They are both in a nightmare with no end. Both are held captive against their will. Nothing has been done wrong, so why this cruelty? All they want to do is wake up. Pinch here, slap there, no it’s not working. This isn’t a nightmare, its reality. A reality so surreal that one wishes they were in a nightmare where one doesn’t wake up.
This is the story of not only millions of holocaust survivors but also Japanese who were fit to burst in internment camps. On one side of the world there was survivor Elie Wiesel who endured an equivalent to hell. He and other Jews were obligated to do hard unimaginable labor and received only a ration of soup and bread. Sometimes you were lucky to receive one. Elie Wiesel with all his courage wrote the book Night where he states “That night, the soup tasted of corpses, Page 65.” Wiesel experienced more death than most people obviously and with much heartbreak lost his father in the concentration camp. Fast asleep Elie didn’t even realize that his father had been taken away to the chambers as he says in his book.
Farther out in the United States everything was chaos. War had broken out with Japan and Pearl Harbor was completely demolished and the Americans went ludicrous. Such so they decided to take action and President Franklin Roosevelt at the time implemented the executive order 9066. They took all from the Japanese decent and corralled them into interment camps where they lived in barracks. I believe this wasn’t necessarily a bad thing of course taking in mind how people would and did react to the Japs. This was a sort of haven for them. Like Manzanar veteran Jeanne Wakatsuki endured all of this and wrote a book about her experience. In her book Farewell to Manzanar she says “Moving, under what seemed to be government protection, to an area less directly threatened by the war seemed not such a bad idea at all, pg 605”.
They were kept safe from the Americans that wanted revenge on innocent Japanese who had nothing to do with the war. Americans felt as if there were Japanese spies out on the lookout searching for information. They were treated better than the Jews of course but bad nevertheless. Different stories these are but so similar. Even though these two characters weren’t even in the same country and even though they don’t know each other, they both share a story of experience, loss, and memories. They both lacked information of where they were headed. They were discriminated by their religion, ethnicity, gender, sexual preferences, Etc. Both of these humans beings were put to work during the war and both survived to tell the tale.