Patty Pierose (III)

On her motivations to study history, and her research:

“The project I have been working on concerns the Prisoner of War Camps in the Magic Valley during World War II. Italians, Germans, and some Russians (called Mongols by some newspaper reports) lived and worked at the Rupert Prisoner of War Camp from late 1944 to 1946. Branch or site camps existed all over the valley, and I am particularly interested in those. My father had said there was a camp at Filer where we lived and that POW’s worked in his fields. My mom said they were so very young and though she wasn’t supposed to feed them, she often baked cookies, bread and cakes for them. Thus, I had always been interested in the fact that a POW camp was in Idaho…so I began reading what I could about camps in the United States and then more specifically in the west…In part, I am pushed by the fact that very few people know that this camp existed outside of Rupert and also that people keep trying to associate it with the Japanese Internment camp in Jerome county. I have taught myself a great deal about researching…I have collected many photographs from people, a particularly significant set of photos of prisoners in the fields. It was illegal to take photos of prisoners for national security reasons, so I prize those...I’m still researching, though the text is pretty well finished about the Magic Valley. Now in the spring I am moving on to the Treasure Valley sites.”