![]() Life in the camp isn’t awful for Elise, because she finds Mariko - also an American-born daughter of immigrants. It was only in the years that followed that I realized this was the moment my eyes were opened to what the world is really like.Įventually, the family is reunited at the Crystal City Internment Camp in Texas, where they, along with hundreds of other German-American and Japanese-American families, are assigned to remain throughout the war years. I couldn’t have explained it to anyone then. It was like being awakened from a stupor, not falling into a nightmare. As the American-born daughter of German immigrants, Elise enjoys her ordinary life in Davenport, Iowa, up until the day her father is arrested as an enemy of the United States:Īs I watched the black car that held my father disappear around the block, the strongest sensation I had was not that this couldn’t be happening, but that it was. And having found her, Elise decides to go see her, despite the memory lapses that cause her to repeatedly lose her focus and her purpose for traveling.įrom there, we go back to Elise’s adolescence. When her housekeeper teaches her to use Google, Elise uses it to look up her friend Mariko, a girl she last saw during the last year of World War II. Told through the eyes of Elise, the story opens in 2010 when Elise is in her 80s, suffering from the losses associated with Alzheimers, feeling pieces of herself and her life being stolen away from her. ![]() ![]() The Last Year of the War is the moving story of true friendship that lasts a lifetime, despite years of separation. Together in the desert wilderness, Elise and Mariko hold tight the dream of being young American women with a future beyond the fences. The only thing that makes the camp bearable is meeting fellow internee Mariko Inoue, a Japanese-American teen from Los Angeles, whose friendship empowers Elise to believe the life she knew before the war will again be hers. The family is sent to an internment camp in Texas, where, behind the armed guards and barbed wire, Elise feels stripped of everything beloved and familiar, including her own identity. resident for nearly two decades, is suddenly arrested on suspicion of being a Nazi sympathizer. Elise Sontag is a typical Iowa fourteen-year-old in 1943–aware of the war but distanced from its reach.
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