Later, the hundreds of racetrack internees were taken by train to the Amache center in southeastern Colorado. They stayed there for the rest of the war, trying to make a normal life with schooling, mess halls, friends, games.

Showing a painting of menacing coyotes, she said one of her big fears about Colorado was the coyotes that roamed near camp. She would hear them howling at night. "It was very frightening," she said.

The image of the little girl in a spotlight came about because of this incident: "I woke up one night to go to the bathroom, and the guard put a spotlight on me," shining it from the guard tower. The light "followed me all the way to the toilet," which was about three barracks away.

Another painting highlights the number she and her family were assigned. "This is 18286," she said. "This is who we were." The camp view is dreary and horrifying, with prickly pear cactus, searchlights, a guard tower and barbed wire.

"That's what I remember," she said. "The searchlights."

A little girl figure in one painting is a ghost.

A painting shows spotlights and a distant church with a cross. "This is the fear of what was going to happen. Were we going to die?"

Women in the Santa Anita camp worked to make camouflage nets that the U.S. Army used. One of her paintings shows the women working on huge greenish nets.

Other paintings show human bones just under the ground. Though bodies were not at the camp, they symbolize the fear.

The fear wasn't unjustified. It is now known that an internee was shot by a guard in the Utah camp.

The Nakai family lived in a 20-by-40-foot room in a barrack for three years. "We used to have one single light bulb in the middle of the barracks," she said. They would find dead moths under the light in the morning.

A painting of a crying girl with jackrabbits, a distant storm in the desert, a far-off town, is one of the most poignant. The rabbits "could just hop in and out of the barbed wire and go anywhere, at random," she said. "So that's making the little girl very sad."

That little girl used to gaze across the desert and think, "Oh, there's Kansas over there."

Internees had a choice of moving inland or going to the camps, she said. Supposedly, ethnic Japanese people, whether American citizens or not, posed a threat of sabotage if they lived on the coast.

Her immediate family didn't have the resources to move inland. But her aunt and uncle went to Salt Lake City, and when Havey and her family were released in 1945, "they found us a little house" here. She has lived in Utah's capital ever since.