The Horror of Japanese-American Incarceration
The dark history of Executive Order 9066
It reads like a simple detail, its succinctness perhaps amplifying its horror: “a number of babies died in the hospital.” This statement appears in a monthly report from Unit I of the Poston Japanese-American incarceration camp in Arizona. By the summer of 1942, thousands of Japanese Americans held at Poston had another name for the miles of tarpaper-covered buildings that they called home: “Roasten.” The high desert heat baked their barracks and scorched the earth.
This is the heat that a “number” of babies — either infants needing special care when they arrived at the camp with their families or newborns — succumbed to while in the hastily-constructed hospital.
Doctors and nurses who worked in the children’s ward reported that the babies died of dehydration. There was no way for the limited number of medical professionals — mostly Japanese-American incarcerees themselves — to alleviate the children’s suffering fast enough.
Parents who struggled to recover from their forced removal following Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s signing of Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942 were now confronted with the painful reality that their babies were gone.
