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The Gem of the Desert

This is a very unusual book about internment since the people involved were not Japanese and they were interned voluntarily. Claudia was the daughter and her father was a professor who choose willingly to teach at the Topaz internment camp. There are two others in the family and they live in the camp, undergoing many of the same difficulties that the internment people underwent, although her father does work for the administration.

Claudia attends a school in a nearby town instead of the school at the camp and at first has trouble adjusting to the fact that the school is tiny compared to what she is used to. However, things work out well there for her. She gets sick like many others due to the insanitary conditions often found in camps. Her mother didn't like the fact that Claudia would sign up for activities in the camp, trying to say that they were for residents only.

She also writes about the terrible problems caused by a questionnaire sent out to camp residents, the infamous questions 27 and 28 which divided residents into groups based on their answers and resulted in very bad feelings and relocations for some.

She also writes about the violence in the camp that arose from bad feeling about some residents that cooperated with the administration.

It's a really good book to read, giving a different view on the things that happened at the camp.



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