The first week of December found her happily engaged in preparing
for the holidays. She was about three months from delivering her first child.
And after a few years of young married life—completing her education and
working while her husband completed his–Maurine was ready to enjoy the upcoming
years in a more settled fashion.
It was not yet to be.
Events transpired that first week of December in 1941 that changed
lives for generations to come in nearly all nations around the world. And life
for Maurine in this turmoil would be no different. The grand effort of World
War II galvanized the nation and everyone in her life. From all sides of her
family, people were separated and displaced. Busy and involved. Her vision of a
steady and warm future would just have to wait a little while longer.
Her husband, Leon, was classified as 4f—physically incapable to serve
in the military due to a severe injury sustained in his youth on the farm. But
her status as a new mother and his physical classification did not preclude
them from the war effort. He was a schoolteacher by day and a steel mill worker
by night. Together they worked the scrap metal and rubber drives.
In the summer of 1942, Leon the eldest of several brothers at
war—received a job offer suited for a man who desperately wanted to be
involved. It would require a huge sacrifice. And, because Maurine was educated
and qualified, it would provide a means for her to serve, too. Before long they
found themselves teaching school to children in a Japanese relocation center in
faraway Topaz, Utah.
What they did was not popular. Where they went was not inviting. But
the same could be said of everyone involved in the effort at that time. And
like so many far away from home and family at Christmas during World War II,
they walked away with memories and deep appreciation for the season that they
may not have previously possessed.
For Maurine, the war experience was one of contrasting injustice.
While on one side of the globe the world fought a tyrant, she faced the shame
of injustice imposed by her own suspicious government. In communities all over
the West Coast, families of Japanese descent were forced to sell their homes,
businesses, and possessions with only a few hours notice. They could take
whatever they could fit in a suitcase and they were shipped to isolated camps
located well inland all over the American West.
Maurine found them to be a stoic people. Respectful and industrious
in every way, she came to love them and their children as they endured the
madness that the world’s circumstances had created. She lived with them behind
the barbed wire, pledged the flag with them each morning, and with them, tried
to make the best of it. They in turn loved her and her family. They were
enchanted with her infant son and often assisted in tending him.
Christmas that year proved most interesting to her. While some of
these people were Japanese immigrants all of them were Americans. They too had
a reverence for the holiday even though many of them were not Christian. The
lessons of giving during this season did not have to be taught to the
Japanese-Americans there, because they were so widely practiced in the art of
giving selflessly. This was proven to Maurine by the singular act of a little
boy who decided to give at great personal risk.
As the Christmas season approached, parents of the Japanese
students in the class helped their children produce gifts for Maurine. Many of
them gave works of art or craft projects of their own making. But one little
boy had wrapped up his most valuable possession. And the sight of it made
Maurine gasp as the meaning of it tore at her heart. Wrapped in tissue was this
little boy’s pass.
To understand, one must realize that Topaz was a military-style
camp. The people interred there did not have rights. They did not go where they
wanted to go. They had few possessions of their own. And they lived under the
strictest rule of law being told where to go and when. Each Japanese-American
person in the camp, even the youngest of the children, was given a pass that
allowed them to move about their business within the camp. To lose the pass, to
sell it or to fail to produce it when asked would impose a strict measure of
discipline upon them. The nation was at war, and right or wrong though it was,
these were the rules under which they lived. The pass was their most valuable
possession.
To give the pass back to the little boy would prove to be a
rejection that he and his family couldn’t bear. Through this gift he was
expressing love and appreciation of her. Living under the circumstances of
great injustice, this little boy (and, undoubtedly, his family too) was willing
to risk what little freedom he had and give it to her as a gift. It was the
most selfless gift she had ever received in her life.
In violation of strict procedure, she requested and obtained a new
pass for the little boy. She kept the pass in her possession for the remaining
days of her life. Over 40 years later, as she recounted this story for me,
Maurine recalled how many of those students remained in touch with her after
the war. She followed their lives, their weddings and babies. One even sent a
photo to her when he graduated from West Point. The giving did not stop that
Christmas. And it would not stop for years.
The
experience in the windswept, desolate place called Topaz touched Maurine’s life
forever. The war did end. And the life she sought before the war, she found.
But it was all the more rich for having to delay it to receive a most valuable
gift in the most unusual of circumstances.
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