By George Will"Hearing about a shortage of farm laborers in California, the couple who would become Susumu Ito's parents moved from Hiroshima to become sharecroppers near Stockton. Thus began a saga that recently brought Ito, 91, to the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, where he and 119 former comrades in arms were honored, during the annual Days of Remembrance, as liberators of Nazi concentration camps. While his Japanese American Army unit was succoring survivors of Dachau, near Munich, his parents and two sisters were interned in a camp in Arkansas.
Ito attended one-room schools, graduated from high school at 16 and was accepted at Berkeley. His parents, however, believed that Japanese Americans could not rise in the professions — even the civil service — for which the university would prepare him. So he attended community college, studying auto mechanics, although he could not join the mechanics union.
In 1940, Congress passed conscription, and Ito was content to be drafted, thinking the military would be an adventure. He got that right."
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