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High schoolers preserved a Japanese internment camp for decades. Now, it’s a national park. (upworthy.com)

 

After the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941, a wave of fear ran through the country that led America to violate the civil liberties of tens of thousands of its own citizens. In 1942, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which led to the internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans and people of Japanese ancestry in ten camps throughout the country.

Two-thirds of those interned were U.S. citizens.

The smallest of the camps, Amache in southeast Colorado, housed around 10,000 internees from 1942 to 1945, with a peak of 7,318 in 1943.

John Hopper was a new social studies teacher at Granada High School in Colorado when he first visited the plot of land where the Amache Internment Camp once stood.

Three years later, some of Hopper’s “really bright and willing students” wanted to interview a camp survivor, which led him to create a nonprofit, the Amache Preservation Society (APS). The extracurricular activities surrounding Amache and its history soon evolved into a class at Granada.

Over the years, thanks in part to work done by the students, Amache has been a place for camp survivors and their descendants to visit and pay homage to loved ones while keeping the memory of the tragedy alive.

For the students, caring for Amache and its history has been a lesson in compassion.

“It’s taught me a lot about empathy,” Bailey Hernandez, a junior, said. “You start to think, well, how would I have reacted if my family was forced into one of these camps?”

To read more of Tod Perry's article, please click here.

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