The War Ends

The day that the war ended, I guess, prior to that day, they had dropped the atomic bomb and we didn't know but they didn't send us out to the mines. We all went to the factory, and I had my 40, 45, 50 men working at the mines. And the Jap honcho come to me about one o'clock in the afternoon, and he said, “Honcho, zumboo mai, yutsmai” (sp) Zumboo means all, yutsmai means rest. “Zumboo mai, yutsmai.” So he told me they were going to go to a meeting, so they went to a meeting and they're gone for about an hour, an hour and a half or something. When they came back, I watched all these Japanese come out of that conference room where they had that big meeting up at the factory offices and the reaction of every one of them was different. Some of them were kind of cheering, some of them were happy, some of them were crying. They were all different reaction to the different guys. And the guy in charge of me, he said to me, “Honcho take the men all back to the camp” and that was about three o'clock in the afternoon. And the next morning, we got up, and the camp commandant called everybody out, we were all up there, he gets up on this stand of his and says, “Senso Oare” (sp). Senso was the war, oare means finished, and he disappeared, we never saw that commandant again to this day.