Keeping Manzanar’s Message

The National Park Service is moving slowly in developing Manzanar camp as a national historic site to commemorate the internship of Japanese Americans--most of them U.S. citizens and Southern Californians--during World War II. The snail’s pace is no surprise, considering the tight Park Service budget.

The staff for the project is being doubled--from one to two. And plans are being developed to turn the single surviving building, an auditorium-gymnasium, into a visitors center.

What is more important than any physical facility is that the Manzanar memorial document the hardship that internees endured in cramped wood and tar-paper barracks through bitter eastern Sierra winters and hot, dusty summers. Living at Manzanar, in the Owens Valley, was not voluntary or easy, as some hostile critics in the region still blindly insist. Those who lived behind barbed wire and machine gun towers can attest to that.

The nation has recognized that the forced relocation of the internees was a colossal constitutional blunder, the result of panic, fear and blatant prejudice. It’s too easy to say, as many do, “It can’t happen again.” Manzanar should stand as a solemn reminder that liberty always is a precious and vulnerable thing.

Manzanar, which can seem to be a bleak and dreary place, remains a memorial to the human spirit--of thousands of American citizens who were wronged by their country but remained steadfastly loyal to it even as they suffered. Manzanar needs to keep that light burning.