What? Is there really some prison camps in the United States too? The first place we visited during our trip to Nevada and Utah was Manzanar in California which is an old internment camp.
Manzanar was not like the concentration camps in Europe, but I have also seen that word used when talking about it. It has also been called a “war relocation center”. What ever the name is, the history of this place really humbled us right from the beginning of our road trip.
Manzanar is located in California, between the Sierra Nevada Mountains and Death Valley.
What was Manzanar?
We didn’t really know what to expect from this visit since Manzanar is not so well known, and I hadn’t read much about it either before we went.
I did know that it was used during the war between 1942 and 45, and it was where Japanese Americans were incarcerated. A total of 10 camps were opened around the country.
This all happened after the December 7, 1941 attack to Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. All the Japanese and Japanese Americans were forced to leave behind their homes and lives, and register to one of these sites, as they were now considered as a threat to the United States.
A total of 110.000 people lived in these camps all around the country.
Life in Manzanar was not easy. The camp was self-sufficient, which meant that internees had to farm the land and work hard to get some food.
People lived in barracks which were not made for the extreme weather conditions of the desert. Summers were brutally hot and during the winter it sometimes snowed them in.
Manzanar was like a small town in the middle of nowhere, and people there were isolated from the rest of the world.
In August 1945 the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan ended the World War II. Soon after the war had officially come to an end, Manzanar War Relocation Center also closed.
When the camp was finally closed, people were given $25 and a one way ticket to wherever they wished to go to. But many of them didn’t have a place to return to anymore, since they had given up everything, and some even refused to leave.
Just like they were forced to move to the camp, now they were all now forced to leave as well.
Visiting Manzanar National Historic Site
Today Manzanar is a museum and part of the National Parks System. President George H.W. Bush signed a legistation in 1992 to establish the Manzanar National Historic Site.
Almost all of the original buildings of the Manzanar Internment Camp were destroyed after the people left the camp, but they have reconstructed some of them so that the visitor can get an idea of what the life at the camp was like.
While visiting one can tour around the area with a car and stop at different spots like the barracks or cemetery, and the Visitor Center has a comprehensive exhibit of the camp. They show a touching movie about the people living in Manzanar, and show case some artifacts found from the area.
Our visit to Manzanar National Historic Site was very interesting and we were quite surprised about the place. We thought it would be a place that we could quickly visit, but it turned out to be a bigger museum with quite a few other visitors in it.
We would have been happy to spend more time there to learn about it more, but we still had a long drive ahead. We are still remembering many sad stories about the people who were living their normal lives one day, and the next they were imprisoned in the middle of the desert.
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A visit to Manzanar is easy to combine with a trip to Death Valley National Park as they are very close to each others. We did just that, and then continued to Las Vegas from there.
Manzanar will also be along the way if you are driving up to Mammoth Lakes from the Southern California. Mammoth Lakes is a popular ski destination but it also has some interesting hiking opportunities such as the trail to Devil’s Postipile.
There are quite a view interesting spots on the other side of the Sierras’s in California. For example Mono Lakes has some unique tufa towers and the Bodie Ghost Town should be on your list to visit.
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