Facing the Mountain (Adapted for Young Readers), page 13
An SS officer, Untersturmführer Heinrich Wicker, came forward to negotiate the surrender of the camp. The Americans weren’t interested in negotiating anything. They marched Wicker to the train full of corpses and demanded answers.
As they moved deeper into the camp, the GIs’ anger mounted. Piles of naked dead bodies stacked up outside a building like firewood. A mountain of shoes—many of them children’s shoes. Some kind of interrogation room, its concrete walls splattered with blood.
Gaunt, hollow-eyed people rushed up to the GIs, cheering, embracing them, dropping to their knees and embracing their legs. Others, too weak to walk, crawled out of the barracks on hands and knees. Some stayed inside, lying in their own filth on wooden bunks, more dead than alive. They stared at the GIs with eyes behind which no one now lived.
In Dachau’s empty coal yard, a few GIs—by now in a cold and furious rage—lined up Nazi prison guards against a wall and shot them, killing several dozen, perhaps more, before a senior officer found them and put a stop to it.
In other parts of the camp, prisoners took matters into their own hands, beating an unknown number of guards to death. Untersturmführer Wicker was never again seen alive.
There is no firm evidence that any of the 522nd participated in the initial liberation of the main camp at Dachau, but by late afternoon at least a few Nisei soldiers had entered the camp.
Toshio Nishizawa recalled driving through the open gates and being shocked by what he saw. Josef Erbs, an eighteen-year-old Romanian Jew, remembered lying sprawled on the ground when a Japanese American soldier bent over, picked him up, and carried him to an aid station. It was the first time Erbs had seen an Asian person of any sort. He took note of the shoulder patch on the man’s uniform: blue, with a white hand holding a torch—the insignia of the 442nd RCT.
What the Nisei soldiers saw at Dachau was just one part of a network of Nazi concentration camps. Some were slave-labor camps like Dachau. Others, like Auschwitz-Birkenau, were devoted to the systematic murder of millions of Jews, Poles, Romani, disabled people, LGBTQ people, and anybody else that the Nazis labeled as undesirable. The next day, April 30, Adolf Hitler died by suicide in a bunker in Berlin.
That same morning, the main column of the 522nd moved south again, breaking down gates and liberating prisoners from some of the subcamps surrounding Dachau. On the road, they came across scores more bodies splayed out in muddy fields, ditches, and pinewoods.
The corpses were dressed in the same thin, striped uniforms as the prisoners at Dachau, and many of them had gunshot wounds to the backs of their heads—victims of a forced march out of the camp and execution when they couldn’t keep up.
On May 2, Kats and George Oiye, along with some other Nisei artillerymen, found scattered lumps in the snow. When they brushed the snow from the lumps, they found what they feared they would: more bodies.
Then, nearby, they noticed a boy crouching in the snow.
Solly Ganor, a Lithuanian Jew, one of those thousands marched out of Dachau days before, had awoken that morning covered by snow and surrounded by bodies. Now he watched warily as men in uniforms approached him.
It must be his turn to be shot.
He resigned himself to his fate and waited for the bullet.
Then he realized the men were speaking English. He looked up and saw Asian men smiling down at him. This did not make sense to him. He wondered if he were dead and these were angels. One of the angels hovering above him said, “You are free, boy.”
Ganor grappled for the English word. “Who?” he finally croaked out.
“Hey! He speaks English.”
“Americans,” one of the men said. “Japanese Americans.”[63]
One of the angels handed him a chocolate bar. Ganor took it but set it aside. He would not eat the chocolate. That would be like eating a treasure. “You would not eat the Mona Lisa,”[64] he would later say.
Chapter 23
At 2:41 on the morning of May 7, 1945, Colonel General Alfred Jodl of the German armed forces met US Army Lieutenant General Walter Bedell Smith at a schoolhouse in Reims, France, and surrendered. The Third Reich was defeated, and the war in Europe at an end.
When the news was announced in Great Britain, tens of thousands poured into London’s Trafalgar Square and Piccadilly Circus, cheering and hugging each other. In Paris, throngs of French civilians mingled with American and British soldiers around the Arc de Triomphe, singing the French national anthem, “La Marseillaise,” and dancing down the Champs-Élysées.
News of the surrender arrived in the United States just in time for the evening editions of the newspapers. Millions read the Associated Press’s lede: “The greatest war in history ended today with the unconditional surrender of Germany.”[65]
Perhaps half a million jubilant people jammed into New York’s Times Square. Blizzards of torn paper and confetti drifted down from tall buildings at Rockefeller Center and on Wall Street. In the Garment District, workers ripped open bales of fabric and threw thousands of yards of rayon, silk, and wool from the windows, draping passing cars in colorful cloth.
In most of the country, though, the response was more muted. Here and there, church bells rang, and people gathered to offer up prayers of thanksgiving. Americans turned on their radios, called loved ones, and congregated on front lawns to talk over the news.
They all knew the war in the Pacific was not yet over. This was not what they had been waiting for since Pearl Harbor.
In Italy, Chaplain Higuchi was the first member of the 442nd’s Second Battalion to hear the news. He asked for permission to address the men and let them know.
The men were puzzled. It was odd for the chaplain to address them all together on any day other than Sunday.
Higuchi mounted a platform and started by asking the men to sing “America.” He led them through the first few familiar lines: “My country, ’tis of thee, / Sweet land of liberty, / Of thee I sing.” Then he told them, “Fellas, the war in which all our friends who slept with us and ate and died and wanted to see this day . . . the war is over.”[66]
No one cheered. A soft sigh rippled through the ranks, but nothing more.
Higuchi looked out at the upturned faces and saw tears running down cheeks. He knew what he was looking at. He felt it himself. He asked them to take a minute for silent prayer, to thank God for their deliverance, and, more than that, to think of the men who were not there, who had died to make this day possible, and to think also of the folks at home who would never see their sons and husbands and brothers return.
A few of the men shouted and threw their hats in the air, but only a handful, and they were new replacement troops, the ones who had not seen any fighting, who had not lost any friends, who had not seen young bodies torn open.
The rest of the men went back to their assigned tasks. They were happy it was over, but grim-faced. Nobody got out ukuleles. Nobody danced hula.
Fred Shiosaki couldn’t manage to get too worked up about the news. Too much had happened. Too many friends were gone. Too many bloody dreams haunted him at night. He thought, Jeez. Well, I made it. I think I made it.[67]
Then he took a nap.
For Fred, and for most of the Nisei soldiers, the end of the war in Europe was clouded not only by their grief and sheer exhaustion but also by the realization that the moment they were waiting for was still off in the future.
Nobody could say how long the waiting would go on. That would be decided in the Pacific. The same Associated Press story that announced the German surrender had stated it starkly with a single line printed in boldface, War on Japs Continues.
* * *
★ ★ ★ ★
Several months later, in Japan, on the other side of the war-torn world, Kats’s sister Fumiye Miho was waiting impatiently for the next train into Hiroshima. It was a warm, humid morning, August 6, 1945, and she was going to be late for work.
In the past few months, life had only gotten harder for Fumiye, her sister, and their family—as it had for everyone in Japan. In March, they had barely survived yet another firebombing of Tokyo by the Americans, so her brother-in-law packed up all his dental equipment and moved them to a village fifteen miles outside the city of Hiroshima—the same village from which Katsuichi and Ayano Miho had emigrated to Hawaiʻi thirty-four years before.
There they lived in a Buddhist temple with four other refugee families. Their living spaces were separated by curtains, and the only water available had to be carried uphill in buckets from a dirty stream. Fumiye’s brother-in-law had already fallen ill from drinking the water. Her sister Tsukie’s two children were perpetually sick and hungry, and there was little food to be had except for potatoes and parsnips.
The only saving grace was that Fumiye had a job in the city center of Hiroshima, translating English news broadcasts for the Japanese government.
And today she was late.
As she approached the ticket booth to inquire about the next train into Hiroshima, a flash of light unlike any light Fumiye had ever seen nearly blinded her. Everything turned white, almost translucent, just for a moment, before the normal yellow light of a summer morning flickered back on.
The world went suddenly silent.
Fumiye turned in the direction from which the white light had come. A long, low rumbling arose in the distance, growing louder and louder until it became a sustained roar. The ground seemed to quiver. Then the gray morning sky over Hiroshima resolved itself into a towering, tulip-shaped cloud, vaguely violet in color, that rose higher and higher in the sky before darkening and flattening out into something vaguely like a mushroom.
By that afternoon, word had reached the village that the whole of central Hiroshima had been destroyed after a single American warplane appeared over the city.
The village authorities commanded everyone to return to the railway station at 5:00 p.m. to help with the wounded being evacuated from the city center.
Many of the area’s schoolchildren had gone into the city to do community service work that day, so the platform was packed with anxious parents when Fumiye arrived. When the first train evacuating the wounded from the city pulled in, a long wailing arose from the crowd. Almost none of the parents could recognize the blackened, disfigured children who stumbled off the train or were carried off on stretchers.
The next day, Fumiye took a train to within two miles of Hiroshima and then walked the rest of the way. Even before she got into the flat, empty wasteland where the city center had been, she could smell the overwhelming stench of burned flesh and see black columns of smoke rising from the ashes.
For a week, she walked through the ruins, helping the survivors in any way she could, sleeping at night on the charred lawns of what had been city parks. She tried to ease the dying of an old woman who had turned purple and blue from what Fumiye would only later learn was radiation poisoning.
Fumiye herself was fortunate enough to experience only mild effects from her exposure to radiation in Hiroshima. After the war, she was reunited with Kats and the rest of her family in Hawaiʻi. The experience of witnessing the suffering of so many people following the bombing of Hiroshima turned her into a lifelong pacifist. She became a Quaker and spent the rest of her life traveling the world preaching peace and compassion.
Sixty-six thousand people died at Hiroshima. Another sixty-nine thousand were injured. On the morning of August 9, three days later, the United States dropped a second bomb on the town of Nagasaki. Another thirty-nine thousand people were killed and twenty-five thousand injured there.
Chapter 24
On the same morning that Nagasaki was bombed, the SS Waterbury Victory pulled up to Pier 40 in Honolulu Harbor, carrying the first 241 men and officers of the 442nd RCT to return to Hawaiʻi.
Young women came on board and handed out doughnuts and pineapple juice. They were followed by dancers in grass skirts, who wore plumeria and hibiscus flowers in their hair. The dancers hung leis around the necks of grinning soldiers dressed in crisp khaki uniforms with arrays of medals and decorations on their chests.
Then the women danced hula, swaying on the foredeck as the men pulled out guitars and ukuleles and sang the familiar songs of home that had sustained them throughout the ordeal.
After some speechifying by local officials, Lieutenant Colonel Pursall led the men down the gangway to a motorcade that whisked them away to the stately grounds of ʻIolani Palace, where thousands of people were waiting for them: their parents, siblings, buddies, girlfriends. They showered the men with more leis, and with kisses and embraces.
A hula dancer welcomes a veteran home aboard the SS Waterbury Victory.
Then, at last, they sat under the familiar banyan trees on green grass and ate kālua pork and laulau as the fairy terns again circled above them in graceful white loops against a blue Hawaiian sky.
In the wake of the bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, news swept around the world that Japan had surrendered on August 14. Now, finally, Americans were able to celebrate as never before in the history of the nation. In New York, the largest crowd the city had ever seen poured into Times Square. Men climbed lampposts waving American flags. In Seattle, sirens wailed and car horns honked as people streamed out of offices and storefronts into the streets. In New Orleans and Boston and Chicago and Los Angeles, in every city, midsized town, and tiny hamlet in America, it was the same: an outpouring of unrestrained relief and joy.
* * *
★ ★ ★ ★
In Europe, many of the soldiers of the 442nd had to wait for weeks or months before they could return to the United States.
Fred Shiosaki got the nod to head for home in late October and made his way back to Spokane, Washington. When he walked into the warm, familiar, steamy smells of the Hillyard Laundry, his whole family was waiting there to greet him. His older brother, Roy, had just returned from serving in Europe, too.
Fred’s mother and sister, gleeful and laughing, embraced him, and his father shook his hand. Then he looked him in the eye and simply said, “You did well.”[68] After that, he went to the front of the laundry and took down the two blue stars hanging in the window.
* * *
★ ★ ★ ★
Rudy Tokiwa was still hobbling on crutches from his injuries when he left Italy for home. And, like so many soldiers, not all his wounds were physical. When he was passing through Chicago on his way west, a car backfired, and Rudy and another GI nearby hit the ground. When Rudy got up and dusted himself off, he realized, for the first time, that it might take him a while to get over the war—both physically and mentally.
When he arrived back at Fort Douglas, Rudy learned that the Poston camp had been closed. No one could tell him anything about his parents and sister or about or any of the people who had been incarcerated there. It was as if they had all just disappeared. Concerned and frustrated, he decided to head for the place his father had always talked about settling: San Jose, California.
In the bus station in San Jose, there was a Red Cross stand, set up to aid returning GIs. Rudy explained to the woman working there that he had just come back from overseas and that the camp his parents had been incarcerated in was now closed. He wondered if she could help him.
The woman looked up and studied Rudy a moment. “There’s a place on Fifth Street. A bunch of Japs are livin’ there.”
A sailor waiting in line behind Rudy pushed forward. “Are you calling this man a ‘Jap’? Do you see his ribbons? He fought overseas! Who do you think you are?”
The sailor put Rudy in a cab that took him to the Buddhist church on Fifth Street. And there, sure enough, Rudy found his parents.
His mother leaped up and wrapped her arms around him when he limped into the room. His father remained seated, looking him over, and then said simply, “I’m very glad to see you home. Are your wounds bad?”[69]
Rudy assured him he would be okay.
Although he made no mention of it that day, pinned to Rudy’s chest, along with a Purple Heart and a Combat Infantry Badge, was a Bronze Star. Before he left Italy, the army had awarded him the medal, in front of fifteen thousand GIs and a number of colonels and generals.
Rudy had felt embarrassed standing on a platform as soldiers marched past, saluting him. But something had surged in him, something that was not there when he left Poston three years before. He had been angry then—angry at the country that incarcerated his family, that humiliated his parents, that cost them their farm and their livelihoods.
In many ways, he was still angry and would stay that way for a long time. But standing there with the medal on his chest and a brass band playing behind him, with the 442nd colors and the American flag fluttering in the breeze, he had a moment of peace and pride that he would remember for the rest of his life.
You know, he thought, it doesn’t make no difference what you look like. It’s what you’re doing and what you’ve done for the country that counts.[70]
* * *
★ ★ ★ ★
It was December 1945 before Kats Miho was finally able to begin the journey home to Hawaiʻi. As the boat approached Oʻahu and rounded Diamond Head, Kats and nearly all of the 232 servicemen aboard crowded the rails. A nearly full moon hung low over the sea to the west, and all of them wanted to catch that first glimpse of the Aloha Tower and the white sands of Waikīkī in the moonlight.
There were no hula dancers to greet them. Sailors and soldiers had been returning to Hawaiʻi for so many months now that only a few newspaper photographers bothered to show up. Roy Fujii took the Honolulu bus token off the chain around his neck, gave Kats a wave, climbed on a bus, and headed for his parents’ home up in the hills.
