“Not as bad as the Nazis” is hardly a recommendation, but my fiancé, who grew up in Auschwitz, Poland, sees the justice in the claim.

We are discussing the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, and Idaho’s Minidoka National Historic Site in particular. About 13,000 people from Alaska, Oregon and Washington were relocated here between late 1942 and 1945. They lost homes, farms, businesses and status in the process (needless to say, their economic rivals profited from their loss) but few of them died here. There were no exterminations, no mass graves, no final solution – just a temporary one: How to deal with an enemy (real and imagined) during a war.

The site on the open sagebrush desert is nearly empty: A turn in the road runs beside the remains of a guard house and waiting room (it is this chimneyed ruin that most reminds my Polish friend of the concentration camps she grew up with); across the way is some signage showing photos of the 36 tarpaper residential barracks that once stood here, as well as a restored Victory garden, still retaining its V-shaped border; nearby gushes a canal along which the captive residents once gathered to while away the time.

What a combination of resentment, fear and boredom those hours must have been.

There is no National Park visitors center yet; that office is shared by the Hagerman Fossil Beds center about a half hour distant. There you can confront both a prehistoric skeleton horse and the historic bones of an old prejudice, revealed in photos from the war years. Businesses then advertised their refusal to serve “Jap rats” and proudly claimed to be for “white people” only. The images are so starkly reminiscent of the anti-black Jim Crow days that it is easy to see how a part of the reaction to the Japanese was just another ethnic bias, from which humans seem to always suffer.

“Could it happen again?” one of the National Park brochures asks.

You almost have to suppress a laugh.