Letter from Christine C. Schnusenberg to President Ronald Reagan requesting faster action with reparation payments to Japanese American citizens held at internment camps during World War II/Accusing NASA of negligence regarding, the Challenger Disaster, 03/06/1986

8 RR THASA 397028 5514 S. Blackstone Avenue #325 Chicago, Illinois 60637 March 6, 1986 To the President of the United States Mr. Ronald Reagon The White House Washington, D. C. 20515 Dear Mr. President: I am writing to you in the following matter: I understand that recently Congress has approved and voted into legislature the reparation payment to the American- Japanese citizens who so unjustly spent three or more years of their lives in American intern-camps, in their own country, during the war years. I understand that the reparation-process of approval of this measure has been a very slow one and that momentarily there is a question of finding the proper and fluent funds. It is therefore that I am writing to you that perhaps by special Presidential Order this process can be speedily put into effect so that those elderly citizens who have suffered under these procedures might at the end of their life-time while, they enjoy still good health, receive their reparations for this injustice. Although such atrocities can never be amended for by fiscal substitute--they did lose years of their lives in which they could not make a living--it would never help them and would make them feel not as an outcast, as such an interment would have indicated. I understand that the Germans have made their reparations both to individual Jews and to Israel for crimes that were committed under a dictatorship. I think that the internment of U.S. citizens in a democracy of their own country also deserves a gestures of reparation and amendment. I think that the late astronaut Onizuka has demonstrated his patriotic loyalty and perhaps his parents are among those who were interned. A friend of mine, now in her sixties, also spent time in those camps; she worked hard all her life and I would like to see her spent the rest of her years more comfortably which she could do if the reparation amendment would be put into effect quickly.