Postcard view of Topaz.
Courtesy of the
author.
Topaz, City of Dust BY YOSHIKO UCHIDA
WAS DECIDEDLY NOT BY CHOICE THAT I happened to spend eight months during World War II living in a cluster of dusty barracks located in the middle of Utah's bleak Sevier Desert. This unhappy circumstance occurred because I was one of several thousand Japanese-Americans incarcerated by our government in Topaz, Utah, one of ten wartime concentration camps established to house the Japanese uprooted from
IT
Ms. Uchida is a professional writer living in Berkeley, California. This article is excerpted from a book in progress.
