Every year since the late 1960s, on the last Saturday in April, there has been a pilgrimage to a place called Manzanar in California, where one of 10 United States internment camps once stood. The annual journeys began as a way to remember those Japanese-Americans who were incarcerated during World War II and to mark a dark chapter in our history. The pilgrimage includes elderly original internees and their families, as well as neighbors of the site, schoolchildren and, since Sept. 11, American Muslims, who see parallels between what once happened and today.

Manzanar is the best known of the camps, because it often made the news during the war owing to unrest, strikes and even shooting deaths. At its peak, the camp held over 10,000 Japanese-Americans inside its barbed wire. Most hailed from Los Angeles, some 230 miles to the south. A vast majority were also American citizens, held without charge or trial for years, for the crime of looking like the people who had bombed Pearl Harbor.

Manzanar is now a National Historic Site thanks to the work of Sue Kunitomi Embrey and the Manzanar Committee, which lobbied for decades to obtain the designation. I have visited it often, but my personal pilgrimages have been to two other camps that once held my family and me. One is in Rohwer, Ark., in what was then fetid, uninhabitable swampland, and the other is in the cold, desolate wastes of Tule Lake, Calif. That was the harshest camp, with more than 18,500 inmates behind three layers of barbed-wire fence and with tanks patrolling the perimeter.

I was 5 years old at the beginning of our internment in Arkansas. I remember every school morning reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, my eyes upon the stars and stripes of the flag, but at the same time I could see from the window the barbed wire and the sentry towers where guards kept guns trained on us.