Elmer Suski, 94, of Indio, holds a 1976 magazine with the headline “Japan Salutes America on its Bicentennial.” Suski and his wife, Alice, are Japanese-Americans who were sent to an internment camp near Parker, Ariz., in 1942 after World War II began. Alice was born and raised in Indio and returned there after the war. Next to Elmer is a Japanese Geisha doll Alice Suski made more than 65 years ago. / Wade Byars, The Desert Sun
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The end of World War II held special meaning for Alice and Elmer Suski, Japanese-Americans who were escorted out of the valley shortly after the war began.
“It allowed us to come back to our home,” Alice Suski, 90, said.
Her parents moved from Japan to the Coachella Valley in 1910, where they became farmers.
“They came over here for a better life,” she said.
After working for other farmers, her father eventually was able to strike out on his own.
“He saved enough money to buy some property,” she said. “It was all desert. We're talking about the early 1920s. There was no Highway 111.”
She said Sakemi Ranch was in an area between Clinton and Madison streets in Indio.
“It would be right across the street from Mathis Brothers,” she said.
“When we were told to get out, we were given very short notice,” she said. “My parents still had crops in the field,” including tomatoes, string beans and other vegetables.
“It was hard to understand,” she said. “It was hard on our parents. We're American citizens.”
The family was sent to an internment camp in Poston, Ariz., where they remained for two years and where she gave birth to a son, Stanley.
The Suskis each had a brother serving in the U.S. military during the war.
Upon their return, the families found they could go back to their livelihoods with relative ease.
“We had good friends here,” she said.
John Westerfield, a banker at First National Bank in Coachella, made sure the family farms weren't lost while they were away.
“He took care of a lot of (our) friends,” she said.
“We were just glad it ended,” she said. “It meant our brothers would be able to come home. Personally, I understand now when I look back,” she said.
She used to get questions like “Why did you let the government do this to you people?” she said.
“We just did what the government tells us to do,” she'd answer.
“I have no animosity because that experience helped open our minds a little bit,” she said. “This is our country. We still want to be good” citizens.
The bombing of Japan
“We thought it was quite a disaster, of course,” said Elmer Suski, 94. “But at the same time, if it's going to end the war. ... There was a tremendous amount of deaths before that.”
Suski, whose parents and two older siblings fled San Francisco after surviving the devastating earthquake and subsequent fires in 1906, was born in Los Angeles. His family later moved to the valley.
The couples' families eventually became business partners, establishing and operating Suski & Sakemi International Trucks, then branched into servicing small engines and power equipment.
“I don't know exactly how I felt at the time,” he said of President Harry Truman's decision to drop the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. “We didn't know what an atomic bomb was.”
The couple visited Hiroshima, Japan, in 1993.
“I saw the new Hiroshima, but at the same time, they preserved a certain section of Hiroshima as it was originally,” he said. “The steel structure dome that you see is all that remains — everything around it was blown away.
In the museum in Hiroshima, there was a “graphic display of mannequins that showed how devastating the flash was,” he said.
He said the mannequins, men, women and children, were depicted with burned flesh, hanging off their bodies.
“You want to turn your head away, but it's history,” he said.
