Author, historian and law professor Eric Muller, who curated the permanent exhibit at the Heart Mountain Interpretive Center, will receive the LaDonna Zall Compassionate Witness Award during the Heart Mountain Pilgrimage on Saturday, July 27.
The award is named after LaDonna Zall, who watched the last train carrying incarcerees leave Heart Mountain on Nov. 10, 1945, and who was the interpretive center’s first curator. A longtime educator in Powell, Wyo., she passed away in 2021.
Muller is the author of multiple books about Heart Mountain and the Japanese American incarceration, including Free to Die for Their Country: The Story of the Japanese American Draft Resisters in World War II and Lawyer, Jailer, Ally, Foe: Complicity and Conscience in America’s World War II Concentration Camps.
The Dan K. Moore Distinguished Professor of Law in Jurisprudence and Ethics at the University of North Carolina Law School, Muller was previously a professor at the University of Wyoming College of Law.
Muller is a faculty member with the Fellowships at Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics (FASPE), which develops young professionals by analyzing the passivity toward tyranny displayed by German professionals during the Nazi regime between 1933 and 1945. He led a FASPE delegation to Heart Mountain in 2021.
The Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation, a Smithsonian Affiliate, preserves the site where some 14,000 Japanese Americans were unjustly incarcerated in Wyoming from 1942 through 1945. Their stories are told within the foundation’s museum, Heart Mountain Interpretive Center, located between Cody and Powell.
