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Exhibit depicts camp life
By Shari Kaplan
Heart Mountain, by its name, sounds like a scenic, romantic peak overlooking an equally scenic valley that people visited because they wanted to--but it wasn't. The people who went there in the 1940s were visitors of a different sort--residents of the Heart Mountain Relocation Center, which name was also an incomplete reflection of what it really was.
The center was actually one of 10 government-sponsored Japanese internment camps erected on the West Coast and Midwest for the relocation of U.S. citizens and resident aliens of Japanese ancestry during World War II.
This is the topic of The Heart Mountain Story, a multimedia exhibit up through Feb. 28, 2001, at the Forbes Mill Museum of Regional History, at 75 Church St. in Los Gatos.
Lifelong Los Gatan and guest curator Mamoru Inouye, a retired aerospace engineer, arranged for the display of more than 30 black-and-white photographs by Hansel Mieth and Otto Hagel, a wife-and-husband photographic team. In 1943, Life magazine sent the couple to Heart Mountain to document life at the internment camp, where nearly 11,000 men, women and children spent their war years.
The photographs were not published during the war; in fact, the majority did not come into the public realm until September 1997, when Inouye arranged with Mieth--Hagel predeceased her in 1973--to have them exhibited at the De Saisset Museum at Santa Clara University.
The couples' photos cover many facets of camp life, many of which were a microcosm of life "on the outside." These include classes and dances for school-age youth, mothers feeding babies, a communal flag salute and people engaged in activities such as game playing, ceramics work and flower arranging.
Forbes Mill hours are noon to 4 p.m., Wednesday through Sunday. For more information, call 408.395.7375.
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Willow Glen, California Since 1992
