For this blog post I browsed the website of Manzanar, a
Japanese American detainment camp located in California turned National
Historic Site and run by the National Park Service. In addition to information about visiting
the park the website is filled with photography, history, and information and
about detainment in general. The
largest section of the website is devoted to archives of the individual stories
of detainees. I additionally looked at
the website for Auschwitz, a Nazi Death Camp located in Poland. While exploring these websites I
specifically looked at the ways in which the curators dealt responsibility to
the respective governments who ran each camp.
While the atrocities and conditions of Auschwitz can in no way be
considered comparable to the detainment that occurred in Manzanar it was still
interesting to see the amount of responsibility taken for the intrusion of
liberty in both situations. I found that
on the Auschwitz website the curators had no problem in affiliating full
responsibility for the misdeeds with the Germans. They did not shy away from using words such
as “murder,” “genocide,” and “victims.”
They discussed in depth and “owned” disturbing topics such as medical
experimentation and the systematic murder of prisoners. I was surprised (and impressed) that the
website used the term “German” very often in discussing the turpitudes of the
camps instead of limiting the scope of responsibility with the term
“Nazi.” The Manazanar website on the
other hand focused much more on the day-to-day life of prisoners with a focus
on lifestyle instead of imprisonment. At the beginning of the website the idea of a
liberty violation is touched upon but is not a major theme throughout the website. Both websites are very extensive and
very interesting. I would encourage
anyone to go check them out sometime.
Auschwitz
Manazanar
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