Ceremony Recalls the Lessons of Manzanar : World War II: Former internees, their offspring and others make a pilgrimage to mark the camp’s 50th anniversary.

Squinting in the hot sun, Paul Mukai stood at the whitewashed stone monument in a cemetery at Manzanar, the World War II internment camp for people of Japanese ancestry where his mother was born.

“I came here just to see what it was like,” said the 18-year-old UCLA freshman, who arrived with a busload of UCLA students.

Mukai was one of about 1,800 pilgrims who visited Manzanar on Saturday to mark the 50th anniversary of the opening of the camp 212 miles north of Los Angeles.

It was one of 10 camps hastily constructed across the western United States after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941. Of the 112,000 people of Japanese ancestry rounded up, about 10,000--two-thirds of them American citizens--lived here until the camp closed in 1945.

The pilgrimage, Mukai said, made him feel closer to his mother by helping him understand this keystone experience in the lives of an entire generation of Japanese-Americans.

Until recently, most Japanese-American families did not discuss wartime internment. Now, with an upsurge in interest among internees’ children, that is changing.

Sue Kunitomi Embrey, who was a high school student at Manzanar, said she has worked on the pilgrimages every year since the first one in 1969 because she hopes Manzanar will serve as a positive model of a mistake that should never recur.

“There was no due process, no charges,” she said as she tried to recruit volunteers to drive pilgrims from outlying parking lots to the camp. “We were not accused of breaking the law. This can happen to anybody.”

Until Saturday, the largest number of people to attend a pilgrimage were the 1,500 who came here in 1973, when Manzanar received landmark status from the state, Embrey said. The camp has since earned national landmark status.

But that crowd was eclipsed Saturday not only in numbers but in variety.

Former internees, friends and curious onlookers listened to anniversary speeches against a backdrop of the snowcapped Sierra rising thousands of feet from the desert floor. Shrubs were in bloom throughout the 500-acre camp.

Mayor Tom Bradley, who flew in by helicopter, delivered a message of encouragement and charged young people with “keeping alive the memories of Manzanar.”

He also denounced people who harbor anti-Japanese sentiments, saying, “Shame on them!”

Throughout the day, picnic tables brimmed with typical Japanese-American fare, rice balls, hot dogs and potato salad. Among the picnickers was Venice High School senior Pesha Rudnick. Her great aunt, her namesake, died in the gas chambers at Auschwitz and she had come to see what wartime internment was like.

Walking away from the crowd with her friends, she looked back at the scene and tried to imagine what it must have been like for the Japanese-Americans.

Although America’s camps do not compare to Hitler’s concentration camps in terms of cruelty, she said, “the initial reaction of being rounded up as a group, as a culture, was just like the beginning of it. It must have been horrifying.”

Times staff writer Dean Takahashi contributed to this story.