Former internee inspires audience with lessons of hardship

Published: 2007-05-30

SPRINGFIELD, Mass. (CNS) -- Mary Matsuda Gruenewald told 600 students at Springfield's Cathedral High School that she had to spend her teen years during World War II in internment camps on the West Coast for just "looking like the enemy." At the start of the war, Gruenewald, now 82, was the same age as many of the students in her audience when her family was taken from its tranquil home on Vashon Island, Wash., and transported to a Japanese internment camp. It took her more than half a century to break the silence kept by her and most of the 110,000 Japanese-American internees about those years, but in 2005 Gruenewald did so, publishing her story in a widely hailed memoir, "Looking Like the Enemy: My Story of Imprisonment in Japanese-American Internment Camps." She brought her message of history and hope to the students and others gathered in the Cathedral High School auditorium this spring.

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