In 2021 a woman named Cynthia Wright reached out to us with an amazing story.
She had always kind of known that her grandparents lived in Topaz. Her grandmother Ella was a sketch artist, and her grandfather, Walter, worked in Operations. Ella used to tell her granddaughter that she had many Japanese friends in Topaz. Cynthia, once she understood what Topaz was, thought to herself, “Yeah, right!” feeling it would be difficult for incarcerees to feel friendship with those in the administration of the camp.
But the Topaz stories she read on our website motivated her to dig into her family’s history. And this is some of what she found out:
Ella Halgren was a young woman when she emigrated from Sweden to Washington State in 1937. “She came to the U.S. to study art,” Cynthia said in an interview with Brad Shirakawa of the Alameda Japanese American History Project1. She met and married Walter Honderich, a fellow student at the University of Washington, who created the first student co-op there—an experience he put to good use later as the manager of the Topaz Co-op.
Walter managed many Co-op employees, including Dave Tatsuno, a Nisei from San Francisco. Dave was an avid home movie buff, but cameras were considered contraband in camp, and before incarceration, he had lent his 8mm movie camera to a Caucasian friend to avoid having it confiscated by the government. Walter, a home movie enthusiast himself, was sympathetic, and suggested that Tatsuno have his friend send the camera to Walter, who then passed it to Dave, warning him not to point it at the guard towers or barbed wire.2 The home movies that Dave Tatsuno surreptitiously shot are the most important record on film of life in Topaz, and the compiled footage was inducted into the National Film Registry in 1997.