Another voice on internment camps

SUSAN SPANO wrote a beautiful piece [“A French Village’s Unexpected Heroes,” Her World, Sept. 4]. The fact that Bruyeres’ liberators were Japanese Americans, many of whose families were being held captive at the time in American internment camps, made the event especially poignant.

Yet rather than celebrating the heroism of these courageous Americans of Japanese ancestry, Charles Jones [“A WWII View of Internment Camps,” Letters, Sept. 11] criticizes Spano’s use of the word “infamous” to refer to President Franklin Roosevelt’s order to round up and intern 120,000 Japanese Americans from the West Coast during the war. To the interned Americans of Japanese ancestry, Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066 was indeed truly infamous.

One of the wonderful things about traveling is that it tends to open up one’s mind to change and new ideas. Too bad Jones seems to be so stuck in a WWII time warp that he can’t acknowledge the grievous harm done to Japanese Americans by the internment or the heroism of the servicemen who proved that Americans of Japanese ancestry were just as loyal as any other Americans.

DANIEL M. MAYEDA

Culver City