Enclosed within a desert, buried under dirt and destroyed dreams, resides the remnants of dark days in American history.
Adjacent to Granada — an agricultural town of 517 in the southeast corner of Colorado — sits the razed remains of the Granada War Relocation Center, dubbed Amache, one of 10 internment camps that imprisoned nearly 110,000 Japanese-Americans during World War II.
Each year on the Saturday before Memorial Day weekend, a contingent travels from the Simpson United Methodist Church in Arvada and the Tri-State Denver Buddhist Temple with former internees, their families, students and anyone who has an interest in Amache’s story.
“If you don’t keep that history alive, then the likelihood that same oppression will be visited upon yet another group of people is much more likely,” said Marge Taniwaki, who was an internee at Manzanar in California and helped begin the first pilgrimage in 1976.
Bob Fuchigami said he remembers the emptiness of the landscape heading into the internment camp in 1942. Just after his 12th birthday, Fuchigami and his family were put on a train packed with other Japanese-Americans and sent more than 1,000 miles east to what would become their home for the next three years.
For the surviving internees, most of whom were children during the war, the annual pilgrimage serves as a way to recognize the injustice their parents faced.
“My parents were here, so I honor them by coming,” Fuchigami said.
At its peak, Amache housed more than 7,500 people in just 1 square mile.