 But when I've taught the internment, what I've done is I've asked students to imagine. And with high school students, it's perfect because they're just the age that so many go into the camps were. High school students. And what I asked them to imagine is a specific decision that young men had to make, and to a lesser extent young women too. That decision came when Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the president, decided that he would re-institute the military draft. Now there were many Japanese Americans serving in the United States armed forces when Pearl Harbor took place. Almost all of them were immediately discharged because they were regarded even if they were native born as enemy aliens, and they were all reclassified. Not only that, anyone who was a young man who was of draft eligible age who otherwise would have been put in the army, they too were kept out. But after it became apparent that the camps, while it was creating a public relations problem, FDR decided, especially given how loyal the Japanese Americans had already proved themselves, he decided that he would restart the draft. And he would say, for Japanese American, and you're of the age that you would normally go into the army or the navy, that we will continue to require you to do that. And he actually made a statement about how loyalty is a matter of the heart, not of race. And so when I teach this, what I do is I ask, I ask young men and women, if you were 17 or 18, and you knew that you would be drafted, what would you do? Do you, on the one hand, serve voluntarily in a segregated unit? Because remember, back then, the U.S. Army had specific units based on race. There were African-American units and white units. And it was clear which units were the more favored. And the African-American units, well, they had white officers. And the same thing was done for this group. There were Japanese American units, the 442nd and the 100th. Over time, by the way, they became the most highly decorated U.S. military units in history. So these soldiers prove through the most profound sacrifice you could make of life and limb that they indeed were loyal to this nation. So what I do is I ask the students who are almost exactly the same age as the real people who face this choice then, what would you do? Would you go off to war? Would you fight Hitler? Would you risk the possibility that you would be killed wearing the uniform of a soldier who looked just like those who were guarding your family, your parents, your cousins, everyone that you had known? Would you fight for a flag that did not fly for you? Or would you be a draft resistor? Would you answer the loyalty questions that were put to you because everyone in the camp was asked to answer an enormous series of questions about whether you were loyal to the United States, whether you liked Japanese culture, whether you would promise to fight for the United States if asked to do so and so on? Would you answer those questions no and no? There were two specific questions that were about loyalty and face the possibility that you would be prosecuted. And in every instance, those who were lost and they were sent to the federal penitentiary where they served with murderers and bank robbers at places like Leavenworth and they merged with criminal records. Which choice would you make? Now as it happens, overwhelmingly Japanese Americans faced with this choice chose to respond by fighting. They volunteered, they served, they became decorated military heroes, not just the men but women too who served in the wax and the waves and outside each camp the Japanese American Citizens League erected an honor roll, a big board where they had on pieces of wood the names of everyone who was in the U.S. armed forces and they put it up on this honor roll so that they could see who was defending their nation, meaning of course the United States. So that was the choice that almost everyone made but a handful became draft resistors as well. Now the decisions that the young men made then, those were life changing decisions. Those were decisions that defined not just who they would be as young men but who they would be for the course of their lives. And all the way until the time that the United States in 1988 decided to apologize for all of this and they passed a law, the Civil Liberties Act, that paid reparations to those in the camps. The young men sometimes would be cousins maybe even brothers who had made very different choices. Some of them had stopped speaking with each other because the one went off to fight and the other became a draft resistor and this reflected such different, radically different philosophies in how they viewed themselves, how they viewed their country, how they viewed rights and responsibilities that that break was just too much. So I've always found that that's a good way for people to think about this, to ask what would it be like if I were there, if I were of Japanese descent, if I love baseball and spoke English and was assimilated in every way and together with my family and was rounded up and locked away, if I lost everything, would I nonetheless continue to embrace my nation or would I become embittered? That framing allows us to think through all of these issues the way that the best history is done by asking what would it be like for us now, today, under very different circumstances, material and in every way with the changes of technology, but we're still human. How would we, if we were part of the community then that faced these challenges, how would we have responded?