Earlier this week, I had the pleasure of speaking with Vivienne Schiffer, author of Camp Nine, about her inspiration for the book (my review). 

Today, she graciously offered to share with you the story and share a photo of the real cemetery that inspired her journey into the internment camp for Japanese-Americans during World War II.

Please give her a warm welcome.

Camp Nine was inspired by my personal experience growing up in Rohwer, Ark., a town that was so small it was the perfect spot to hide nearly ten thousand Americans of Japanese ancestry where virtually no one would find them. There, my grandfather, Joe Gould, Sr., a wealthy landowner, sold hundreds of acres to the federal government to build what was euphemistically called the Rohwer Relocation Center. The United States government maintained that the Japanese Americans of California, Oregon and Washington were being simply “relocated” for their own protection, and for the protection of the war effort in sensitive military areas. In fact, it was pure racism. Powerful business lobbies on the West Coast didn’t want the Japanese Americans there. They’d been trying to exclude them for decades. Finally, they had the perfect excuse, and the federal government was the perfect ally.

By the time I was born fifteen years later, not only was the camp gone, even memory of it seemed to have faded. But how odd even that was. In 1942, the population of tiny Rohwer, Ark., swelled almost one hundred fold, from around one hundred people, most of them poor white and African American tenant farmers, to nearly ten thousand people, well educated city dwellers and prosperous farmers from somewhere far away. When the war ended, Rohwer abruptly shrank back to a population of one hundred, and fifteen years after the fact, not a soul in town mentioned that anything had ever happened. The only signs available to a small child were a brown government sign pointing the way over a dirt bank supporting railroad tracks, an incinerator smokestack, a tar-paper barracks formerly used as a hospital, and the ghost, the thing of beauty, the specter that crouched under the trees and hid in the cotton field: the haunting and lovely cemetery.

Copyright Vivienne Schiffer

That there were camps in the Deep South is news to even the well-informed. Japanese Americans from the camps did interact with their neighbors, and there were culture clashes. Unlike their counterparts in the western states, the Arkansans had never had any personal interaction with anyone of Asian ancestry. Their knowledge was limited to stereotypes and cartoons. Fear and resentment were real and were amplified by gossip. But the prisoners were Americans first. The only ethnic group required to prove their loyalty to the United States, men from the Rohwer Camp were a part of the “Go for Broke” team, the 442nd Regimental Combat Unit, the most highly decorated combat unit of its size in American military history. The 442nd famously liberated Rome (although they were stopped at the gates so that newsreels could record only white soldiers entering the city) and rescued the Lost Battalion of Texans in one of the most celebrated battles of the European theatre.

Camp Nine honors the Japanese Americans who endured their ordeal with grace and dignity, as well as those Caucasian Americans who protested their mistreatment and sought to make their lives better.

Thanks, Vivienne, for sharing your inspiration with us.

If you’re interested in reading about how WWII impacted U.S. communities, especially after the government began establishing internment camps for Japanese-Americans, you should check out Camp Nine.