When I was a boy I was told I had to give up life as I knew it. Give up my friends. Give up going to Pleasant Valley Grade School. Give up my boyhood treasures except what would fit in my small wooden cigar box. Give up my warm bed. Give up my favorite foods. I was told on a Wednesday that I had to give up these things by the next Tuesday.

On that Tuesday, I went with my family to live in a horse barn. I smelled the horse manure. I was given strange food to eat. I had no privacy when using the toilet. I had to sleep on a straw-filled canvas sack. I lived there four months. Then I was told I had to move again.

I was loaded on a train with my family. No one knew where the train would take us. We traveled all night. When we got off the train, I saw a desolate-looking landscape. And then, behind a barbed wire fence, I saw buildings constructed of knotty wood and tar paper. I lived with my family of seven in a 20-foot-by-25-foot room in one of these buildings. I walked to the end of the block and waited in line to use one of six toilets or showers. I still could not have my favorite foods. I slept on a folding canvas cot next to my four siblings and parents. I stuffed paper in half-inch cracks in the floor to keep out the winter cold and the blowing dust of the arid summer. I was told not to make fun of the armed guards on the other side of the barbed wire fence. I watched my cousin leave the camp and volunteer for the U.S. Army. I was not told how long I had to survive here.

All this started when I was 8 years old. All because I looked different. I was an American citizen of Japanese ancestry.

On Feb. 19, 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, excluding citizens and legal residents of Japanese ancestry from living in Western states. Civilian Exclusion Order No. 26, dated April 29, notified my family, identified only as Family No. 15477, to evacuate our farm in Multnomah County. We were required to report, with only one suitcase for each person, to the Assembly Center at the Portland International Livestock Exposition grounds by noon May 5. On Sept. 7 we were moved to the Minidoka War Relocation Center in Jerome County, Idaho. We were incarcerated there for over 21/2 years.

When we were told we could leave the internment camp, there was no government train to take us back to where we had begun 32 months before. To take us back to the farm we had worked with our new tractor. To our Chrysler sedan. To our comfortable home with its newly electrified lights and power outlets, and brand new electric refrigerator, range and washing machine. To our household furnishings that made it our home. These were gone, not to be reclaimed. Our family had to start over.

Over 120,000 persons of Japanese ancestry, as a military necessity for national defense, were removed from their homes and incarcerated in 10 WWII internment camps. Not one of them was ever found to be a threat to our nation. In 1944, the U.S. Supreme court unanimously ruled that the government could not detain United States citizens who had not been proven disloyal. The Civil Liberties Act of 1988 acknowledged that the internment was based on “race prejudice, war hysteria and a failure of political leadership.”

Many people say I was too young to remember then or too old to remember now. No! Seventy-five years later, I remember vividly and accurately. And I will not forget. None of us should forget, lest it happen again to others.

— Roy Ouchida lives in Redmond.

I lived with my family of seven in a 20-foot-by-25-foot room in one of these buildings. I walked to the end of the block and waited in line to use one of six toilets or showers. … I stuffed paper in half-inch cracks in the floor to keep out the winter cold and the blowing dust of the arid summer.