Teresa Tamura—Minidoka An American Concentration Camp

After the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941 — the same year my parents graduated from Caldwell High School — President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 on Feb. 19, 1942. Roosevelt's mandate confined 120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans to 10 internment camps in the western and midwestern United States. Minidoka Relocation Center was one of them.Those who lived in Washington, Oregon and Alaska went to Minidoka, a dry, desolate, sagebrush plain 20 miles northeast of Twin Falls, a two-hour drive from our home.