Your Berlin Moment

by Craig Wiesner - San Mateo Daily Journal - February 25, 2026

When I read that guards at the ICE detention center in Dilley Texas were going room to room, confiscating and ripping up letters and drawings children incarcerated there had made, I thought of Ruth Mix, the “girl with hair like the sun,” a nickname she earned from the internees at the Gila River Internment Camp, where Japanese-Americans were imprisoned during WWII. 15 year-old Ruth volunteered to help at the camp where her mother, Frida, was serving as a nurse. Sickened by witnessing the terrible conditions in which people lived, Ruth smuggled in food, soap, lotions, diapers, and most importantly, film, so the world could see what was happening. Like many people who witness and experience trauma, Ruth had not talked much about her experiences until she and her daughter Claire attended a San Jose lecture by George Takei. Ruth spoke up during that event which led, eventually, to a documentary and young adult book to chronicle her story. Reach And Teach hosted a showing of that film some years ago.

5 year-old George Takei (most famous later in his life as an actor in the original Star Trek series), and his Japanese-American family were arrested based on Executive Order 9066, transferred to the Rohwer War Relocation Camp in Arkansas, a camp in swampy land ringed with barbed wire and guard towers. Then, because Takei’s parents declined to sign a “loyalty oath,” they were sent to a worse camp at Tule Lake. They were held until the war ended, and afterwards lived in poverty because their home and family dry cleaning business were gone. My father-in-law, Thomas Kikuchi, was also interned during WWII, and he died an early death from a type of cancer linked to pesticides he was exposed to when he was forced to pick a local farm’s strawberries. We’ll never get to hear his stories. Takei has written a memoir, children’s books, and a play about the humiliation, trauma, and pain inflicted by our country against him and 120,000 others, a stain on our nation’s history. 

Today, across America, mass detention camps/facilities have once again been hastily opened, with many more being built, some on the land formerly used to imprison Japanese Americans during WWII. The president’s team is planning to match or exceed the number of Japanese detainees held during WWII in its ICE camps. Congressman Joaquin Castro recently visited Dilley Texas, where 5 year-old Liam Conejo Ramos was being held with his father (both LEGALLY in the country seeking asylum). Liam is the boy in the blue cap who went viral after ICE agents in Minnesota grabbed him on his way home from school, held him captive for hours, allegedly trying to groom him as bait to get people in his house to open their front door. ICE shipped him and his father to Dilley. In a scathing ruling demanding DHS release them, U.S. District Judge Fred Biery condemned the “perfidious lust for unbridled power and the imposition of cruelty” of the detention. "The case has its genesis in the ill-conceived and incompetently-implemented government pursuit of daily deportation quotas, apparently even if it requires traumatizing children.” 

ProPublica recently published drawings and letters from children held at Dilley, images and words which broke many people’s hearts, including mine. The film smuggled into and photos smuggled out of Gila River showed people the cruelty of mass incarceration, just as photos from the Nazi concentration camps illustrated the horrors of the Holocaust, which my father, a Jewish-American soldier, witnessed at Dachau.

Bay Area Rabbi David J. Cooper, who recently protested in Minneapolis, said in JWeekly: “What would have happened if, after Kristallnacht, or when Jews were being rounded up for the concentration camps, the Berlin community united and came out in large numbers and peacefully resisted the Brownshirts and Gestapo?” Daily Journal guest columnist Charles Stone, talking about the killing of Alex Pretti, ended his recent column asking, “What are we going to do about it?” With tens of thousands of people already held in ICE detention centers with many credible reports of horrible mistreatment, sickness and deaths, and plans to hold 100,000 more, with staff at Dilley reportedly ripping up children’s drawings and letters, to keep us from seeing their plight, I too ask what are we going to do about it?

I say let’s do what the people of Berlin didn’t do, protect our neighbors and say NO to this generation’s different, but terribly dystopian nightmare. If you disagree with what’s happening you can stand up against it. Be on the right side of history, like the girl with hair like the sun. March 28th is the next No Kings Day. Let’s make that history’s biggest single day of protest. Visit nokings.org to find your Berlin. 

Craig Wiesner is the co-owner of Reach And Teach, a book, toy and cultural gift shop on San Carlos Avenue in San Carlos. Follow Craig: craigwiesner.bsky.social.

NOTE: This version of the column has been updated with links to pages and stories referenced in the text. While my most recent columns are in print and online at the San Mateo Daily Journal, they are behind a pay wall (please subscribe to support a wonderful local newspaper). After each new column hits the streets and the web, I publish the previous one without a pay wall here. Please SHARE!!