An object that looks like a big drum made of concrete squats on the mess hall floor. Wondering what it was, Beckwith once asked some visitors to turn it over. Before they replaced it, they could see it was an elongated bowl.

"It is a mochi pounding barrel," she says, used to pound rice into sweet cakes

Food, Beckwith said, was provided by the U.S. government. "According to (the late Utah historian) Leonard Arrington, they fed them on about 42 cents a day."

At the latrine, she shows where women would do the laundry, hand-washing Levis and diapers. "They would hang the laundry on this side," she said.

The camp had a lot of trouble with sewage. Officials would hire the internees to dig up sewer pipes and replace them.

A piece of pale green glass is among several types of glass fragments found on site, including some Japanese pottery.

Speaking of a pearl-colored piece, she said, "This is probably a Pond's Cold Cream jar. It was so dry that women just slathered themselves with that."

These were not conditions the internees had been used to. "People in this camp came from San Francisco, highly educated, very cosmopolitan for the most part. ...

"This was a very sophisticated camp. Art work and literature in this camp were quite amazing."

Isn't all of this depressing? Not to Beckwith.

"I've always admired Japanese-American people who were able to kind of move their lives forward even under these horrific conditions."

And, Beckwith adds, the stories of Topaz should not be forgotten.

"Well, the most basic part of democracy is the rights of citizens, and about 70,000 of the 120,000 that were put in these camps were citizens, they were born in this country," she says.

"We have to show those kinds of people, citizens, have to be protected — not protected in an artificial way, but protected in the most common way that all citizens are, by being free to live their lives the way they want to."

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E-mail: bau@desnews.com