To combat family separation, we must study our own history

“Tell your teacher about the Japanese,” my mother told me when I said we were studying Nazi Germany in my eighth grade history class. “They don’t know about the Japanese.”

Their Emperor Hirohito was thought divine, she continued, mixing religion with state and attacking Pearl Harbor during

World War II. And I always heard about one of Japan’s greatest war crimes: separating children from their families in concentration camps, such as my then 10-year-old father endured growing up in Java, Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia.

When I told my teacher, she looked at me quizzically and said, “Is your father Japanese?” referring to Colorado’s Japanese American internment Camp Ameche. I shook my head, no. He was Dutch and immigrated to the U.S. in 1956.

The Department of Homeland Security is asking for public comment on how America can never again commit the horror of family separation that the Trump administration perpetuated as official policy. The public can submit recommendations to support the Work of Homeland Security’s Interagency Task Force on the Reunification of Families. The deadline is Jan. 10.

This atrocity happened on American soil because education failed and censorship prevailed. Preventing crimes against humanity from happening in America comes with the uncomfortable truth of looking at history from all sides. For those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it, witnessed as the sad truth that America participated in what Amnesty International called the torture of children, children who accompanied their parents as refugees seeking the human right of asylum.

The TV series The World At War played endlessly in my childhood home, as did my father’s oral history of his trauma. In 2016 when Donald Trump was running for president, immediately I recognized him as Hitler-esque, just as Anne Frank’s stepsister and documentarian Ken Burns did.

I was not surprised when the Jan. 6 insurrection happened. I was surprised it didn’t happen earlier, and see its dangerous plot still unfolding with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis planning a militia. Compare this with how Adolf Hitler’s Schutzstaffel SS police started.

It was only after living in Japan that I understood what my mother was talking about. I never knew about the American

bombing raids on Japan that intentionally targeted civilians until I visited the International Peace Center in Osaka. I noticed, however, that Japan’s own war crimes were omitted.

My own inquiry led to discovering that the Japanese were previously open about their war mistakes and were committed to peace so that these tragedies would never again happen. Yet Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, grandson of former PM Nobusuke Kishi who went unprosecuted for war crimes committed in Manchuria, had revised the museum.

After World War II, the U.S. shielded war criminals from prosecution and evidence of medical experiments at Shinagawa POW Hospital outside Tokyo, where my grandfather died from forced labor and starvation. In 1995, the National Air and Space Museum exhibit of the original Enola Gay entitled “The Last Act: The Atomic Bomb and the End of World War II,” was also cancelled for political reasons. This year Republicans refused to probe the Jan. 6 insurrection.

When censorship happens, be it our nation’s war history, critical race theory or Moms for Liberty wanting to censor books about seahorses, free inquiry and thinking are denied. Yet censorship ultimately fails, as people ultimately will discover the truth.

The two women who founded the POW Research Network Japan took me on reconciliation tours of the sites where my grandfather labored and died. Their school history books had one sentence about Japan and World War II, they said. Yet their natural curiosity while wandering the Yokohama War Cemetery near their homes made them ask themselves how all these people died so young.

To prevent family separation from ever happening again, we must commit to honesty and courageously look into our own darkness to know the truth about ourselves and country. I made peace with what my Dutch colonial ancestors did to native peoples, and the storytelling journey with the people of Japan created understanding and loving healing to move forward in peace. To restore its dignity, the U.S. must do the same — reunite these families and pay restitution for their unconscionable suffering.

Sydney Solis, who lives in Orlando, is an award-winning author and poet.