non-Jewish German refugees: liberals, socialists, communists, priests, and pastors. Educators among them set up a camp school, and we, boys under twenty, studied for the junior matriculation granted by McGill University. Some of us woke up intellectually in the camp; we had great German teachers, we felt rescued from Europe at a time of crisis, and we slowly got ready for the adventure of adult life. We had a photo taken of the teachers and students of the camp school, which is now in the [End Page 582] possession of a former inmate, Vernon Brooks, Professor Emeritus of the University of Western Ontario, who is tracing the careers of the participants after their release. I am sorry that Igersheimer...

Searching for Justice: An Autobiography (review)

Reviewed by: Searching for Justice: An Autobiography Kent Roach (bio) Fred Kaufman. Searching for Justice: An Autobiography Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History. xii, 404. $65.00 Fred Kaufman has written a compelling account of his extraordinary life. Kaufman was born into a comfortable life in Vienna in 1924. His parents saved to send him to camp only to bring him home when he called them [End Page 587] complaining he was homesick. Life, however, was never the same with the rise to power of the Nazis. In 1939, the fifteen-year-old Kaufman was evacuated to Britain. The chief rabbi who had presided a few years earlier at his bar mitzvah was forced to scrub the streets with a toothbrush. Worse indignities remained for those left behind. Kaufman was adopted by a kindly family who treated him well but this only lasted for ten months before he was interned as an enemy alien and eventually sent to Canada. Jewish refugees were imprisoned side by side with German prisoners and Nazi sympathizers. These early experiences of injustice, however, fuelled Kaufman's passion for justice. He writes how his experience as an innocent man imprisoned helped him to understand the 'agony' of the wrongfully convicted whom he would later assist. When released, Kaufman made up for lost time by earning three degrees, the last two while also working as a reporter. His experience as a reporter helped him throughout his legal career, and colleagues would tease him that his short, clear judgments during his eighteen years on the Quebec Court of Appeal were 'press releases.' Before his appointment to the bench, Kaufman was a leading lawyer in Montreal. When Pierre Trudeau phoned to offer Kaufman an appointment to the bench, he recalled how Kaufman facilitated Trudeau's release after Trudeau had a misunderstanding with the police. Kaufman faced far more serious cases as he successfully defended many accused from the death penalty. In the best traditions of the bar, Kaufman also acted as prosecutor, most notably in cases arising from a 1969 university riot and the 1970 October Crisis. Kaufman still supports Trudeau's invocation of the War Measures Act and recounts how he and his family were guarded by soldiers and police during this tense time. Kaufman is best known for his work since he retired from the bench in 1991. He conducted the royal commission into Guy Paul Morin's wrongful conviction and made important findings about how police investigations and prosecutions can be tainted by tunnel vision, how forensic evidence can be contaminated and misinterpreted, and how jailhouse snitches can lie. Although no one intends to convict an innocent person, Kaufman warned that wrongful convictions are not an 'aberration' and that they are rooted in 'systemic problems' in criminal justice systems throughout the world. Kaufman sees his report as 'the most important undertaking of my career.' It has influenced law reform not only in Canada but elsewhere and it influenced the Supreme Court of Canada to conclude that people should not be extradited from Canada to face the death penalty because of the ever-present risk of wrongful convictions. Kaufman did not stop with the Morin case. He volunteered to preside at an informal hearing where witnesses who had helped Leonard Peltier be extradited from Canada recanted their testimony. He subsequently wrote [End Page 588] to President Clinton supporting a pardon for Peltier who had been convicted of killing two fbi agents at Wounded Knee, but to no avail. He also recommended that the Stephen Truscott case be reopened because of new evidence, evidence that was not disclosed to the accused, and better understandings of forensic evidence. Kaufman's story is not all about his work. He recounts two emergency landings during the three years he flew recreational planes. He also recounts his loving relationship with his wife, Donna, who earned a law degree after their two children were grown and has a successful career in business. The Kaufmans have resettled in Toronto to be closer to their children. Jacques Parizeau's comments about 'money and the ethnic vote' being responsible for the defeat of the 1995 sovereignty referendum, however, understandably made it easier for them to leave...

MARTIN F. AUGER. Prisoners of the Home Front: German POWs and "Enemy Aliens" in Southern Quebec, 1940-46. (Studies in Canadian Military History, number 9.) Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. 2005. Pp. xii, 227. $85.00

MARTIN F. AUGER. Prisoners of the Home Front: German POWs and "Enemy Aliens" in Southern Quebec, 1940-46. (Studies in Canadian Military History, number 9.) Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. 2005. Pp. xii, 227. $85.00

The Japanese Internment and the Racial State of Exception

The Japanese Internment and the Racial State of Exception Fred I. Lee (bio) The rule proves nothing; the exception proves everything. — Carl Schmitt, Political Theology Now, therefore, by virtue of the authority vested in me as President of the United States, and Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy, I hereby authorize and direct the Secretary of War, and the Military Commanders whom he may from time to time designate, whenever he or any designated Commander deems such action necessary or desirable, to prescribe military areas in such places and of such extent as he or the appropriate Military Commander may determine, from which any or all persons may be excluded, and with respect to which, the right of any person to enter, remain in, or leave shall be subject to whatever restrictions the Secretary of War or the appropriate Military Commander may impose in his discretion. — Franklin D. Roosevelt, Executive Order 9066 On February 19 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 in the first of a series of decisions of fateful consequence for Japanese Americans during World War II. In the first weeks of the American involvement in the war, the state treated Germans, Italians, and Japanese alike as ‘enemy aliens.’ Based on lists compiled with the help of the 1940 Alien Registration Act, the FBI immediately arrested 1,700 potentially dangerous aliens the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Similarly, although the attorney general denied the Western Defense Command (WDC) permission to search “all alien homes” for the purposes of seizing potential tools of espionage and subversion, the Department of Justice ordered all enemy aliens in seven western states to surrender such items on December 29 1941.1 But the military actions authorized by Executive Order (EO) 9066 made sharp distinctions amongst enemy aliens: not only were Japanese aliens treated differently than German and Italian aliens, but in the evacuation and internment of nearly 120,000 Japanese Americans from the Pacific Coast, some 70,000 citizens found themselves forcefully ‘alienated’ into the enemy category. It is apparent that for the state, the West Coast Japanese Americans — including the Issei (first generation aliens), the Nisei (second generation citizens) and the Kibei (Nisei educated in Japan) — were initially enemy aliens alike. Not yet fully realized is the significance of undoing this ‘lumping’ through later decisions on ‘splitting’ this population along different lines. To achieve this recognition, I will theorize the internment as a succession of sovereign decisions on the friend/enemy distinction coincident with a racial state of exception from which a state project of racial assimilation emerged. The stakes of this investigation then involve the identification of the very ‘what’ of the Japanese internment — for the Japanese internment, narrated in a more familiar form, is a story of rights and racism.. Along with assignations of responsibility, scholars have sought out the causes of the decision to displace and confine Japanese Americans in the major historiographical debate surrounding the internment.2 Hence this exceptional event in American history has been understood primarily in terms of the economic lobbying of white farmers on the Pacific Coast, the longstanding tradition of anti-Asian racism in the United States and closely related wartime hysteria over fifth column activity.3 Yet whatever the differences in historical explanations, the vast majority of scholars structure their narratives within what might be called the ‘necessity-rights circle’.4 The political question pursued by these inquiries is whether rights were justifiably or unjustifiably sacrificed by the military necessity invoked by Executive Order 9066, in which “the successful prosecution of the war requires every possible protection against espionage and against sabotage to national defense.” For example, Clinton Rossiter finds the internment “extremely disturbing” especially in the violation of “the most basic rights of a large group of American citizens.”5 This assessment might seem surprising coming from the defender of the doctrine of “Constitutional Dictatorship,” which states that “in times of crisis a democratic, constitutional government must be temporarily altered to whatever degree necessary to overcome the peril and restore normal conditions... the government will have more power and the people fewer rights.”6 But particularly perturbing is the fact that “the criterion for...

Between Two Adversaries: Korean Interpreters at Japanese Alien Enemy Detention Centers during World War II (review)

Between Two Adversaries: Korean Interpreters at Japanese Alien Enemy Detention Centers during World War II (review)

Anti-Alienism in New Zealand during the Great War: The von Zedlitz Affair, 1915

This article examines the role played by the New Zealand popular press in fostering anti-German sentiment during the Great War. In particular, it focuses on the case of George von Zedlitz, a Wellington academic, who for 12 months after the war's declaration, evaded government legislation intended to dismiss all enemy aliens from their posts, and intern those regarded as a danger to home security. Weekly journals led the campaign against the professor and fed the public's growing interest in the case. The affair sparked considerable public and private debate to the extent that by August 1915 the New Zealand Government was pressured into introducing the Alien Enemy Teachers' Act, which led to von Zedlitz being dismissed from his position.

The Confederate Sequestration Act

In the South there was near ideological consensus on the legal basis for seizing Union property during the Civil War. The United States was an enemy belligerent whose property was, at international law, subject to permanent confiscation during war. Through the resort to international law, the Confederacy was able not only to assert its sovereignty, but also to craft a far more rigorous and effective confiscation regime much quicker than their Northern counterparts. U.S. citizens were, at Confederate law, foreigners, and were not due the protections of domestic Confederate constitutional law. U.S. citizens were not traitors or rebels, and in fact owed no legal allegiance to the Confederate States of America. As a result, all of the agonizing self-scrutiny over the constitutional rights of the enemy that so dominated the Northern confiscation debates was mostly absent in the South. The classification of the Union as a foreign country had important institutional consequences. Property was confiscated by Confederate courts simply if it could be shown such property belonged to an alien enemy. By 1865 the Confederate judiciary had seized and sold millions of dollars worth of Northern property located all over the South. Yet the very independence of the Confederacy also limited the reach of Southern property seizure. Northern confiscation was designed to seize disloyal property and took place as the Union acquired more and more Confederate territory. Sequestration, on the other hand, could be enforced only within the boundaries of the new Confederate nation. The Confederacy made no claim to dominion over the Union, but was instead fighting to secede. By the laws of war, the Confederate army operating in the U.S. could impress property for its own use. But the Confederate Congress could not, in contrast, make any general claim to property located inside the boundaries of the United States. Belligerent property belonging to U.S. citizens could be confiscated by the legislature only if it was located inside the boundaries of the Confederacy. The fact that Union property was subject to legislative confiscation only inside the Confederacy put remarkable demands upon Southerners, and became, in some cases, oppressive. All citizens were required to inform the government of any enemy property of which they were aware, whether in their possession or anyone else's, imposing a clear legal instruction to inform on one's neighbors. In this way, the Sequestration Act reflected a broad assertion of extraordinary constitutional powers on the part of the Confederate government, and, in particular, its courts. Families were required to offer up to court officers property belonging to children and siblings living in the North. Lawyers, bankers, brokers, and businesses were made to open their books to reveal any property located in the South belonging to Northern clients or partners. The contents of wills were scrutinized by court officers who duly seized property that would have passed to Northern heirs. Most importantly, in terms of the sheer amount of money involved, the Sequestration Act made the Confederate government the new creditor for any debt owed by a Confederate citizen to an alien enemy. Those in debt to any U.S. citizen now owed money to the Confederacy instead.

Prisoners of the Home Front: German POWs and "Enemy Aliens" in Southern Québec, 1940-46 (review)

Reviewed by: Prisoners of the Home Front: German POWs and “Enemy Aliens” in Southern Québec, 1940–46 Yves Tremblay Prisoners of the Home Front: German POWs and “Enemy Aliens” in Southern Québec, 1940–46. By Martin F. Auger. Vancouver, British Columbia: UBC Press, 2005. ISBN 0-7748-1224-9. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Pp. xii, 227. CAN$85.00. The first chapter of this book provides background, including internment operations during the South African War and a review of international conventions on prisoners of war. Though the 1929 Geneva Convention is silent on civilian internment, the Canadian government decided in 1939 [End Page 1166] that it would be applicable to "enemy aliens." During the First World War, some Central Powers citizens caught in the country at the opening of hostilities were interned. Civilians were released on parole in 1916–17 because they proved to be no threat. Some civilians had been interned only because they were considered a potential burden on local welfare systems. The measure was not without commiseration: wives and children could accompany the family man. This was deemed a successful security operation—there was no sabotage during the war—and an internment program integrating POWs and civilian internees was again planned in 1936 (chapter 2). Xenophobia and war hysteria in the spring and summer of 1940 assured that history would repeat itself. Thousands of refugees and some German POWs were shipped to Canada to lessen the "fifth column" threat in the U.K. To accept these thousands, the Canadian government improvised new facilities, among them five camps in Southern Québec. At the beginning of 1941, the British decided, as in 1916, that most aliens posed no threat. Unfortunately, it took some time to "inform" the Canadian government and "refugees" were released only in October 1941. Camps were emptying. Then came real German POWs from every battlefield in the Western hemisphere. In accordance with the Geneva Convention, officers were to be segregated. German officers found their first camp "absolutely unfit," lighting being inadequate, small rooms not available for senior officers, etc. The Canadian government soon responded to the complaints, dutifully relayed by the Swiss consul. Luxury resorts were first considered, but were rejected as being too far from main rail lines. Instead, a pleasant masonry building was converted and provided with all the amenities possible, including a large gymnasium. But complaints continued, for example the lack of cupboards through which to protect personal effects from damage by exposure to dust. Chapters 3 through 5 deal respectively with "Life behind barbed wire," "Labour projects" and "Educational Programs," all giving the impression that Canadian authorities were complacent when dealing with these demanding customers. Not surprisingly, the short concluding chapter is titled "Canada internment experience, a home front victory." In fact, many German POWs found their incarceration so enjoyable that they immigrated to Canada after the war. (Another indication of comfort: For an average POW population of 2500, Auger counts only 42 "successful escapes," 33 of the escapees being captured the same day or the day after.) The difference of treatment between refugees in the first part of the war and POWs afterward is striking. For Auger, Canada had to be "fair" if Canadian POWs in Germany and Japan were to be treated with humanity. The explanation is not entirely satisfying. Conditions in POW camps in Germany were not as good as in Canada, to say nothing of Southeast Asia prisons. And for all these manifestations of good will, as Auger demonstrates in the most suggestive pages of the book, and despite "education" programs tailored to extirpate Nazi beliefs, hundreds of prisoners kept their Nazi faith until the end. [End Page 1167] Extensive use is made of archival material. The narrative lacks balance, the experience of refugees being cursorily recounted, compared to that of the POWs. The conclusions drawn are too naïve in this adaptation of an otherwise impressive M.A. thesis. Yves Tremblay Department of National Defence Ottawa, Ontario, Canada Copyright © 2006 Society for Military History

Nikkei in the Pacific Northwest: Japanese Americans & Japanese Canadians in the Twentieth Century

Acknowledgments1. Introduction: Nikkei in the Pacific Northwest, by Louis Fiset and Gail M. Nomura2. Writing Racial Barriers into Law: Upholding B.C.'s Denial of the Vote to Its Japanese Canadian Citizens, Homma v. Cunningham, 1902, by Andrea Geiger-Adams3. Becoming Local Japanese: Issei Adaptive Strategies on the Yakama Indian Reservation, 1906-1923, by Gail M. Nomura4. Yasutaro Yamaga: Fraser Valley Berry Farmer, Community Leader, and Strategist, by Michiko Midge Ayukawa5. Americanization vs. Japanese Cultural Maintenance: Analyzing Seattle's Nihongo Tokuhon, 1920, by Noriko Asato6. Nail That Sticks Up Gets Hit: The Architecture of Japanese American Identity in the Urban Environment, 1885-1942, Gail Lee Dubrow7. Four Hirabayashi Cousins: A Question of Identity, by James A. Hirabayashi8. The Minidoka Draft Resisters in a Federal Kangaroo Court, by Eric L. Muller9. Words Do Matter: A Note on Inappropriate Terminology and the Incarceration of the Japanese Americans, by Roger Daniels10. In the Matter of Iwao Matsushita: A Government Decision to Intern a Seattle Japanese Enemy Alien in World War II, by Louis Fiset11. The Free Zone Nikkei: Japanese Americans in Idaho and Eastern Oregon in World War II, by Robert C. Sims12. Lessons in Citizenship, 1945-1949: The Delayed Return of the Japanese to Canada's Pacific Coast, by Patricia E. Roy13. Peculiar Odyssey: Newsman Jimmie Omura's Removal from and Regeneration within Nikkei Society, History, and Memory, by Arthur A. Hansen14. Reclaiming and Reinventing Powell Street: Reconstruction of the Japanese Canadian Community in Post-World War II Vancouver, by Masumi IzumiContributorsIndex

Equilibrium, and: Shikata ga nai, and: What Remains, and: Over the Moon

Equilibrium In Sacramento, I was a newspaperman, but now I stuff newspapers into cracks around the door frame, between the floorboards and into knotholes to keep sand, wind and rattlesnakes out of our barracks. Here at Topaz, the Jewel of the Desert, I have become a carpenter. I use my hands to make life in the camp bearable for my family. When we arrived, our shack held nothing but four army cots. For mattresses, we were given bags to be filled with straw. I salvaged lumber from the yard to build crude furniture – a table, chairs, and a few shelves. Emi borrowed a broom and swept out the dust, then sewed curtains by hand to hang in the window. My son made a pull toy from the lids of tin cans. Mama came with us. She was an Issei and a poet. One day she wandered into the desert and never came back. I fashioned a box with no nails to hold her ashes. Emi made an ikebana from tumbleweeds. [End Page 88] Beneath the shadows of barbed wire, I have discovered the beauty of tools. How a plane can subdue the harshness of wood, its cold steel a comfort in my palm. How a level, with its bubble that does not freeze in winter, can offer levity. I have learned how to face a sandstorm with a strip of cardboard plastered with glue, then to use this sandpaper to smooth out the incongruities of our lives. I have been shown the miracle of precision and balance – how a hammer can straighten out the bent backs of nails and make them useful again. Shikata ga nai Rage was not something we were allowed to feel at Gila River and before that, when we were herded into horse stalls. We followed, obedient citizens bound in by barbed wire and silence. Shikata ga nai. It can't be helped. My father was a 'no-no man,' checking 'No' on the government's Loyalty Questionnaire – 'No' to giving up his rights – and was taken away by the FBI to a detention camp for criminals. We never saw him for three years. Shikata ga nai. [End Page 89] After eight months in the internment camp, my brother joined the Army. Fred was swoony. All the girls adored him. In the photograph of us together, he's standing proud in his uniform. I'm wearing my best lacy blouse. Mother and the other women in camp each sewed a stitch for a thousand-stitch sash, a good luck charm to keep him safe. Fred and his friends joined the 442nd. All Nisei. All sent to Italy. All dead. Shikata ga nai. After the war, General Stilwell pinned a Distinguished Service Cross to my blouse. Yes, the same lacy blouse. Mother stood like a ghost behind me. She was not allowed to receive her son's medal. She was an Issei, an enemy alien. Shikata ga nai. [End Page 90] What Remains They loaded us onto trucks bound for the camps took our homes, our possessions, our land just because we were Japanese – Japanese Americans. Two suitcases were all we were allowed for clothes photos, keepsakes – twenty years of our lives in America. Your grandfather was taken right off his fishing boat. I was cooking the evening meal when they came. Your mother sat at the kitchen table studying for a test. That night I cut strips of cloth from garments I had to leave behind. And from them I sewed this quilt. Each stitch, a remembrance – each square, rectangle a tribute to nature's bounty in the desolation of Heart Mountain. I stitched in the comfort of kasuri, the smell of wood smoke on rain-black nights, of days when rain fell soft and even as my child's breath. I stitched in triangles of flowers from my wedding kimono. And as I quilted, I whispered their names: kiku, hagi, kikyô chrysanthemum...

A Life in Secrets (review)

Reviewed by: A Life in Secrets Rita Kramer A Life in Secrets. By Sarah Helm. Boston: Little, Brown, 2005. ISBN 0-316-72497-1. Photographs. Bibliography. Index. Pp. xiii, 463. $45.00. When Britain's Special Operations Executive was closed down at the end of World War II, there were many questions left unanswered. The organization, created by Churchill and famously charged to "set Europe ablaze," had infiltrated agents into the Nazi-occupied countries of Europe to organize, arm, and train resistance groups to rise up when the anticipated cross-Channel invasion took place. In the end, it left an ambiguous record, particularly in France. Some effective leaders in the French Section succeeded in holding up German reinforcements to the Normandy D-Day beachhead. Less well-organized or less careful agents were captured and sent to the infamous [End Page 867] camps as Nacht und Nebel prisoners—meant to disappear without trace. The haste with which officials put an end to the existence of SOE at war's end kept the degree and nature of its failures from the public until well into the 1950s, when it became known that women had been sent into the field as couriers and radio operators, and that some had not returned. There were heroines like Odette, celebrated in biographies and films, but investigations began to uncover uglier stories about some of the other thirteen who, out of the thirty-nine women who had been landed or parachuted into France, never returned. Their fates had in fact been established immediately after the war, although not made public until later, by the woman who had worked most closely with them in preparing them for their missions and seeing them off when they boarded the planes that would take them into the unknown darkness of Fortress Europe. It was generally acknowledged that Vera Atkins, the intelligence officer of French Section, was more astute than her immediate superior, the head of F Section, Colonel Maurice Buckmaster, and that her loyalty to him, as to "her" agents, was boundless. But almost nothing was known during her lifetime about Vera Atkins's past. When she died in 2000 her family commissioned journalist Sarah Helm to write a biography, making available letters and other documents hidden away for years. Helm put her background as an investigative reporter to good use as she traced Vera Atkins's journey from an assimilated German Jewish family living a privileged life in Romania to her highly sensitive position in the London headquarters of the French section of SOE, where she impressed colleagues as "English to the bone" with her dignified demeanor and Mayfair accent. Her foreign roots were not the only surprise. Following the trail established by Vera Atkins's letters and extensive interviews with those who had known her in years gone by, her biographer uncovered the answer to the mystery that had intrigued historians, journalists, former SOE agents and authors of a stream of books since the war's end. How could it have happened that despite repeated messages from radio operators indicating they had been caught, French Section went on sending agents directly into waiting German hands? How could they have responded to an agent omitting his security check with a nanny-like tut-tut ("You have forgotten your security check. Be more careful next time." As one infuriated agent put it, "What did they think the security check was for?") Over the years, authors of the growing number of books about F Section put forth answers ranging from the inevitable muddle of wartime pressure to various byzantine conspiracy theories. The answer revealed by Sarah Helms's researches has to do in part with Vera Atkins's unsuspected background. She would never have been allowed to secure or continue in a position involving such secret activities of the government had it been known that she was not a British subject but technically an enemy alien. Her hopes rested on Buckmaster's support of her petition to become a British subject, and she was consequently reluctant to cross him or question his judgment. And it was Buckmaster's decision to [End Page 868] send some unsuitable young women into the field as...

Book Review: Nationalizing the Russian Empire. The Campaign against Enemy Aliens during World War I

Book Review: Nationalizing the Russian Empire. The Campaign against Enemy Aliens during World War I

Enemy Aliens, Prisoners of War: Internment in Canada during the Great War, and: A Bare and Impolitic Right: Internment and Ukrainian-Canadian Redress (review)

Reviewed by: Enemy Aliens, Prisoners of War: Internment in Canada during the Great War, and: A Bare and Impolitic Right: Internment and Ukrainian-Canadian Redress Lubomyr Luciuk (bio) Bohdan S. Kordan . Enemy Aliens, Prisoners of War: Internment in Canada during the Great WarMcGill-Queen's University Press2002. 202. $39.95 Bohdan S. Kordan and Craig Mahovsky . A Bare and Impolitic Right: Internment and Ukrainian-Canadian RedressMcGill-Queen's University Press. 96. $55.00, $19.95 Between 1914 and 1920, during Canada's first national internment operations, thousands of Europeans were needlessly imprisoned as 'enemy aliens.' They suffered the confiscation of what little wealth they had and were forced to do heavy labour under trying conditions in the country's frontier hinterlands. Many more were disenfranchised or subjected to other state-sanctioned censures. These indignities were endured not because of anything they had done but only because of who these people were, where they came from. Most were Ukrainians, although, officially, they were registered not by nationality but according to their status as Austro-Hungarian citizens. As pedestrian accounts of the home front in Canada during the First World War still often misidentify these men, women, and children as 'Austrians,' the two books under review are especially welcome for treating what was, until recently, a relatively forgotten episode in Canadian history and for ensuring that the reality of who these people were, and what they went through, is fixed. Although it is not readily discernible from a simple reading of either book, Bohdan Kordan is one of the initiators of the Ukrainian-Canadian redress movement, having coauthored a 28 October 1988 opinion-editorial, 'And Who Says that Time Heals All?' in the Globe and Mail, thus propelling this issue into a national forum. And Craig Mahovsky was, for a time, involved with the Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association, the group that has, for some two decades, called upon the government of Canada to negotiate acknowledgment and redress. While both writers have withdrawn from active involvement in that ongoing campaign, Kordan recently organized the installation of an impressive monument in rural Saskatchewan, near a work site where internees were transported in from adjacent Alberta. That plinth complements the nearly two dozen trilingual plaques and statues installed across Canada since 1994 by the UCCLA, at locations familiar to many Canadians for their natural beauty or historical [End Page 368] significance but unknown for what they also were - places of detention and hard labour for internees whose civil liberties were sacrificed on the altar of public order. Only in the past decade have Cave and Basin, in Banff National Park, or Kingston's Fort Henry, to name but two, been recognized as once having been concentration camps. The coauthored book is, in essence, a reworked briefing paper prepared originally for the Ukrainian Canadian Congress, which has since joined the UCCLA in its ongoing negotiations with the federal government over redress. Those particularly interested in the legal issues arising out of the internment operations will certainly find Mahovsky's contribution informative. The more substantial book, authored by Kordan alone, comprises six thoughtful commentaries having to do with various aspects of this historical injustice, rather than being a coherent history of what happened during the internment operations. Thus Kordan's chapters deal with themes such as the responsibilities of the state to the 'enemy within' in times of domestic and international crisis, the exploitation of forced labour in the creation of many of western Canada's national parks, and a comparative assessment of how 'enemy aliens' and pows were treated differently within the dominion and overseas. These reflections give evidence of the author's abiding interest in understanding the sociological and philosophical implications of what happened to people who were lured to this country with promises of free land and freedom only to find themselves suddenly branded as the enemy and then partly excised from the national project. While welcome additions to a growing body of scholarly literature on this troubling episode in our country's ethnic and immigration history, neither book is up to date or entirely accurate when describing the Ukrainian-Canadian redress movement. Thus Inky Mark's Bill C 331 - The...

BRIAN MASARU HAYASHI. Democratizing the Enemy: The Japanese American Internment. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2004. Pp. xvi, 319. $35.00

Brian Masaru Hayashi sets himself an ambitious goal: to redefine the history of the wartime removal and confinement of Japanese Americans (popularly known as the Japanese American internment). Whereas other historians, he states, have studied these actions as a domestic event, Hayashi wishes to view them internationally, placing America's policy alongside repression of enemy aliens by other nations. Similarly, instead of focusing on Japanese Americans as victims of wartime hysteria and bias by military and government officials, Hayashi seeks to reconstruct the complex negotiation that occurred in the camps among military officials, camp administrators, and confined Japanese Americans (or what he calls “ordinary” internees) within the context of the developing military situation and of the government's interest in obtaining hostages to trade with Japan. He rightly rejects the notion that official policy was driven simply by an unchanging and fundamental racial bias against Japanese. Instead, he focuses on how different government factions, defining loyalty according to “race” or “culture,” sought to inculcate or impose a pro-American position among the camp inmates.

The Internment of Civilians by Belligerent States during the First World War and the Response of the International Committee of the Red Cross

Between 1914 and 1918 several hundred thousand ‘enemy aliens’ were interned by the belligerent nations of the first world war, and many more civilians were trapped behind enemy lines in their own countries. This article looks at the efforts made by the International Committee of the Red Cross and other relief agencies to alleviate the plight of non-combatants held in internment camps. It also examines the dilemmas faced by neutral inspection teams, and asks why the ICRC in particular failed in its attempts to secure equal and humane treatment for civilian prisoners. The conclusion briefly considers the longer-term impact of these developments in the light of the even greater challenges facing the ICRC in the 1920s and beyond.

Не по своей воле… История и география принудительных миграций в СССР по Павел Полян by Alex Marshall (review)

426 Рецензии/Reviews Alex MARSHALL Павел Полян. Не по своей воле... История и география при- нудительных миграций в СССР. Москва: “ОГИ”, “Мемориал”, 2001. 326 с. ISBN: 5-94282-007-4. The historiography of forced migration within the former USSR continues to grow apace. Pavel Polian ’s latest work marks a significant advance in a field first ploughed by the likes of former Soviet dissident Aleksandr Nekrich1 and the infamous Cold Warrior Robert Conquest.2 In part this has been a product of new archival access, and in part a consequence of a more broad-based and holistic approach to the study of the subject, itself inspired to some degree by the end of the Soviet Union and the consequent need to place the USSR in its overall twentieth century context. Perhaps the most admirable aspect of this fine work is its refusal to see forced migration as a symbol of Soviet “exceptionalism,” as so many others have, but to place it instead within its global context. Forced migration has both a long historical tradition behind it (one need think only of the fate of the Scottish Highlanders in the eighteenth century or of the Muslims of Andalusia after 1492) and a particular place in the history of twentieth-century authoritarian modernization. Polian makes effective use of the work of Peter Holquist to point out both the strong imperial as well as pan-European roots of forced migration before 1917 (both Tsarist Russia and Imperial Germany before 1914 first tinkered with forced migration in their various colonies, and then employed it on a massive scale in eastern Europe during the First World War).3 The American scholar Eric Lohr in particular has recently significantly advanced general studies on this point, pointing to the considerable parallels and areas of continuity between the later Soviet government and the actions and thinking of both the imperial and provisional governments of Russia in 1914–1918.4 Polian himself also makes effective comparisons between the forced migrations carried out within the Soviet Union after 1917 and those conducted by contemporaneous authoritarian regimes in the 1920s, 1 A. Nekrich. The Punished Peoples. The Deportation and Fate of Soviet Minorities at the End of the Second World War. New York, 1979. 2 R. Conquest. Soviet Deportations of Nationalities. London, 1960. 3 P. Holquist. Making War, Forging Revolution: Russia’s Continuum of Crisis, 19141921 . Cambridge, MÀ, 2002. 4 E. Lohr. Nationalizing the Russian Empire. The Campaigns Against Enemy Aliens During World War I. Cambridge, MA, 2003. 427 Ab Imperio, 2/2006 event nonetheless remains a major blank spot in most existing Western historiography of the Second World War, which appears uncomfortable and even vaguely embarrassed by European and American complicity in forced migration, such an uncivilized and barbaric practice in Western eyes. Polian is to be congratulated for not shrinking from analysis of it here. The great majority of this work, however, focuses solidly on the particular characteristics of forced migration within the Soviet Union between 1919 and the rehabilitation processes that began in the 1950s and which continue even today. Polian follows Terry Martin in identifying clearly distinct periods within this general policy, in which diverse motivations were at play at various times in different regions.5 The deportation of the Terek Cossack Host in 1920, for example, was an intrinsic part of the Soviet state-building process, designed to facilitate the creation of viable mountaineer administrative districts in the North Caucasus in general and to defuse the land question that had created ethnic conflict in the Terek oblast’ in particular ever since the 1860s. Tsarist ethnic policies in the region, which had entailed the 30s, and 40s – with Imperial Japan for example, which both pressed some four million Koreans, including children, into slave labour during the SecondWorldWar on the Korean peninsula itself, and engaged in the widespread forced migration of Koreans to Japan and other parts of the “Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere.” Some 444,000 were ultimately compulsorily moved from Korea to other regions in 1939-1944 (P. 39). Perhaps one of the largest forced migrations to occur in this period happened, of course, under international mandate and with the full consent of the international community after the Second World War, in the grand geopolitical reordering of post-war eastern Europe. This began as...