Audio Memories and words from the Snow Country prison (story audio) Photos Itaru Ina Translation of Itaru Ina haiku A concert at Fort Lincoln View full slideshow (4 images) Resources North Dakota Museum of Art Your Voice Join the conversation with other MPR listeners in the News Forum.

	E-mail this page			Print this page

Memories and words from the Snow Country prison
by Dan Gunderson, Minnesota Public Radio
March 1, 2004

Itaru Ina wrote dozens of poems while detained at Fort Lincoln near Bismarck, North Dakota, during World War II. (Photo courtesy of North Dakota Museum of Art )

Sixty years ago, U.S. authorities imprisoned nearly 4,000 German and Japanese men at a camp in Bismarck, North Dakota. When World War II began, the government rounded up thousands of "enemy aliens." A new exhibit at the North Dakota Museum of Art in Grand Forks remembers those men and their stories.

Grand Forks, N.D. — Many of the men held at Fort Lincoln did not talk about the experience for decades, even with their families.

A few returned recently to view a collection of photos and text about their time as captives in North Dakota. For Max Ebel, it was a chance to tell his story. "I've come from New Hampshire to North Dakota to again remember that I had here -- bad experiences and good experiences," says Ebel.

	Translation of Itaru Ina haiku

Max Ebel says he came to America to avoid joining the Hitler Youth in his native Germany. But as a young German man living in Boston, he was detained by the FBI in 1942. After traveling across the country on a prison train, he was incarcerated at Fort Lincoln, located just outside Bismarck, North Dakota.

"I did not like being locked up here at Fort Lincoln. I think it was hell," says Ebel. "It was bad, the food was bad, and when we went out we were harassed."

Max Ebel spent time on a work crew, laying rail lines across North Dakota under the blazing sun, and in the bitter cold of winter. He remembers befriending Indian people, and collecting pennies at the camp to buy medicine for a sick girl on the nearby reservation. There were thousands of men like Max Ebel at Fort Lincoln. Yet when Laurel Reuter set out two years ago to create a visual exhibit about the Fort Lincoln internment camp, she struggled with how to convey those personal stories.

"All I could find were official INS or Border Service photographs, and they made the place look like a picnic," says Reuter.

The official photos show benches in a rose garden, a string quartet performing, and men participating in a variety of sporting events.

	A concert at Fort Lincoln

Then Reuter had a stroke of luck. She met the daughter of Itaru Ina. While Ina was captive at Fort Lincoln in 1942 and 1943 he wrote dozens of poems.

"As soon as I read them I knew this is what we needed. They were just wonderful," says Reuter. "They completely captured our climate and our weather. And if he got that so accurately, then surely the emotions are also real."

The haiku poems are interspersed among photos on the walls of the North Dakota Museum of Art in Grand Forks.

"Music is played at the flower garden where I have come to rest grieving," reads Laurel Reuter. "You could see if I only had photographs of the garden without the poem, I could not tell that story," she adds.

Itaru Ina's haiku images provided the personal context Laurel Reuter was seeking, and the exhibit title, Snow Country Prison.

Another poem reads: "In the field of white snow I starve for the love of my own people."

And: "The war has ended -- but I'm still in the snow country prison."

	Men leaving Fort Lincoln

The men interned at Fort Lincoln were well fed. Music and sports helped wile away the endless hours.

But many internees were faced with a heart-wrenching decision. They didn't know if their families had been deported. They had to decide if they would retain their American citizenship or be repatriated.

Itaru Ina penned this haiku: "This thing called repatriation. Fear lives in my mind."

"That was the huge issue," says Laurel Reuter. "'Do I repatriate? I can't find out what my wife is going to do. I don't know what my mother's going to do. We all have to make the same choice if we're to stay together.'"

The Snow Country Prison exhibit also includes large cloth banners with photographs of prisoners. The thin material makes the images shift and fade, ghostlike in the light.

"And they're like monumental tombstones. They're the people who left part of their spirits back in Bismarck," says Reuter.

Beginning in 1941, more than 31,000 enemy aliens were held in camps around the United States. The North Dakota camp, one of the largest, closed in March 1946.

Snow Country Prison is on display at the North Dakota Museum of Art in Grand Forks until April 11. The exhibit moves to the Heritage Hjemkomst Interpretive Center in Moorhead from April 18 to June 20.

News Headlines

Related Subjects