Michael Tunnell discovered a diary in the Utah State Historical Society in Salt Lake City, kept by a third grade class in the Topaz Camp in Utah. This group of Japanese American children wrote and drew pictures of the happenings during that year in school in the internment camp during World War II. He has added well-researched narrative that brings their story together without intruding on their story in the book Desert Diary. The diary begins on March 8th and extends through August 12th with school extended through the summer because of the disruption the children have experienced. Both pictures and narrative of the children in the 72-page account give a first-person account of life in an internment camp.
These children have been moved from the luxuriant California area into the desert. Their pictured surroundings scorpions and little vegetation beyond greasewood bushes. Teacher Miss Yamauchi brings a sense of normality to eight-year-old Mae Yanagi and her classmates. Classroom pets included prairie dogs, horned toads, and ants! Even under these circumstances, the children participate in the junior Red Cross, promote war bond purchases, and grow Victory Gardens. The diary records a baseball game but doesn’t name the winner. The community joined to observe both Christian and Buddhist holidays and celebrations.
The children recorded happenings in the community – births, deaths, and marriages. The most significant one was Miss Yamauchi’s own! The children took a vote after the wedding about whether to continue to call her by the name they knew or to call her “Mrs. Hori.” They voted to continue to call her by her maiden name. The class’s reasonably normal schoolyear is a tribute to a creative teacher and to their own resilience.
The diary ends with the end of school, but the author adds some information in an epilogue about the return to “normal” and the aftereffects of the internment on its citizens when the camp years were ended. Interesting back matter includes a glossary, an editor’s note on terminology, photo credits, and information about the sources he used and the people he met as he put their stories together. The book is listed for fourth to seventh grade, but I think anyone with an interest in the history of World War II would find it fascinating.