“You are an angel, Christian Lange. Inge’s angel,” she said, in tears. “Helene, your boy . . .” She touched his face. “I’m so thankful.”
“I was happy to watch her,” said Christian, who was soon transferred from her arms back to his mother’s arms. “She gave me something to think about on the trip.”
“How are you feeling?” he asked his mother as they all made their way onto the bus.
“I’m tired. My back is sore. But without you here, it’s been this baby who has kept my sanity.”
Since the night the agents had come to the house, Christian had grown even more thankful for the baby. At first, he’d been shocked, and distressed at what a baby might do to the calm of their lives, but now he appreciated the hope it was giving his parents. Something good for the Langes, despite what was happening outside the womb.
“What’s the camp like?” he heard Inge ask her mother as they settled onto the old bus’s vinyl-covered bench seats.
“Oh, it’s all right, Sch?tzen. There’s a swimming pool and lots of other children to play with. You’ll like that. And since it’s so warm here, you can start swimming very soon.”
“Like summer camp,” Inge said, smiling.
“Yes, Sch?tzen. That’s what it’s like. Summer camp in March.”
CHAPTER 5
EMI KATO
AUGUST 1942–MARCH 1943
Norio had explained to Keiko that as much as the Japanese Embassy had pleaded with the U.S. State Department, the Americans would not let her and Emi stay at the Greenbrier hotel alone. The American government was removing all their staff—the FBI agents, the State Department employees—from West Virginia as soon as the Japanese diplomats sailed in June. The only place where Emi and Keiko could go besides prison was an internment camp. And the government had decided that they’d be going to a largely female camp in Texas.
“But why can’t we just go back to our apartment in Washington?” a very weakened Emi asked her mother from her hospital bed.
“Your father said it’s not an option. They don’t trust us to be there without surveillance. We have to go to one of these camps.”
“But what is an internment camp exactly?” Emi’s chest still felt like there was a hot iron on it and despite the nurses’ constant doses of medicine and fluid, she was still coughing up blood at night. Her breathing was very labored and she couldn’t walk to the bathroom without having to stop to rest—how was she going to make it to Texas?
“I don’t know what an internment camp is precisely,” said Keiko, “but I know that the Japanese-Americans are being sent to them. Whatever it is, it won’t be for long. And we won’t leave until you’re better. That they promised me.”
A week later, Emi was told that her father would be coming to the hospital but that he wasn’t permitted to be in the same room as her. He would stand outside the building and she would be allowed to wave at him from her window.
They waved for ten minutes, Emi crying as she held up a piece of paper that read, ai shiteru, otōsan. I love you, father.
“What if he doesn’t make it back to Japan? What if the boat is bombed? This will be the last time I ever saw him, through an American hospital window. Not even able to touch his hand,” said Emi through her coughs and sobs.
“Don’t think that way,” said Keiko, with tears in her eyes. “Do not let war—or illness—turn you into a pessimist.”
“I don’t think war is producing many optimists, Mother,” said Emi, watching her father get into a car.
After one month in the hospital, the women were told that Emi was healthy enough for them to travel to the internment camp in Seagoville, Texas. They were assured that it would be a short stay and that they would soon head to Japan and be reunited with their family.
The Kato women were used to long journeys, but they’d had the luck of always doing so when they were healthy. While Emi was no longer contagious, she still needed to take medicine for six more months and was a very weakened version of herself on their train ride down to Texas. The government officials had toyed with letting them travel to Texas alone, without FBI accompaniment, but in the end, they sent a sullen agent with them. In healthier times, the presence of the man would have bothered her immensely, being treated like a criminal when it was only her place of birth that was the problem, but Emi was barely awake for the entire journey. She absorbed the noises and the smells—children complaining about the hard bench seats, women eating noodle salad and days-old rice—but her eyes stayed closed, as her mother’s hand rested on her forehead, monitoring her temperature.
When they finally arrived at the camp, the first thing they both noticed was the barbed wire surrounding the buildings.
“But the buildings themselves are not bad looking,” said Keiko, smiling at her weak daughter. “It looks like an American college.”
Emi stared at the long two-and three-level brick buildings that seemed to have grown out of the earth, as there was nothing else for miles around them but dirt, a water tower, and some dry, browning shrubs.
“If you say so,” said Emi, following a man in a sand-colored cowboy hat who worked at Seagoville and was barking orders at them.
Emi spent the first two weeks of their time in Seagoville in and out of sleep, still fighting the illness that had grounded them in the United States. On their fifteenth night there, her fever spiked, but by the next morning she had a clear head and a clear chest and was able to walk around the camp for the first time.
“I hate it here,” Emi declared, sitting on her creaky twin-sized bed in their tiny stark room after her mother had taken her on a tour of the camp.
“I don’t think you’re supposed to like it,” said Keiko, sitting on her bed, which was less than three feet away from Emi’s.
“What a small, unpleasant room,” said Emi. “I’m glad I’ve been asleep for two weeks. Do we know how much longer we’re here for?”
“Your father and the embassy staff are doing their best to get us on the next boat to Japan. But it’s not as easy as it sounds. We have to travel with others who are repatriating. Thousands of others. We can’t just row there on our own, can we?” Keiko smoothed and folded her clothes, though they were already neatly folded and placed on the only shelf in the room.
“Have I received any letters from Leo?” Emi asked. “You did send him our address before we left the hospital? You promised you would.”
“Yes, I did,” said Keiko. “But like I told you at the Homestead and at the Greenbrier, America has cut off mail exchanges with many countries. That must be the reason that the last letter you received from Leo was just after Pearl Harbor. And it’s a miracle that it made it through. You’re lucky it arrived at the embassy—and that Leo had the foresight to mail it there—before we were all sent away.”
“But perhaps when we are back in Japan?” said Emi, reaching under her pillow for an old letter from Leo that she had received the month before the Pearl Harbor attack. “Then our letters might reach each other?”