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Nonfiction Views: Books about concentration camps in the US, plus the week's notable new nonfiction [1]
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Date: 2025-07-15
A new age of the concentration camp has dawned in America. The collection of tents and cages built in the Florida swampland by Governor DeSantis, with help from his boondoggling buddies in the building trades and the encouragement of Trump is up and running, and with the supercharged funding given to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in the new budget, this promises to be the first in a series of concentration camps. Officials have been obstructing outside visitors, but slowly some Congressmen and women have been allowed limited visits. Rep. Maxwell Alexander Frost:
"I was in the facility for about two hours, and what I saw were horrible conditions and cages," he said. "... There are three toilets in each cage for the group of 32 people, and their drinking water comes from the toilet. "There's a little spigot on top of the toilet, and that's where they drink their water as well. ... it's gross and it's disgusting, and this is where people are being held."
Rep. Debby Wasserman Schultz noted that the kitchen area served employees "large pieces of roast chicken, large sausages," while detainees ate "small, gray turkey and cheese sandwiches and apple and chips, and that's it." She issued this statement to Newsweek:
"This inhumane camp mirrors the despicable imprisonment that Japanese Americans endured in internment camps without due process in World War II. Like then, Trump and DeSantis ethnically target individuals without formal trials or charges, and detain them in makeshift barracks, or in this case, cages. And just like that ugly chapter in America's past, these Everglades detainees lack any privacy or humane treatment, and face inadequate food, sanitation, medical and living conditions. The immoral treatment of human beings on this Florida site unmistakably echoes a similarly shameful American chapter."
Yes, this is only the latest chapter in the United States’ experience with concentration camps. The forced relocation and internment of Japanese living in the United States during World War Two is the most recent and well-known example. Some 120,000 people, two-thirds of whom were American citizens, were forced from their homes and imprisoned in several large, remote camps. Many lost their homes and businesses. They endured harsh conditions for years.
A new book came out just last week that describes the experience in ways that echo what is happening today with families being torn apart. In Together in Manzanar: The True Story of a Japanese Jewish Family in an American Concentration Camp, by Tracy Slater, we learn the story of Elaine Yoneda, child of Russian Jewish immigrants and the wife of a Japanese American man. Her husband was taken away to one of the concentration camps, and soon her three-year-old son was scheduled to be sent to the camp as well. As if that wasn’t bad enough, her husband was hoping to be able to enlist with the US military to get out of the camp, an option which some of the Japanese detainees were allowed. But if he did that, what would happen to her son? Would she be able to join him in the camp? And what about her white daughter from a previous marriage? It is a gripping story. The couple were very politically active before the war, and once reunited inside the camp, after some amazing risks taken by Elaine Yoneda, they became activists within the camp as well.
George Takai, famous for his role as Mr. Sulu in the original Star Trek, and at age 88 very politically active against Trump, has a graphic novel version of his childhood in the camps: They Called Us Enemy, cowritten with Justin Eisinger and Steven Scott, illustrated by Harmony Becker. The children’s book Farewell to Manzanar, by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston was written over 50 years ago and remains a classic. Penguin Classics has a paperback anthology: The Literature of Japanese American Incarceration, edited by Frank Abe and Floyd Cheung, a rich collection of first-person sources. Similar is Only What We Could Carry: The Japanese American Internment Experience, edited by Lawson Fusao Inada.
But it wasn’t only the Japanese who were interned in the United States during World War Two. Some 400,000 German POWs during World War Two were taken on the battlefields of Europe and shipped to the United States, where they were housed in camps all across the country. (There were a small number of Germans and Italians living in the United States who were interned, though generally not if they were US citizens and nowhere near the extent of the roundup of Japanese-Americans.)
One recent book details the German POW experience in America: The Fifteen: Murder, Retribution, and the Forgotten Story of Nazi POWs in America, by William Geroux.
The American government was faced with an unprecedented challenge: where to house the nearly 400,000 German prisoners of war plucked from the battlefield and shipped across the Atlantic. On orders from President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Department of War hastily built hundreds of POW camps in the United States. Today, traces of those camps—which once dotted the landscape from Maine to California—have all but vanished. Forgotten, too, is the grisly series of killings that took place within them: Nazi power games playing out in the heart of the United States. Protected by the Geneva Convention, German POWs were well-fed and housed. Many worked on American farms, and a few would even go on to marry farmers’ daughters. Ardent Nazis in the camps, however, took a dim view of fellow Germans who befriended their captors. Soon, the killings began. In camp after camp, Nazis attacked fellow Germans they deemed disloyal. Fifteen were sentenced to death by secret U.S. military tribunals for acts of murder. In response, German authorities condemned fifteen American POWs to the same fate, and, in the waning days of the war, Germany proposed an audacious trade: fifteen German lives for fifteen American lives.
What is interesting here is the references to how well the German prisoners were treated, and how American authorities looked the other way and just let the Nazis be Nazis on the American camps. If you delve into the literature, you will see over and over how well the German POWs were treated. There are many books put out by local presses and University presses detailing life in various camps around the country. Lone Star and the Swastika: Prisoners of War in Texas, by Richard Paul Walker, notes that locals lobbied to have a camp built nearby to help the economy. Lone Star Stalag: German Prisoners of War at Camp Hearne, by Michael R. Waters, offers a detailed description of life in the camp: educational opportunities, recreation, mail call, religious practices, work details, and the food provided. Nazi POWs in the Tar Heel State, by Robert D. Billinger, uses German language camp newspapers as on of its sources, and is “dedicated to the insights gained by many POWs, guards, and civilians: that wartime enemies could become life-long friends.” The publisher blurb for The Fort McClellan POW Camp: German Prisoners in Alabama, 1943-1946, by Jack Shay, says “The camp's well-maintained and humane facilities gained it a reputation as a "model camp." Military officials praised its elimination of major operational problems. International inspectors commended it, calling it one of the best camps in the country. Prisoners accepted and even enjoyed their time there.” The Enemy Among Us: POW's in Missouri during World War II, by David W. Fiedler, says “life as a POW in the thirty camps scattered across Missouri was a surprisingly pleasant experience. The men ate well and were quartered under the same conditions as the Americans assigned to guard them, and the prisoners often enjoyed a great deal of freedom. The internees worked on local farms, often "guarded" only by a bored GI snoozing under a shade tree. They organized camp theater troupes, sports leagues, and orchestras, and some prisoners studied at the camp library for classes at the POW "university."
My goodness! These were soldiers who had been fighting for the Nazis, tearing Europe apart, killing millions. And yet they were treated so much better than Japanese Americans who were living happy, productive lives in their adopted country. What could account for this disparity?
Racism, of course. It is truly shocking to read about how differently these two groups were treated.
And it goes back much further in the United States, of course. Driven Out: The Forgotten War against Chinese Americans, by Jean Pfaelzer, details the horrific ethnic cleansing that took place against the Chinese in America in the late 19th Century.
Driven Out exposes a shocking story of ethnic cleansing in California and the Pacific Northwest when the first Chinese Americans were rounded up and purged from more than three hundred communities by lawless citizens and duplicitous politicians. From 1848 into the twentieth century, Chinatowns burned across the West as Chinese miners and merchants, lumberjacks and fieldworkers, prostitutes and merchants' wives were violently loaded onto railroad cars or steamers, marched out of town, or killed.
Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America, by Michael Luo, is another good book.
Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, 1910-1940, edited by Him Mark Lai, Genny Lim, and Judy Yung, tells about Chinese immigrants coming to the United States were detained at the Angel Island Immigration Station in San Francisco Bay.
There, they were subject to physical exams, interrogations, and often long detentions aimed at upholding the exclusion laws that kept Chinese out of the country. Many detainees recorded their anger and frustrations, hopes and despair in poetry written and carved on the barrack walls.
Island tells these immigrants' stories while underscoring their relevance to contemporary immigration issues. First published in 1980, this book is now offered in an updated, expanded edition including a new historical introduction, 150 annotated poems in Chinese and English translation, extensive profiles of immigrants gleaned through oral histories, and dozens of new photographs from public archives and family albums.
During the Civil War, both sides detained large numbers of prisoners of war. An estimated 194,000 Union soldiers and 214,000 Confederate soldiers were detained. often under very harsh conditions. Over 50,000 of the detainees died in the camps. And of course, newly freed slaves after the Civil War had to deal with refugee camps and forced labor, ‘slavery by another name.’ Some books on this subject include Embattled Freedom: Journeys through the Civil War's Slave Refugee Camps, by Amy Murrell Taylor, and Slavery By Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II, by Douglas A. Blackmon.
And let's not forget the treatment of native Americans, the forced marches, the Indian Schools, the Reservations. We can even go back to the Revolutionary War. In that instance, it was the British who imprisoned more of the fledgling America’s soldiers, and they treated them harshly, considering them to be traitors. But the Americans also took some British soldier POWs. Their initial impulse was to treat them humanely, but as people learned about the harsh treatment the British were doling out, in some cases there was an urge for retribution.
And now, here we are, embarking on a new era of concentration camps in America.
THIS WEEK’S NOTABLE NEW NONFICTION
All book links in this diary are to my online bookstore The Literate Lizard. If you already have a favorite indie bookstore, please keep supporting them, but if you’re able to throw a little business my way, that would be truly appreciated. I would love to be considered ‘The Official Bookstore of Daily Kos.’ Use the coupon code DAILYKOS for 15% off your order, in gratitude for your support (an ever-changing smattering of new releases are already discounted 20% each week). I’m busily adding new content every day, and will have lots more dedicated subject pages and curated booklists as it grows. I want it to be full of book-lined rabbit holes to lose yourself in (and maybe throw some of those books into a shopping cart as well.)
We also partner Libro.fm for audiobooks. Libro.fm is similar to Amazon’s Audible, with a la carte audiobooks, or a $14.99 monthly membership which includes the audiobook of your choice and 20% off subsequent purchases during the month. Note that the DAILYKOS coupon code is only for the bookstore, not for the audiobook affiliate.
I’m adding more books every week to my RESIST! 20% off promotion. The coupon code RESIST gets you 20% off any of the books featured there.
READERS & BOOK LOVERS SERIES SCHEDULE
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