Councilmember’s Analogy to “Concentration Camps” Misguided

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What is a concentration camp?

I first asked that question in fourth grade when I saw pictures of it in a magazine. It must have been Time, as it’s the only magazine I remember receiving in the mail. It was about that time that I learned the existence of Hungary and Iater wondered why Hungary didn’t invade Turkey.

I scrutinized the pictures in the magazine. I had never seen a stack of bodies before. I had never seen a mass grave with limbs that resembled the width of sticks. I had never seen a group of people whose faces were so hollow.

I saw, but I didn’t see. How could I? How could anyone?

Ten years later I visited a real concentration camp turned outdoor museum in Auschwitz. I was studying abroad. After the school year ended, I bought a $300 Eurail pass and travelled around Europe for a month. Auschwitz was one of the places I visited because, well, I was already in Krakow, Poland.

I remember a room with a huge pile of eyeglasses. I didn’t initially see that either. How many people with eyeglasses perished in that mound of glasses? It was inconceivable. Another room contained a mountain of shoes. Another, human hair.

I walked between the buildings. The sun was shining. Then someone invited me to step inside a gas chamber.

I didn’t want to. It was dark inside and had some kind of energy, or maybe it was my mind imagining things, but I was scared, and at the same time, I felt I had to.

I stepped in.

There was a stereotype among Europeans that Americans are naive. A war will do that to you- make you grow up. My experience there is something I can’t describe, so I buried it.

I had an opportunity to visit the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. The museum itself made you feel like you were in a camp. The doors slid sideways, like in a prison. The elevators were, shall we say, stark and could invoke PTSD. There were videos of accounts from survivors, voices that are probably now gone. Auschwitz was just one camp. There were hundreds across Europe.

One million people perished in Auschwitz out of approximately 6 million from 1933 to 1945, most of them Jews, but also Gypsies, Poles, gays, disabled and others who didn’t fit into the Nazi mold.

That was then, this is now.

At a town council meeting on May 13 and again on July 22, Twisp Councilmember Tim Matsui, in statements opposing the current immigration policy, said his family was taken to a “concentration camp” during World War II. Matsui, who is of Japanese ancestry, made this statement on July 22 acknowledging the controversy.

I think that it is important for us to say that we’re not okay with illegal infringement on people’s constitutional rights, and I am going to bring a personal story back to this council, which I was told by a councilmember that it was inappropriate to do so and disrespected the people who went through it, but when my family was put in concnetration camps in America, they had their rights infringed upon illegally, and it was done by an executive order from the president at the time. It was done because of fear and misunderstanding, and I see that happening now, and I’m afraid of that, and I know people in the community are afraid of that.

I was taken aback by the initial analogy, but then he used it again. And again. I asked myself if something changed. Throughout my life there was a deliniation- Japanese-Americans were sent to internment camps, European Jews to concentration camps. Did I miss something? I had never heard the term “concentration camp” applied to Japanese in America. How did they get criss crossed?

In the late nineties, I lived in Russia for three years. A Nazi facility used for incarceration or extermination is called kontsentratsioniy lager or konzlager for short. In German, it’s Konzentrationslager. Why was Matsui applying it to Executive Order 9066?

Turns out, a seismic shift happened in 1998 while I was living abroad. Japanese-Americans organized a museum exhibit on Ellis Island entitled “America’s Concentration Camps: Remembering the Japanese American Experience.” In a key meeting with the museum’s representatives, the American Jewish Committee ceded the term “concentration camp” and redefined it as “a place where people are imprisoned not because of any crimes they have committed, but simply because of who they are.”

A joint press release wiped away the delineation and with it, historical accuracy. No mention of forced labor, malnutrition, starvation, firing squads, gas chambers, shaved heads, number tattoos, medical experiments, mutilation, mass graves or any other horrific crimes in those concentration camps. Henceforth, anyone who is unjustly imprisoned can also say they are in a concentration camp, as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez did in reference to migrant detention centers.

ChatGPT and Co-Pilot include internment of Japanese-Americans as historical examples of concentration camps, right there with Soviet gulags and Nazi Germany. Merriam-Webster, my dictionary of choice since college, clings to the definition I grew up with, but maybe that’s no longer relevant. Who looks at a dictionary anymore anyway? History has been muddled. The organizers of the Ellis Island exhibit conceded that “America’s concentration camps were clearly distinguishable from Nazi Germany’s,” so why use the exact same term?

Even AOC admitted that migrant detention centers were not Nazi concentration camps.

Somewhere in our cultural ethos there arose an explosion of hyperbole. In this delirium, history wasn’t as important as how you feel now.

Why is “concentration camp” so valuable? Because it still has a shock factor. As Eric Muller writes in his essay, “you say ‘concentration camp’ to most people and what they hear is ‘Auschwitz.'” Its misuse chips away at the significance of what actually happened to six million people who aren’t here to object or protest because they didn’t live to see 1946.

Muller writes:

I believe that many of the advocates for the term “concentration camp” understand this connotation – and that it’s this very link that makes the term attractive. Rightly trying to correct the misperception that the American camps were justified and life in them pleasant, they want a word that will jolt people. I once attended a talk where a leading Japanese American advocate for the term “concentration camp” urged the audience to adopt the term because it would “get people in the gut.” Exactly. But the major reason why the term “gets people in the gut” is Auschwitz.

References to “concentration camps” in America are not only inaccurate, they piggy back on experiences that had been unique to the Holocaust. It muddies the water and makes things more confusing in an environment already tarnished by “fake news.”

We owe it to the people who didn’t survive to stay honest about what happened.