A little girl cries. She is watching jackrabbits jump freely through a barbed-wire fence, in and out of the internment camp where she and her family are imprisoned.
The air outside her barrack is filled with the sound of homemade wooden geta sandals clip-clopping through camp.
At night a searchlight mounted on a guard tower blasts onto a small girl walking to the latrine.
A little girl in a kimono stands in the midst of barbed wire, barracks, a map of the camp's location in Colorado, and a guard tower where helmeted soldiers peer down, rifles in hand.
An 11-year-old's hands reach for a beautiful doll in a kimono, hovering above bleak rows of barracks.
These are some of the profound watercolors by Lily Havey, a Salt Lake artist who was imprisoned with her father, mother and brother in two of the internment camps where Japanese-Americans were held during World War II. Many years later, she painted the large works from her recollections and a few photos, helping her cope with the experience.
As Feb. 19 approached — the Day of Remembrance — she shared the striking paintings with the Deseret Morning News. This year the Day of Remembrance marks the 65th anniversary of the day President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, resulting in the rounding up and internment of more than 100,000 residents, most of them American citizens.
Forced to live for up to three years in 10 camps around the country, including the so-called Topaz Relocation Center in central Utah, the internees lived in barracks with armed guards watching their moves. Many of the young men joined the Army and fought valiantly for the country that had imprisoned them and their families, and many died in the service.
Havey's viewpoint in the paintings is that of a child who at times felt she was going on an adventure, at others was frightened, and often longed for things she was denied. These included a pretty doll, fresh orange juice and freedom.
In 1942 she, her brother, George, their mother, Yoshiko Nakai, and their father, Kanesaburu Nakai, were uprooted from their home in Los Angeles. They had 10 days to pack their suitcases.
They and hundreds of other evacuees stayed about six months in temporary quarters at the Santa Anita, Calif., racetrack. She had just turned 10.
"We were sent to Santa Anita because they hadn't completed the camps," she said during an interview in her Sugar House-area home.
"The Santa Anita buildings were even more temporary. The people who went there first had to clean out the horse stable. That's where they stayed."
Later, the hundreds of racetrack internees were taken by train to the Amache center in southeastern Colorado. They stayed there for the rest of the war, trying to make a normal life with schooling, mess halls, friends, games.
Showing a painting of menacing coyotes, she said one of her big fears about Colorado was the coyotes that roamed near camp. She would hear them howling at night. "It was very frightening," she said.
The image of the little girl in a spotlight came about because of this incident: "I woke up one night to go to the bathroom, and the guard put a spotlight on me," shining it from the guard tower. The light "followed me all the way to the toilet," which was about three barracks away.
Another painting highlights the number she and her family were assigned. "This is 18286," she said. "This is who we were." The camp view is dreary and horrifying, with prickly pear cactus, searchlights, a guard tower and barbed wire.
"That's what I remember," she said. "The searchlights."
A little girl figure in one painting is a ghost.
A painting shows spotlights and a distant church with a cross. "This is the fear of what was going to happen. Were we going to die?"
Women in the Santa Anita camp worked to make camouflage nets that the U.S. Army used. One of her paintings shows the women working on huge greenish nets.
Other paintings show human bones just under the ground. Though bodies were not at the camp, they symbolize the fear.
The fear wasn't unjustified. It is now known that an internee was shot by a guard in the Utah camp.
The Nakai family lived in a 20-by-40-foot room in a barrack for three years. "We used to have one single light bulb in the middle of the barracks," she said. They would find dead moths under the light in the morning.
A painting of a crying girl with jackrabbits, a distant storm in the desert, a far-off town, is one of the most poignant. The rabbits "could just hop in and out of the barbed wire and go anywhere, at random," she said. "So that's making the little girl very sad."
That little girl used to gaze across the desert and think, "Oh, there's Kansas over there."
Internees had a choice of moving inland or going to the camps, she said. Supposedly, ethnic Japanese people, whether American citizens or not, posed a threat of sabotage if they lived on the coast.
Her immediate family didn't have the resources to move inland. But her aunt and uncle went to Salt Lake City, and when Havey and her family were released in 1945, "they found us a little house" here. She has lived in Utah's capital ever since.
In 1998, she and her sons, Michael Havey and Tab Uno, attended a reunion of internees. It was her first visit back to the camp, and her mother had recently died. The camp had become a cow pasture, with nothing much left but concrete foundations and elm trees that were planted by the inmates five decades before.
Lily Havey is a well-known artist in stained-glass creations. Her works have been displayed and sold in galleries, and she is commissioned for major projects.
But decades after the internment, the camp experiences triggered a powerful response that found its outlet in watercolors.
"She slowly began to paint these watercolors, and suddenly ... memories and experiences ... began to flood out," said Michael Havey.
Michael Havey, operations manager at KUER, the University of Utah radio station, said the camp art works "all sort of came out in a rush." When she did one painting, that would spark another memory and she would make another.
"Many of the early paintings were really quite angry in a way, that they held a lot of this suppressed sadness and frustration and anger."
He recalled the reunion in 1998. They arrived two days before the reunion and received permission to visit the campsite. They found the foundation of the barrack where Lily Havey had lived.
"It was the first time she had ever come back since leaving the camp all those decades ago," he said in a telephone interview.
As a child she had yearned to be free as the jackrabbits, to see what was outside the wire, to find out what the state was like across the border. "And Kansas was so tantalizingly close," he said.
As a surprise, Michael Havey drove her to the border of Kansas. "We drove out there, and we took some pictures, and stood out there, and she walked into Kansas.
"I said, 'Do you want to do anything further?"'
She said, "No. Now I've been to Kansas. That's enough."
The camps are deserted today, returning to the soil. Among the sagebrush are broken plates and pipes, foundations, blocks of wood, rusted bolts set in concrete, pieces of glass, strands of barbed wire.
But in the vivid paintings of Lily Havey, the internment experience will live on: sometimes terrifying, sometimes sad, always wrong.
E-mail: bau@desnews.com