Densho Digital Archive
Emiko and Chizuko Omori Collection
Title: Shosuke Sasaki Interview
Narrator: Shosuke Sasaki
Interviewers: Chizu Omori (primary), Emiko Omori (secondary)
Location: Seattle, Washington
Date: September 28, 1992
Densho ID: denshovh-sshosuke-02-0007

SS: Well, in, in going to the camp, one of the things I did -- which I don't know if anyone else did the same thing -- I expected to be in a barbed wire enclosure, and it turned out to be that way. But the thing that worried me was how they would treat us there. And I wanted to be able to get out of camp if necessary, if treatment was as bad as it might have been. And so as we left home, I remember one of the last thing I grabbed out of the toolbox was a pair of wire cutters, put it in my pocket and went. And I had occasion to use those wire cutters only once. When, after the, in Minidoka, they had bits of insulation, Celotex, bits of it, piled up in a pile on the other side of the barbed wire fence that they had us in, you see. And I wanted to go and get those pieces of Celotex to insulate a part of the barrack, the quarters that they had us in. Well, I thought, well, the best thing to do is to get out there and bring that inside the wire. Well, I tried crawling through that barbed wire and I got caught on it once or twice and I said, "Well, the heck with it," and I took the pliers out and I snapped it. Well, that was an unexpected surprise. All that barbed wire was taut, and so when I snapped it, then the thing goes, "boing," like that -- [laughs] -- loud sound. And I thought, "Oh my gosh," and the first thing I did was to go flat on my stomach so they couldn't see me because of the sagebrush. And I thought someone might show up, so I lay there for a while, and nobody seemed to notice, so I got up and went through the barbed wire fence, this time with considerable ease, and brought most of that inside the wire, which I could take back to my apartment. Well, that was the first, that was the only time I ever used that barbed wire -- that clipper.

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