When I was growing up my family simply called it “camp,” like the summer retreat I would escape to as a kid. Both places tended to have wood cabins, tight rows of beds and a large mess hall. My grandmother, or Baachan as I called her, used to say the baseball diamonds at her camp would draw huge crowds for every game.

In reality, the place my grandmother was describing was a prison.

My great-grandparents and their 10 children, all of whom were born in the United States, were among the first wave of Japanese-Americans torn from their homes and thrown into internment camps built at the height of World War II. They were forced to abandon the family farm just as the strawberries had ripened on the vines. For nearly three years they lived within the confines of a barbed-wire fence.

Still, they called it “camp,” with little evident resentment.

In the decades after they were released, they continued to play down the enormity of their experience. When I prodded them for details, I heard stories that lacked even hints of anger or bitterness. Instead there was a fierce resolve to forgive the country that had imprisoned them.

Even so, I was shocked, though not entirely surprised, to learn that some of my relatives who endured the internment also voted for Donald J. Trump.