Topaz War Relocation Center WWII

This concrete slab stands in Delta's city park, fifteen miles from the camp it remembers, and was set here in 1976. Beneath the official title, Central Utah WRA Relocation Center, its text uses plainer words: a concentration camp, one of ten, where people of Japanese ancestry were held against their will. Its last line belongs to the former prisoners, thanking Delta for how the town received them. One date is wrong: Topaz closed in 1945, not 1946. The camp's foundations and gravel streets still lie out on the Sevier Desert flats to the northwest.

What the plaque says

Topaz 1942 - 1946 Central Utah WRA Relocation Center Fifteen miles west at Abraham is the location of the bleak desert site of a concentration camp, one of ten in Western America, in which 110,000 persons of Japanese ancestry were interned against their will during World War II. They were the victims of wartime hysteria, racial animosity, and economic opportunism on the West Coast. Confined behind barbed wire fence and guarded by armed sentries and held for no justifiable reason, the internees, two-thirds of whom were American citizens, and the majority of whom were women and children, not only endured the bitter physical discomforts of the desert heat and cold, but sustained a shocking affront to their sense of justice and fair play and human dignity. May this grim episode of basic American principles gone astray remind us to work for understanding and goodwill and justice in an enlightened America today. The former residents of Topaz remember with grateful appreciation the friendliness and understanding with which the people of Delta received us during the period of our trial and despair.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Topaz War Relocation Center — 11 mi
  The Sevier Desert camp where the United States imprisoned 11,000 Japanese Americans

More markers nearby

• Topaz Museum — steps away
• Fort Deseret (Black Hawk War) — 7.3 mi
• All Gave Some - Some Gave All Monument — 12 mi
• Topaz Internment Camp WWII — 12 mi