Margot says, to survive the camp you must put the experience in a box and keep it there. Wasn’t that true? Haruko says that she thinks her father is keeping a secret. Her father went to one meeting in Iowa to hear a band and a speaker, as a favor to a friend, just to keep neighborhood peace. No, they just lived in a German farming community-they aren’t Nazis. Then Haruko asks if Margot’s father is a Nazi. They discuss their families-first tentatively. The two girls start meeting in the dark icehouse, sitting on bales of hay. But the Japanese prisoners are fed Chinese rather than Japanese rice-one of many interesting details. The USA wants their prisoners to look well fed. The prisoners say, that’s in case the Japanese win the war. Margot goes to the same school as Haruko rather than the German school in Crystal City Internment Camp in order to receive a better education in preparation of her dream to become a scientist.Įach imprisoned family lives in a prefabricated “victory hut,” and the food isn’t bad. After all, she’s cute and she laughed at the jokes made against Japanese people. Japanese American Haruko was popular in her Colorado high school. What did their parents do? Margot’s father is keeping a secret, clearly, all the while her mother’s health is deteriorating radically.
German American Margot says, “In the middle of this dust, in the middle of these chaotic arrivals, I feel I am watching a secret.” American families are imprisoned by the U.S. Now the two teens, each lives with her family in a dusty Texas internment camp for those accused of colluding with the enemy. World War II is raging across Europe and the Pacific when Margot is taken from Iowa and Haruko from Colorado in “The War Outside” (Little Brown 2018), by Monica Hesse.
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