Anger at her cheating husband spurs grieving war widow Rosemary Hopkins to spend an impromptu night with an overseas-bound soldier. Fearing her small hometown will discover her secret, she makes him promise to not write her. Yet she can't forget him. Eager to talk to a pretty girl before shipping out to fight the Germans, Guy Nolan impulsively implies they're married and buys her ticket. The encounter transforms into the most memorable night of his life when he falls for a woman he will never see again. While Guy tries to stay alive in combat, Rosemary finds work in a secret defense plant and a possible future with another soldier. Will she choose security or passion? Can she survive another loss?
The citizens of Belfast, Northern Ireland were keenly aware of the war raging in Europe and elsewhere. They duly put up their blackout curtain, formed fire-watch patrols and stood patiently in endless queues with their ration booklets. They never expected the German Luftwaffe would actually bother to attack their remote island. That complacency was shattered in April of 1941. After that first attack, eighteen year old Elizabeth Fleming refused to evacuate along with her two younger sisters, to the seaside town of Bangor, thirteen miles up the southern side of the Belfast Lough. Just over a week later, Elizabeth was caught away from home during the second and most deadly attack. She was plagued with nightmares for months afterwards. In late April of 1942, Richard Harrison, a laboratory technician serving with the U.S. Army Medical Corps, boarded an army transport ship in route to N. Ireland. Six weeks later the two would meet at a dance in a Belfast ballroom.
“Please don’t cry,” wrote Iwao Matsushita to his wife Hanaye, telling her he was to be interned for the duration of the war. He was imprisoned in Fort Missoula, Montana, and she was incarcerated at the Minidoka Relocation Center in southwestern Idaho. Their separation would continue for more than two years. Imprisoned Apart is the poignant story of a young teacher and his bride who came to Seattle from Japan in 1919 so that he might study English language and literature, and who stayed to make a home. On the night of December 7, 1941, the FBI knocked at the Matsushitas’ door and took Iwao away, first to jail at the Seattle Immigration Stateion and then, by special train, windows sealed and guards at the doors, to Montana. He was considered an enemy alien, “potentially dangerous to public safety,” because of his Japanese birth and professional associations. The story of Iwao Matsushita’s determination to clear his name and be reunited with his wife, and of Hanaye Matsushita’s growing confusion and despair, unfolds in their correspondence, presented here in full. Their cards and letters, most written in Japanese, some in English when censors insisted, provided us with the first look at life inside Fort Missoula, one of the Justice Department’s wartime camp for enemy aliens. Because Iwao was fluent in both English and Japanese, his communications are always articulate, even lyrical, if restrained. Hanaye communicated briefly and awkwardly in English, more fully and openly in Japanese. Fiset presents a most affecting human story and helps us to read between the lines, to understand what was happening to this gentle, sensitive pair. Hanaye suffered the emotional torment of disruption and displacement from everything safe and familiar. Iwao, a scholarly man who, despite his imprisonment, did not falter in his committment to his adopted country, suffered the ignominity of suspicion of being disloyal. After the war, he worked as a subject specialist at the University of Washington’s Far Eastern Library and served as principal of Seattle’s Japanese Language School, faithful to the Japanese American community until his death in 1979.
Born in Warsaw, the author served on the front lines during the invasion of Poland by Hitler in 1939. He spent over five years as a prisoner of war. The book chronicles his and his familys stories as well as those of nine other Cleveland Poles. It includes descriptions of life in the POW camps, Mauthausen concentration camp, and Siberia. There are numerous photographs as well as an extensive index.
