AUSTIN, Texas -- Few places in Austin are as serene as Zilker Park’s Japanese garden. It was designed by a man named Isamu Taniguchi, an immigrant from Japan.
Today Taniguchi’s grandson, Evan, is a prominent architect in Austin. He can recall his grandfather’s darker years.
“It was just kind of a bad part of their lives that they seriously didn’t want to talk about much,” Taniguchi said. “And I didn’t ask them.”
During World War II, the FBI forced Isamu Taniguchi from his home in California and interred him at a camp in Crystal City, Texas.
Located about 120 miles southwest of San Antonio, it was 500 acres, making it the largest internment camp in the country. It was also the only camp to accept families.
For five long years, Evan’s grandfather lived there with his grandmother, father and uncle. There were thousands of German, Japanese, and Italian immigrants who were also rounded up and forced to live there, too.
“Even if you were the second generation, or the wife, you had to go to these camps,” Taniguchi said.
A government propaganda film referred to it as an “alien detention facility.”
Today a high school is situated where the camp once stood. Many of the buildings are now slabs.
However, the scene in Crystal City is quite unlike many of the former concentration camps in Germany and Poland, which opened to the public shortly after the war ended.
This summer, a KVUE-TV crew visited a camp called Sachsenhausen, which is about 20 miles outside Berlin.
Unlike the camp in Crystal City, the walls still stand, some barracks remain, and monuments have been erected.
Elizabeth Bridges, a student at Purdue University, was among many Americans visiting Sachsenhausen.
“Learning about history when you’re actually in the place where it happened makes it more real,” Bridges said. “It makes it more real than reading about it in a book.”
Historians agree. The Sachsenhausen camp was declared a national memorial in 1956, six years after it closed.
One guide told KVUE the lessons it taught were simply too big to ignore.
Back in Texas though, it took nearly 40 years before a marker would commemorate what happened in Crystal City.
Evan Taniguchi wonders why it took so long.
William McWhorter, with the Texas Historical Commission, believes that people might have once simply tried to erase the memory.
“You see a lot of people wanting to move on from the World War II experience,” McWhorter said. “Whether they saw combat or not, whether they had their civil liberties trampled on by being interred at a camp, whether they were a prisoner of war and held by a country for several years—a lot of people wanted to move beyond it.”
Today that is changing. McWhorter recently helped the state earn a grant that purchased pamphlets and interpretive panels for the former camp.
“It may not be the storming of the beaches at Normandy; it may not be the flying and bombing missions over Germany; but it is still part of the World War II story," McWhorter said. “Whether it’s the logistics of how we put together planes, the interment of enemy aliens, or the training of soldiers — all of it comes together to let us know what our parents and grandparents went through six and a half decades ago.”
It was a time when the government forced an Austin man’s family from their home -- a move that not only changed the course of his family’s history, but the country’s.
Click here to watch a video produced by the Immigration and Naturalizaton Service in 1945 of the family internment camp at Crystal City.
