Posted at 12:13 p.m., Tuesday, February 20, 2007
WWII internment camp memorial planned in California
Associated Press
PINEDALE, Calif. — Organizers broke ground on a site for a memorial to more than 4,800 Japanese-American internees held in Fresno County during World War II.Residents of California, Oregon and Washington were taken to Pinedale, just north of Fresno, in 1942 after President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an order to relocate 120,000 Japanese-Americans to internment camps after Japanese forces bombed Pearl Harbor.
Families were put on trains and taken to the interim camp for a couple of months before being transferred to camps in other states.
"What I remember most is that the concentration camp destroyed our family," James Hirabayashi, 80, of Mill Valley said yesterday at the groundbreaking of Remembrance Plaza.
Armed soldiers guarded the wooden barracks, which were surrounded by barbed wire, said Hirabayashi, whose family was uprooted from Tacoma, Wash.
The $150,000 memorial will include a landscaped plaza with a fountain and a "story wall" with information about the camp and the people who lived there.
