by Jon Yatabe
Reading was my salvation in the three and a half years that I spent behind barbed wire. Though my body was imprisoned, there was no limit to where my mind could go through books.
In 1942, my father carried a few beloved books to the relocation camps, like Kent’s N by E, Mann’s The Magic Mountain, and Santayana’s Philosophies. When the people being relocated took only what they could carry, he carried these in his bag and kept them throughout relocation on a small shelf he made. He couldn’t take them with him to the army so they remained in our room in Topaz to remind us of him. In the army, he carried a paperback of Thoreau’s A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers that friends had given him before he went overseas. He also read the compact paperback classics that the army published and passed out to all the troops. That is where he began to read William Faulkner.
He also taught me about the joy of reading a book. He taught me to always have a book to read when there was a break at work, in bed, and even in the bathroom. It’s a habit he instilled in me and I read anything that was available in Topaz—some from neighbors and some that my parents obtained, like Tom Sawyer, which they first read to me and then had me read by myself. At Desert View School in Topaz, we had a small library of kids’ books that a kind kindergarten teacher let me take home and bring back the next day. I became used to taking a book home, sitting with my parents after dinner while they read by the light of a bare electric bulb and tracing the words to try to recognize them. I was learning by osmosis, helped by the lack of modern day distractions like radio, television, or the newspapers; and long before the advent of video games, cell phones and the Internet. We sat in the glare of the unshaded electric light where we talked and read, and my mother would knit scarves for the coming cold. It was an environment for learning that got me reading at an early age. When my dad joined the army in 1943, my mother took over reading to me and with me.
Being a reader in Topaz posed challenges similar to getting enough kite string to fly your kite over the barbed wire fences. You had to improvise. I borrowed books from the family, from the neighbors, and from the school, but by the first grade I was running low. The school had only a few donated books and no more seemed to be coming in when we received a heaven-sent gift. A library was being started from donated books coming from outside camp. Several charities and churches had recognized the need for books in the camps and had begun to donate boxes of books. We had several qualified librarians and soon one of the barracks was converted into a lending library.
