A Gathering of Heroes : The irony was thick. While their families were locked up, Japanese American soldiersliberated a Nazi death camp. Now, they reunite with honor.

He remembers the death camp clearly.

Fred Yasukochi can still see the Jewish prisoners, black-and-white striped uniforms hanging loosely from their frames, walking down the dirt road away from the Dachau concentration camp. They looked hungrily into the eyes of their Japanese American liberators, hoping for a bit of food and water. Many collapsed from starvation and exhaustion; many did not live to taste freedom.

These grim sights deeply affected Cpl. Yasukochi and his comrades in the U.S. Army’s 522nd Field Artillery Battalion, who had stumbled upon the camp and opened the iron gates to free nearly 32,000 Jews and other Nazi prisoners. As the shuffling parade went by, Yasukochi recalls, he thought about his own parents, prisoners in a U.S. internment camp in Poston, Ariz.

“Looking back,” he says, “it’s ironic that these people were liberated by American soldiers whose families were incarcerated in American camps.”

That was half a century ago. Later this month, nearly 200 members of the 522nd from throughout California and Hawaii will gather in Little Tokyo to commemorate their heroism in World War II. In conjunction with the reunion, the Japanese American National Museum here and the National Museum of American Jewish Military History in Washington will present a joint exhibition titled “Witness Our Brothers Keepers: Japanese American and Jewish American GIs.” Some battalion members traveled to Europe last year, to villages they had liberated in France and Germany, and the townspeople thanked them with luncheons and memorial services. But this is the first time they will be honored on American soil.

Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii), who fought in WWII as part of another battalion within the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, will congratulate the unit at a memorial service. Jewish organizations will present a 50th anniversary program titled “Honor the Liberators.” A parade from Beverly Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue to the Los Angeles Holocaust Monument in Pan Pacific Park will pay tribute to all liberators of concentration camps. And at the Japanese American Museum, the veterans will rediscover events that, even more than combat, forged close bonds.

The Japanese American soldiers of the segregated 522nd battalion suffered retribution; some Americans viewed them as potential traitors. Their stories differ, but deprivation and discrimination are common threads.

They call themselves Nisei, second-generation Japanese Americans. Their parents migrated to Hawaii and the West Coast in the late 1800s and the early 20th Century to work as farm laborers. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor by Japan on Dec. 7, 1941, they were cast out as the enemy--120,000 sent to inland camps for the duration of the war.

Sho and Yoshiko Dowichi were married just three weeks when an evacuation notice arrived at their home near Jefferson Boulevard in Los Angeles. They were given eight days to prepare and were ordered to take only what they could carry. Yoshiko packed two suitcases and found renters for their home. Sho quit his service station job. They were taken to the Assembly Center at Santa Anita Racetrack and within weeks the newlyweds were transferred to Camp Amache in Colorado.

Sho was bused to Nebraska, along with most of the other men, to pick potatoes, while Yoshiko and the other women tended to the barracks. The camp was surrounded by barbed wire.

“At the time we never realized what they did to us was wrong,” Yoshiko Dowichi, now 74, says. “It wasn’t necessary to put us in camps.”

After Pearl Harbor, the military classified Japanese Americans as enemy aliens. They were forbidden from enlisting. But six months later, desperate for soldiers, the Army changed its policy. Sho Dowichi was accepted in November, 1942.

Like many Nisei, Dowichi hoped to prove himself a loyal U.S. citizen. But the Japanese American GIs were relegated to such menial tasks as latrine cleaning. Finally, after complaints from the soldiers, the Army in 1943 formed the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, a cadre of 4,500 Japanese American men from Hawaii and the mainland. The 522nd was one of its three battalions.

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The creation of a segregated unit made life easier for Niseis who had served in integrated units before the war. They, too, had been treated like the enemy after Pearl Harbor.

Tadd Tokuda was stationed at Ft. MacArthur in San Pedro on Dec. 7. The Japanese American soldiers were herded into one of the barracks, he recalls, where they sat for hours without any explanation.

“They said it was for our own good,” says Tokuda, who later worked as a cook for the 522nd and now lives in Rancho Park. “When we got out, they gave us crappy detail work.”

A few days later, Tokuda learned that his father had been arrested and imprisoned in a high-security camp in North Dakota for Japanese leaders and businessmen. The rest of the family was taken to a camp in Wyoming known as Heart Mountain.

“I was so mad,” Tokuda recalls. “I was a soldier fighting for my country and they separated my dad from his family.”

Some families who lived farther inland had time to move to the Rockies or the Midwest, where they could live in freedom. Minabi Hirasaki’s mother and siblings had six weeks to arrange a move to Colorado before his father was taken to a camp. Hirasaki joined the Army and the 522nd at age 19. Everyone he knew was in the service, he says. “I thought it was my duty to volunteer.”

When the war ended in 1945, many of the returning 522nd soldiers had nowhere to go. First Sgt. Takeo Suzuki, who had lived in Ventura before the war, settled in Los Angeles. His family had moved back to Japan before the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

Suzuki enrolled at UCLA to study geology. After graduation, he interviewed with oil companies.

“They all said they would hire me,” Suzuki recalls, “but couldn’t because their employees wouldn’t want to work with me because I was Japanese.”

When Suzuki told his UCLA colleagues about his situation, they created a position. He went on to get his doctorate and worked as professor in the Department of Earth and Space Sciences until retiring in 1988.

In that same year, President Ronald Reagan signed a congressional act acknowledging the injustice of the relocation camps. Many internees received an apology and $20,000 in restitution.

These days, Suzuki stays busy keeping the 522nd legacy alive. The West Los Angeles home he shares with son Mark is covered with war memorabilia. Scrapbooks rest on the coffee table, a photo of Dachau on the piano. Glass-enclosed shelves hold more than 20 berets and combat helmets. Two complete uniforms hang in the closet.

Mark Suzuki displays patches, flags and medals in 20 portable cases that he takes to churches and community associations. As the group’s self-appointed historian and as a member of a local chapter of the Hawaii-based Sons and Daughters of the 442nd, he vows not to let America forget the Nisei.

“This unit played a major role during the war,” he says. “It’s important that we let people know the unit existed. They made it possible for their sons and daughters to have the rights we have today.”

‘I was so mad. I was a soldier fighting for my country and they separated my dad from his family (in internment camps).’