Executive Order 9066

• In February 1942, U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which banned all people of Japanese ancestry from a 50- to 60-mile-wide area on the country's Pacific coast. As a result, Japanese-American men, women and children in California, Oregon and Washington state were taken from their homes and imprisoned in internment camps. This is now recognized as a shameful chapter in American history; in 2007, President George W. Bush issued a formal apology and financial compensation to the Japanese-Americans who were imprisoned in U.S. internment camps.
  
  

Camp Topaz

• Camp Topaz opened in September 1942 to house Japanese-Americans from the San Francisco area, most of whom had previously been confined to a makeshift barracks at the Tanforan Race Track in San Bruno, California. Construction of Camp Topaz wasn't complete when internees began arriving. Soon after it opened, the camp's population reached about 8,000. Internees were forced to complete the construction of barracks and other camp buildings.
  
  

Housing

• Camp Topaz had two elementary schools, a junior/senior high school and a hospital. Internees lived in apartment buildings, each of which had six differently sized apartments to accommodate families of various sizes. The apartments were sparsely furnished, containing only surplus army cots, mattresses and blankets. Some internees were forced to move into apartments that still didn't have glass installed in window frames. Over time, some internees built shelves, tables and makeshift furniture out of whatever scrap wood they could find. Some residents worked at various jobs in the camp, and received minimal wages. These residents were sometimes able to obtain passes to shop in the nearby town of Delta. However, internees were not free to come and go as they pleased; in 1943, a camp guard shot a 63-year-old internee who was standing near the camp's fence.
  
  

Conditions

• The hastily erected barracks comprised crude structures built from pine planks covered with tar paper. Sheetrock lined the inside walls; no insulation protected internees from the extreme weather conditions of central Utah, where temperatures dropped below freezing in the winter and exceeded 90 degrees in the summer. Heat in these apartments came from small coal stoves, on which internees were discouraged from cooking. Internees ate communally, in a military-style mess hall.
  
  

"Topaz Memories"

• The conditions at Camp Topaz can be seen in the film "Topaz Memories," which internee Dave Tatsuno filmed with an 8mm home-movie camera he smuggled into the camp. This film, one of only two home movies held by the Library of Congress, is the only color footage of Japanese-American internment camps shot by an internee.