[Interviewer] Did you experience any prejudice in Hattiesburg, Mississippi at Camp Shelby?
[Katsugo] Within camp, you see the Caucasian boys who were exposed only to
the military or American propaganda did not know that you don't call these boys Japs.
See, that was the only language they knew, and when you think about it you don't blame them because
the war hysteria, the anti-Japanese movies and the newspapers all referred to anything
Japanese American or Japanese whatever as Japs.
So we were put into this area of camp where a lot of these things were not finished.
So there was hardly a PX (store) but we found out that oh you go down two three blocks and there's the nearest PX.
So, I remember the first week we found out that some of the boys went to the PX
and when we went into the PX, the Caucasian boys they saw us and they said, 'Hey, what are you guys?'
'Oh we just came over to camp.' And pretty soon, the things were right for a while, but then
one of them would be feeling a little high and say, you know, 'You Jap, this PX belongs to us, go find your own PX.'
The boys left there, came back to camp, reported to a couple of the other boys, because they were there two boys I think,
they told them hey we just got kicked out of this PX because
and they call us names. A dozen of them went up to the PX, and when they went into the PX all
the Caucasian boys in the PX were on the floor of the PX when they got out. But this happened
throughout our training where Caucasian boys were not taught not to call us Japs because when they
did that any AJA (Americans of Japanese Ancestry) boys nearby would get... our fighting was not fair, we were a smaller stature,
we know we couldn't take them one for one, uh you know, five foot five, five feet, six
tall, well it's not going to stand too much of a chance against a six footer, but if you get
three or four of us against one, you know the one loses.
But that was the unit feeling that the closeness that we had as a unit.
It was on April 27, 1945, that we liberated one of the camps of Dachau.
We found out later that Dachau had a main camp where 35 or 40,000 inmates were kept,
but surrounding the main camp were about a hundred sub-camps,
five thousand, six thousand people kept in there.
And my vivid recollection is that
after these people were liberated, in one area where we were sitting, whether we were
not moving we were sitting in a camped wooded area, there was a group of maybe 100 of these
walking skeletons and bones in flannel
blue and white pajamas, and some of them I recall had overcoats,
many of them had instead of shoes, they had the foot wrapped up in cloth and whatnot, but my
distinct and unforgettable
sight that every once in a while it comes to me
is here, one of these poor individuals that evidently died just at that moment of liberation.