Densho Digital Archive
Densho Visual History Collection
Title: Angus Macbeth Interview
Narrator: Angus Macbeth
Interviewers: Tetsuden Kashima (primary), Becky Fukuda (secondary)
Location: University of California, Los Angeles
Date: September 11, 1997
Densho ID: denshovh-mangus-01-0005

AM: Well, you know, more than anything else, is just this heart-rending sense of loss. I mean, people who had spent fifteen, twenty years, in a way in quite routine lives and occupations. I mean, truck farmers, people who ran small stores. Just very solid, unexceptional members of a town or of a city and the way in which their lives were just completely disrupted by the exclusion and the shock of it all. And then a lot about life in the camps, which frequently had two sides to it. There's the deprivation and the psychological battles that camp life produced, and in the loyalty oath's the most obvious example. There were (...) places where people had to make very real difficult choices about what they were going to do, vis-a-vis the government, vis-a-vis other people in the camps. But on the other side of it, too, life goes on. And human beings are going to make the best of bad situations, so that there are these other stories about the baseball teams and the gardens and so on. And there is again, just a very, very touching and powerful side to people who make a genuine and rich human life out of very barren and very adverse human conditions. And there's a lot of that in the testimony.

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