Pat Morita on internment camp

Pat Morita, el señor Miyagi de Karate Kid, habla sobre cómo fue escoltado por un agente del FBI, cuando todavía era niño, desde el hospital donde había estado internado hasta el campo de concentración en Gila, donde ya estaban sus padres. El inglés de Morita no es difícil de entender, aunque los nombres hay que buscarlos, como Gila Camp o Tule Lake. Entrevista imperdible a Pat Morita sobre un pedazo de la historia de los Estados Unidos (un video cortito)

En vocabulario: intern, y cast. Para saber: Weimar Institute

I was escorted from the hospital by an FBI agent to join my parents at an internment camp…

… my mother had this strong feeling that perhaps he may not live through the war…

Morita was born in Isleton, California in 1932, from Japanese parents.

Morita developed spinal tuberculosis at the age of two and spent the bulk of the next nine years in the Weimar Institute in Weimar, California, and later at the Shriners Hospital in San Francisco. For long periods he was wrapped in a full-body cast and was told that he would never walk. Released from the hospital at age 11, after undergoing extensive spinal surgery and learning how to walk, Morita was transported from the hospital directly to the Gila River camp in Arizona to join his interned family. After about a year and a half, he was transferred to the Tule Lake War Relocation Center.

Harvey Itano, 1942

Pat Morita on internment camp during World War II

I was escorted from the hospital by an FBI agent to join my parents at an internment camp in the middle of Arizona and I was, what a kid knows about wars, I was living in Milwaukee, they said this kid would never walk. And I felt I was a kind of big deal because an FBI guy carrying a piece, he was scorting me. The first place we were to live in was called Gila, g-i-l-a, as in Gila River. It was called The Gila River Internment Center. Uncle Sam, and we Americans, like to use euphemistic words or indent words, if we think other words are too harsh. So they called them relocation centers. They were America´s version of concentration camps. I went there, I stayed there about a year and a half. We moved from Gila to Tule Lake. Tule Lake was right on the border of California and Oregon, way up north, on the border. And the reason for that was my grandfather, on my father side, at the time of all this separation, when the war broke out, he ended up in Tule Lake with my uncle and we went to Gila, Arizona. So my mother had this strong feeling that perhaps he may not live through the war and she wanted to be with him. I forgot how we did it because I was too young to understand. That´s how we got transferred to Tule Lake. (Suscríbete para saber de qué se trata esta explicación sobre su prisión en un campo de concentración)

Para saber

Weimar Institute is a private educational and health care institution in Weimar, California, United States. It operates a college, academy, and lifestyle-oriented health care center. It highlights traditional Seventh-day Adventist principles of health and education, especially as espoused by early Seventh-day Adventist founder Ellen G. White, who wrote extensively on health and education. Weimar Institute is located on the property formerly occupied by the Weimar Joint Sanatorium, which operated from 1919 to 1972.

James and Ellen White

Vocabulario

Intern: confine (someone) as a prisoner, especially for political or military reasons.

"The family were interned for the duration of the war as enemy aliens"

Cast: a rigid encircling casing, often made of plaster of Paris, for immobilizing broken bones while they heal.

He was wrapped in a full-body cast…

Artículos relacionados

…there was a lot of idleness for kids that summer because we didn´t have school and our society had been so disrupted… Chizuko Omori

… envió a judíos a los campos de concentración, ganando su confianza y prometiendo guardar sus pertenencias hasta el final de la guerra.. Dries Riphagen

When he reduced Czechoslovakia to a German puppet state, forced a revision of Europe's defensive alliances, and won a free hand for himself in Eastern Europe, Adolf Hitler became 1938's Man of the Year… Hitler, hombre del año

Esto es parte del archivo: el señor Miyagi