Four hours of road and heat and colored sand separate Manzanar from the bells and lights of Las Vegas. Driving through Death Valley may seem daunting — the temperatures reach the 120s during the summer — but it is well worth the effort.

Manzanar is a place of many lessons, of images that stay with you and stories not soon forgotten.

Manzanar was one of 10 internment camps, euphemistically called "relocation camps," where Japanese-American families were held during World War II. It is considered the best preserved of these camps, though all of the barracks and buildings were removed down to the foundation and sold off or scrapped after the camp was closed in 1945.

In 2004, an interpretive center was opened in the site's only restored building, the old high school auditorium.

Yes, there was a high school in the internment camp, if you can imagine that. It was part of the commitment to carry on some semblance of a normal life.

There's a restored copy of the class of 1943 yearbook at the center, with photos of teenage girls who each morning got ready for school in dust-filled barracks, stood in line to use the bathroom, put on red lipstick and starched dresses and painstakingly rolled their hair into the style fashionable at the time.

There are many testaments to the strength of will, the resolve to make the best of things.

There are photographs of camp life taken by a professional photographer who fashioned a homemade camera after his equipment was confiscated by camp guards.

Remnants remain of elaborate gardens and koi ponds the internees somehow managed to build and nurture in the baked sand and dull stone.

There's a collection of smiling team pictures of the young men who played America's favorite sport within the camp borders.

So much of what happened in Manzanar was heartbreaking and unfair and untenable; yet the will of the people forced to live there rose up again and again. They made the best of what they had.

Manzanar held more than 10,000 Japanese-Americans during the peak of the relocation program. In the fear and paranoia that followed the bombing of Pearl Harbor, families were forced to leave their farms, homes and businesses to be housed together in austere barracks and watched by armed guards from watch towers along barbed wire fences. About two-thirds of those taken to Manzanar were American citizens by birth. There was no way to prove loyalty; race spoke louder than deed.

The Manzanar National Historic Site is 230 miles from Vegas and well worth the drive out of the city of sin and superficiality. At Manzanar, the internees all those years ago managed to rise every day and endure and cultivate grace and beauty and character where it seemed none could grow. The camp is long gone but the lessons remain.

Lee Cataluna's column runs Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Reach her at 535-8172 or lcataluna@honoluluadvertiser.com.