On March 29, 1942, Elaine Buchman Yoneda faced an excruciatingly fateful decision: She had received an order to bring her three-year-old son Tommy the following day to an assembly point in Los Angeles for registration and removal to an internment camp.

In the months following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the US government ordered its military to round up and incarcerate all people of Japanese descent on the West Coast. It didn’t matter that Tommy was just a toddler — or that his mother was white and Jewish. Anyone, from babies to nonagenarians, with even one drop of Japanese blood was considered a national security threat.

In all, some 120,000 people, two-thirds of them US citizens, were removed from their homes and held at 10 camps surrounded by wire fences and patrolled by armed soldiers between February 1942 and March 1946.

Elaine and her Japanese-American husband, Karl Yoneda, were seasoned labor leaders and fighters for social justice. Yet, this time Yoneda lost her argument against the authorities that sickly Tommy should stay home with her, her Russian-Jewish immigrant parents, and her 14-year-old daughter from a previous marriage.

Anticipating the order to intern his son, Karl Yoneda had gone ahead to help build the Manzanar camp in a remote, barely inhabitable area at the foot of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. He had been told that volunteering to do so would delay his family’s deportation. This would unfold to be a lie.

Elaine knew her husband planned to do everything possible to obtain special permission to leave the camp and enlist in the US military, which would leave Tommy parentless in the camp. So, she saw no choice but to forgo her freedom, leave her daughter behind, and insist on being sent to Manzanar with her son on April 1, 1942.

The fascinating story of the Yonedas’ traumatic and life-altering eight-month experience in Manzanar, along with its historical and political context, is the subject of a new book, “Together in Manzanar: The True Story of a Japanese Jewish Family in an American Concentration Camp,” by Tracy Slater.

“I was inspired to write this book after initial research revealed that, while a fair amount had been published about the Yonedas’s roles in leftist activism, there was little mention of their time at Manzanar. So I........

© The Times of Israel