In 1942, amid peak wartime hysteria, more than 120,000 Japanese Americans, two thirds of them U.S. citizens, were uprooted from their West Coast homes and incarcerated by their own government in ten inland concentration camps, including Topaz, where they remained behind barbed wire under suspicion and armed guards for up to 3½ years. Without hearings or trials, this injustice rested solely on the color of their skin and the country of their origin, after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor heightened America’s fear and distrust. In the rush to judgment, constitutional rights were denied, personal property was heavily lost, and citizens were labeled as enemies, even though not a single act of espionage against the U.S. was ever discovered. At the same time, the 442nd RTC and 100th Battalion, made up entirely of Japanese-American boys, many of them volunteers from internment camps, suffered major war casualties and became the most highly decorated combat unit in U.S. Army history. Topaz closed in October 1945, and its memory endures as a tribute to a people whose faith and loyalty remained steadfast while America’s had faltered.