Arkansas concentration camp for young Japanese Americans during World War II.

Between 1941 and 1945, more than 120,000 Japanese Americans- two thirds of them U.S. citizens- were forced to leave their homes and live in what were then called "relocation camps." Most of the camps were in desolate locations west of the Mississippi River; about 8,000 Japanese Americans, were unconstitutionally imprisoned on Ellis Island, in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty.

The Ellis Island Immigration Museum commemorates this dark episode in our national history with America's Concentration camps: Remembering the Japanese American Experience, an exhibition documenting the internment camps aand the experiences of those held there. The show opens on the museum's front lawn, where a fragment of an authentic barracks from the Heart Mountain Wyoming Camps stands behind 20-foot fencing and a guard tower, giving visitors a real sense of the internees' incarceration. In addition to detailed maps and statistics about each camp, the exhibition focuses on the internee's personal stories, related through their own words, photographs, and momentos. On view through January 5, 1999.