The Train to Crystal City

FDR's Secret Prisoner Exchange Program and America's Only Family Internment Camp During World War II

Jan Jarboe Russell

• Publisher: Scribner
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781451693683
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

The New York Times bestselling dramatic and never-before-told story of a secret FDR-approved American internment camp in Texas during World War II: "A must-read…. The Train to Crystal City is compelling, thought-provoking, and impossible to put down" ( Star-Tribune, Minneapolis). During World War II, trains delivered thousands of civilians from the United States and Latin America to Crystal City, Texas. The trains carried Japanese, German, and Italian immigrants and their American-born children. The only family internment camp during the war, Crystal City was the center of a government prisoner exchange program called "quiet passage." Hundreds of prisoners in Crystal City were exchanged for other more ostensibly important Americans—diplomats, businessmen, soldiers, and missionaries—behind enemy lines in Japan and Germany."In this quietly moving book" ( The Boston Globe ), Jan Jarboe Russell focuses on two American-born teenage girls, uncovering the details of their years spent in the camp; the struggles of their fathers; their families' subsequent journeys to war-devastated Germany and Japan; and their years-long attempt to survive and return to the United States, transformed from incarcerated enemies to American loyalists. Their stories of day-to-day life at the camp, from the ten-foot high security fence to the armed guards, daily roll call, and censored mail, have never been told.Combining big-picture World War II history with a little-known event in American history, The Train to Crystal City reveals the war-time hysteria against the Japanese and Germans in America, the secrets of FDR's tactics to rescue high-profile POWs in Germany and Japan, and above all, "is about identity, allegiance, and home, and the difficulty of determining the loyalties that lie in individual human hearts" ( Texas Observer ).

PART ONE

WITHOUT TRIAL

CHAPTER ONE

New Enemies

On January 8, 1942, one month and one day after the surprise Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, America’s entry into World War II, Ingrid Eiserloh’s world changed forever. At six that morning, Ingrid’s father, Mathias Eiserloh, a German-born immigrant, left the family’s Strongsville home, a square, concrete box made by his own hands, for his job in nearby Cleveland, Ohio. Then forty-six years old, Mathias was fair-haired with gray-blue eyes. Five feet eight inches tall, stocky, he had the ruddy skin of a man well accustomed to hard labor. A structural engineer, Mathias worked for the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company for $60 a week. He was in charge of constructing lime plants for the chemical division of Pittsburgh Plate, a company that made glass. His large hands carried a scent of sour chemicals that Ingrid did not find unpleasant, as the smell meant her father was with her.

Ingrid had been born on May 8, 1930, in Cleveland, Ohio. Her parents, Mathias and Johanna, had immigrated to America from Germany seven years before. In the midst of the Depression, they had purchased in Strongsville a heavily wooded, five-acre lot, which sloped down to a creek. There Mathias built a tent on a wooden platform, and Johanna, a slim, green-eyed beauty with chestnut hair and fair skin, raised chickens. Johanna took a lot of pride in her chickens. They yielded eggs at a rate that astonished her and added to the family’s meager income. Over the years, German-born friends and relatives who lived nearby helped Mathias and Johanna mix the concrete that was used to add on to their large, sturdy house. They built their home one room at a time. They had no indoor plumbing or electricity for years.

Ingrid lived her early life like a woodland nymph, roaming the forest and collecting animals. On her third birthday, her father gave her a raccoon. On her fourth, she was given a German shepherd puppy which she named Tire Biter, because biting tires came so naturally to him. Other dogs followed: Senta, another German shepherd, and a collie mix named Pal, with long golden hair.

As a child, Ingrid had long hair, red as a penny, which trailed down her back, and a gift. Her young soprano voice, while still immature, had the potential to rival the opera stars she listened to on the family’s Victrola phonograph. She babied her voice and knew better than to scream. Her voice teacher, a neighbor who lived down the road, regularly told her to protect her voice. The child had a rare four-octave range and an unusually disciplined disposition. If Ingrid had to cough, she coughed gently to avoid strain. In smoky environments, Ingrid breathed through her nose, not her mouth, to protect her throat. Her middle name, chosen at birth by her adoring father, was Goldie. That was the name her teacher had given to her voice: Goldie, the teacher called it, a treasure to be prized.

Even in tiny Strongsville, the unbearable news of Japan’s crippling strike at Pearl Harbor (3,581 casualties, 188 planes destroyed on the ground, 8 battleships sunk or run aground) rolled off newspaper drums and hummed across radio signals. On the morning of December 8, 1941, the headline of the Cleveland Plain Dealer was: “Japs War on U.S., Britain; Bomb Hawaii, Philippines; Congress to Hear F.D.R.” The newspaper printed instructions for responding to blackouts. Air-raid sirens shrieked fifteen miles away in downtown Cleveland. The Plain Dealer printed instructions for responding to blackouts. Terms such as spies, saboteurs, and Fifth Column subversives were alive on editorial pages. Suddenly in America there arose an entirely new lexicon—krauts, Nazis, yellow devils, and Japanazis—all new words deployed to categorize enemies in the contest between the forces of good and evil.

German immigrants to the United States, such as Ingrid’s parents, had long been subjects of suspicion. In 1936, President Franklin D. Roosevelt secretly issued an order to J. Edgar Hoover, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, to investigate not only suspected members of the Nazi movement, but anyone who might pose a security risk in the event of war. Hoover had earlier instituted a sweeping surveillance program that proved much more far-reaching than his commander in chief had in mind. In just four years, from 1932 to 1936, the FBI swelled from three hundred to six hundred agents. Hoover’s coast-to-coast team wrote daily reports of real and imagined subversive activities, wiretapped suspects, and developed an extensive file of secret dossiers, built on the word of anonymous informants.

Within a few hours after the first Japanese bombs were dropped on Pearl Harbor, FBI agents, working from a list of thousands of names already compiled into its secret Custodial Detention Index, arrested an estimated 2,000 Japanese and German immigrants on the West and East Coasts. Fourteen days later, the FBI held under arrest 1,430 Japanese, 215 Italians, and 1,153 Germans in the continental United States and Hawaii. All of this news inflated the public’s fear of immigrants. The pursuit of enemies was on—even in such places as rural Ohio.

In Strongsville, half of Ingrid’s neighbors had either been born in Germany, like her parents, or were first-generation, born in America, like Ingrid and her two younger siblings. With the news of arrests of Germans, a worried hush fell over the neighborhood as every family of German descent came under suspicion. Mathias and his German friends stopped meeting at the neighborhood beer hall. They stopped speaking German in public. Agents came to town to interview their non-German neighbors. As had happened during World War I, anti-German sentiment was everywhere. Sauerkraut became “liberty cabbage” and hamburgers were renamed “Salisbury steak.” In nearby Cleveland, the city orchestra stopped performing the works of Beethoven.

Two days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Ingrid rode the bus to school. She was a small girl, not even five feet tall, and scrawny as a shadow. Fueled by the anti-German influence of the day, four boys held her down on the bus, pulled her hair, and jeered, “Hotsy-totsy Nazi!” When the driver finally called off the boys, Ingrid picked herself up. Flushed and angry, she willed herself not to show fear. She had her father’s pride.

That year, 1941, Christmas came and went. Her mother sent no Weihnachtskarten—Christmas cards—and the house seemed silent and sullen. As an escape Ingrid went outside into the woods and sang arias to the trees, as if the high, crystal notes could chase away the oppressive gloom. When confined to the house, she felt claustrophobic and hummed softly to console herself.

Day by day, Ingrid sensed her father’s growing anxiety. When he came home from work, usually after dark, he threw himself into a kitchen chair and grumbled about the coworkers he thought might be his enemies. “Perhaps the FBI was interviewing them?” he wondered aloud. “Who knows what they might say?”

During family dinners he called them anonymous accusers. “What’s fair about that?”

Obsessed by fear and worry, he talked too fast and was incapable of staying on a single subject for more than a few minutes. Before Pearl Harbor, Mathias smoked two packs of cigarettes a day. Now he was never without a cigarette. Ingrid’s mother, Johanna, complained that Mathias was up to four packs a day. When, wondered Ingrid, would her father next draw a clean, easy breath? And when would she have to stop holding her breath in his presence to protect her voice?

January 8, 1942, was a Thursday and a cold winter’s day. Ice had formed on the surface of the creek behind the Eiserloh house. Ingrid and her six-year-old brother, Lothar, were away at school. Their baby sister, Ensi, only one year old, was quiet in the crib.

Two FBI agents pulled up in large black cars and parked in front of the house. They walked to the front door and knocked. Johanna opened the door, Mathias by her side.

The agents walked in and presented their identification. They were dressed in dark suits and hats, like characters in a movie. Both carried guns. They asked for permission to make a search of the premises. Mathias said yes. He was eager to comply but the agents didn’t need his permission. They had an authorized search warrant, signed by the attorney general of the United States, Francis Biddle.

Mathias fumbled through his pocket and finally produced from his wallet his alien registration card, which he carried with him everywhere. He pointed to the number on the card—4772829—in a desperate attempt to prove his legitimacy. Though born in Germany, he explained to the agents that he was a legal resident of the United States. His papers were in order. Johanna produced hers as well, along with both of their passports. Johanna explained that all three of her children were American-born. Didn’t that count for anything?

Over the next few hours, the agents moved from room to room, looking for dynamite, shortwave radios, cameras, and any other suspicious items, which they did not find. They confiscated ordinary letters and photographs from relatives in Germany. Paintings of German landscapes were taken from the walls. Other items seized that night were a black leather book with names and addresses of other German legal aliens who lived near them in Strongsville; twelve hardcover books in German that Mathias had recently purchased during a book sale at the German consulate in Cleveland to raise money for winter relief; and a list of shortwave German radio programs from the month of January 1941.

The agents opened drawers and inspected closets. They examined bank records from the Cleveland Trust Co. and noted the small amount of money in Eisleroh’s account, a mere $700. Among the postcards they took was one Ingrid had written to her father during a recent trip to Chicago to visit relatives. The card was written in English, Ingrid’s first language, but she also knew German. “I forgot my promise to write this in Deutsche,” she wrote, each letter neatly formed, “but I’m tired of writing now and won’t start all over.”

Finally the agents snapped handcuffs on Mathias’s wrists and placed him in what they called “custodial detention,” which meant that he could be held in prison indefinitely. The word arrest was not used. No one read Mathias Eiserloh his rights because as a legal resident alien from Germany, an ally of Japan’s and Italy’s in the war against the United States, Eislerloh had no rights under US laws. He was not allowed a lawyer. No charges were filed, and he would never be convicted of any crime. Yet from that moment on, Eiserloh was officially branded a “dangerous enemy alien.”

The agents instructed Johanna to pack a small bag for her husband. Eager to comply, she gathered a toothbrush, a shirt, a pair of pants, and pajamas and placed the items a small bag. “He won’t be gone long,” the agents told Johanna. This was the standard line designed to soothe anxious wives and used by FBI agents all over the country during arrests of Germans, Japanese, and Italians.

When Ingrid returned home from school, she found Ensi safe in her crib but both of her parents vanished. She walked outside to the garage and saw her uncle, Mathias’s brother-in-law, spread-limbed on the floor. He was drunk, and Ingrid shook him by the shoulders to wake him. Once on his feet, her uncle told Ingrid that FBI agents had arrested her father. He described how humiliated Mathias looked in handcuffs, eyes downcast as he slipped into the backseat of the black car. Johanna had taken the family car and driven to the jail in Cleveland to find out how long Mathias would be gone.

Ingrid left the garage, collapsed on the cold ground, and stared into the sky. Her father had vanished. She filled her lungs, and then out came an unwilled, painful roar to the sky. The high wail of her voice was so raw it made the hair on the back of Ingrid’s neck rise. Her legs came up to her chest and she rolled back and forth like a wounded animal. Then there was silence.

Like the moment captured by the artist Edvard Munch in his iconic painting The Scream almost fifty years before, Ingrid’s shriek was a life-changing moment. Munch’s painting expressed a moment from his walk in 1892 in which the sky turned bloodred and the expressionist artist sensed “an infinite scream passing through nature.” For many years after her father was snatched, Ingrid felt a similar massive disorder in her environment and in the depths of herself. The particulars of her life at home—the chicken coop, the woodburning stove, the dogs, the daily bus ride to school—all seemed blurred, no longer certain. That day, lying in the woods, Ingrid’s shriek left her silent and spent. “My God,” she thought to herself. “What will happen to us?”

After that day, Ingrid no longer sang to the trees or hummed during her household chores. Life as she had known it was finished. By the time that she next saw her father—two long years later in what seemed the other side of the world in Crystal City, Texas—Ingrid’s golden voice, along with a great many other things, had been lost.

• • •

On the morning of December 7, 1941, Sumi Utsushigawa, a thirteen-year-old American girl, rested her elbows on the windowsill of her second-story apartment on East First Street in Little Tokyo, the commercial and cultural enclave for Japanese in Los Angeles. In the neighborhood, filled with Shinto shrines, judo and kendo schools, and many Japanese restaurants, the culture of Japan was everywhere. The weather was in the high seventies and sunny, and the light streamed through the windows into the apartment. It was the kind of shiny California winter day, set among green hedges and eucalyptus trees, that seems improbable anywhere else.

Below Sumi’s apartment window was a traffic jam. Cars filled with angry white American men lined the street. Horns honked. Radios blared. Voices shouted. The surprise attack on Pearl Harbor unleashed panic and alarm at the possibility of additional attacks on American soil. After the worst naval disaster in American history, the Japanese might strike anywhere next. Fear of the “yellow peril,” racism toward anyone of Japanese ancestry, swept the country. The white men who crowded into Little Tokyo that day carried guns, ammunition, and baseball bats. They were on patrol to see if any of the Japanese in Little Tokyo had the temerity to celebrate their countrymen’s attack on Pearl Harbor. A few of these men carried posters with an enraged message: JAP HUNTING LICENSE, GOOD FOR DURATION OF HUNTING SEASON, OPEN SEASON NOW. NO LIMIT.

Crossing First Street, a Japanese businessman hurried toward Sumi’s building. He wore a dark suit, white shirt, and a broad-brimmed hat and carried a Christmas package tucked under one arm. Two small children walked by his side, each clutching one of his hands. The man’s gaze was lowered and his children’s faces were blank.

Sumi’s mother, Nobu, shouted at Sumi to stay away from the window and to stay indoors. “It’s very dangerous,” her mother told her in Japanese. Her mother need not have worried; Sumi had no desire to leave the apartment. The sight below had the dark, unreal quality of a Martian invasion, something impossible to believe.

Meanwhile, Nobu and Sumi’s father, Tom Utsushigawa, a photographer who owned the apartment building at 244½ East First Street, moved quickly through the two-story building. They went door-to-door—to the beautiful Japanese dancer on the first floor, next door to the somber Japanese lawyer. They pounded on doors and in feverish Japanese shouted to tenants to remove portraits of the Japanese emperor and the royal family from the walls of their apartments. Inside, the residents were just learning the news from Hawaii. “Quickly,” Tom warned. “Protect yourselves.” Suddenly, being Japanese in America was dangerous.

None of it made any sense to Sumi. She found herself on the other side of an invisible line that she had not drawn. While her parents were issei, immigrants born in Japan, Sumi was a nisei, born in America. In every way, she fit the stereotype of the nisei, the second-generation Japanese who worked hard to become “100 percent American.” Unlike her mother, Nobu, who wore her long sheet of black hair in a chignon at the back of her neck and took small, delicate steps through the apartment, Sumi wore her hair in bedraggled pigtails and had the gait of an awkward pony. She talked in California slang: “What you guys this and what you guys that?”

She had been born on August 14, 1928, in Los Angeles. That was the year Walt Disney debuted Mickey Mouse, the madcap cartoon character that became Sumi’s childhood hero. Her teenager’s closet was filled with Mickey Mouse T-shirts, caps, and sweaters. Her friends gave her Mickey Mouse pins for birthday presents. She said the Pledge of Allegiance at Central Junior High School, located only six blocks from her apartment. She celebrated the Fourth of July. A young American teenager, she had, until this day at least, been naturally optimistic. Now Sumi tried to make sense of the uncomfortable reality that her own country—America—was at war with the homeland of her parents.

Within two hours of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, FBI agents had swarmed through the narrow streets of Little Tokyo and placed Japanese leaders in handcuffs, leading them away from their friends and families. A physician who lived in Sumi’s building was among the first arrested. His wife, known as Battleship Mama, had entertained members of the Japanese navy in their tidy apartment, decorated with furniture from Japan. When young Japanese seamen, far from home, visited Los Angeles, she invited them to her home and performed the tea service, stirring green tea into exquisite small cups. These events for sailors were an innocent act by a traditional Japanese woman well schooled in hospitality. But what once seemed a courteous, sympathetic tie to her homeland was now perceived as subversive, reason enough for her husband’s arrest.

Over the next few days, the Japanese bank branches in Little Tokyo closed. Suddenly, Sumi’s parents were penniless because the US Treasury had frozen all bank accounts of anyone born in Japan. The vegetable markets along Central Avenue were shut down. Even Fusetsu-do, a Japanese sweetshop, where Sumi and her friends bought fortune cookies, was padlocked. Rumors flew through the ...