Los Angeles ? A group of Japanese-Americans seeking to preserve World War II internment camp sites concluded a three-day summit Sunday, saying there is an urgent need to gather information from survivors who are now mostly in their 70s and older.

Just one of the camps where 120,000 Japanese-Americans were held has come under a National Park Service program. At the three-day All Camps Summit, the group outlined its plans to seek preservation status for what remains at nine others.

One of their priorities is recording the stories of those who experienced the camps, organizers said.

“We’ve been losing so many members,” Daisy Used Satoda, who spent her high school years at the Topaz camp in Utah, told the Los Angeles Times.

The series of workshops included participation by at least 400 Japanese-Americans who were forced to live and work behind barbed-wire and guard towers between 1942 and 1945.

“Hopefully the sansei (third-generation Japanese Americans) and the yonsei (fourth-generation) will continue to tell the story,” said Eddy Kurushima, who spent time at the Jerome internment camp in Arkansas before entering U.S. military service.

Efforts to preserve and in some cases reconstruct the Manzanar Camp, 200 miles north of Los Angeles, have been the most successful so far. Fifty buildings are still standing from the 1,300 built to house entire families.

“It’s probably one of the most important parks in the national system (because) … it tells a different story, one of social justice,” said Frank Hayes, the National Park Service superintendent at the Manzanar National Historic Site.