The Train to Crystal City: FDR's Secret Prisoner Exchange (13 page)

In a report, Mrs. Neff requested that the INS pay for a female social worker to accompany the Eiserlohs on the trip, noting, “It is our observation that Ensi, her baby, is an active toddler who will require a lot of attention. Lothar, although he is a manly chap, is a
normal boy with natural curiosity and probably will demand a lot of attention. Ingrid is a capable girl of thirteen but the responsibility of assisting the mother and caring for these two active children would be too great for her.”

On the summer day that Johanna and her children boarded the train, Allied strategy had become more effective. Seven months before, fifty American bombers made the first US strikes against Germany, and in February 1943, the Soviets freed Stalingrad. In the Pacific, the Japanese had lost major sea battles to the Americans. In July 1943,
as Johanna and her children made their way to Crystal City, the Germans tried to seize the initiative in the Soviet Union in a major battle near Kursk, but were crushed by Soviets with 75 divisions and 3,600 T-34 tanks. After the loss of the battle of Kursk, which involved more than 2 million men, the Germans could not stop the Red Army’s drive to Berlin. On the home front, the shock of Pearl Harbor had been replaced by the relief of the country unified in service to winning the war. The fervor of that cause intensified distrust of German and Japanese immigrants and their American-born children.

From her desk in Cleveland’s public relief office, amid the larger setting of the war abroad, Mrs. Neff turned to a logistical problem close at hand, the transport to Crystal City of Johanna and the three children. The dilemma Mrs. Neff faced was of the same sort that Harrison, O’Rourke, the many guards, teachers, doctors, and various other staff who worked at Crystal City from 1942 to 1948 faced: how to serve America’s security needs while protecting the humanity of innocent wives, children, and in many cases wrongly accused fathers who would nonetheless be indefinitely incarcerated behind barbed wire. Often, as in this slight matter, protection proved impossible. Mrs. Neff’s request that a social worker be allowed to accompany the family was denied. The responsibility for managing Lothar and Ensi fell to Ingrid.

In the dining car, Ingrid, Lothar, and Ensi ate lunch with other German American children and their mothers, all bound for Crystal
City. Like Ingrid, everyone else in the dining car wore a family identification card around his or her neck. Under the vigilant eyes of two INS guards, the Eiserloh children ate sandwiches and drank tumblers of milk. Lothar played a game of tiddledywinks with a group of young boys, substituting coasters for chips.

When the siblings returned to the passenger car, Ingrid settled by the window and watched small towns in Ohio and then Kentucky whiz by. The train slowed only when it crossed over wooden trestles. Ingrid was aware that what was happening to her and to her family was unusual. She was on her way to see her father, and the price of reunion was the loss of her own freedom. She paid it gladly.

Ingrid remembered that after war was declared, she wrote two letters in her neat cursive style, letters that she never mailed. One of the letters was to President Roosevelt and the other to Hitler. She asked both men to negotiate their differences so that war could be averted. On the day she wrote them, she slipped both of them into the base of the largest of five trunks built of pressed plywood and forgot about them. Now those trunks carried her family’s belongings to Crystal City. Oh, well, she thought to herself, it was too late to send them.

That night, Johanna joined the children in the dining car for dinner. For the first time in many months, it felt as if they were again a family. Even though Mathias wasn’t with them, they were traveling to meet him. Ingrid was relieved that her mother looked content, maybe even happy.

On the second day, the train crossed the border into Texas, a word that sounded like heaven to Ingrid. In Texas she would at last see her father. She assumed that she would soon arrive in Crystal City. Instead, the hours passed slowly and the train kept moving. How big could this state be? Texas sprawled over 268,820 square miles and was almost twice as large as Germany or Japan. From her seat, mile after mile flashed by under a vast sky. She tried to picture Crystal City as a kind of true version of the Emerald City as described in
The Wizard of Oz,
magic and shimmering, a place of miraculous
reunion. Instead, Crystal City was one of those incomprehensible phrases from the war—
internment camp, voluntary internment
, and
family identification card
—that had to be lived through to be understood.

In the peak of summer, Texas was bone-dry and sparse of vegetation. The temperature was over a hundred degrees, thirty degrees warmer than Cleveland when Ingrid had left. The air inside the train was stuffy, and Ingrid’s clothes were drenched with sweat and her mouth was dry.

When the train pulled over to a sidetrack to let another train pass, Ingrid received permission from a guard to go to the caboose and get some fresh air. From the caboose, she saw a field filled with striped watermelons. The train stood still in the too-bright light.

“Oh, what a temptation!” she told a guard who stood near her.

“Do you like watermelons?” he asked.

“You can have my arm, but please get me a watermelon.”

The guard hopped off the train, picked a watermelon, and brought it back to Ingrid. “Now we are going to feast,” he said, taking a pocketknife from his pants pocket. He cut a wedge for her, and she took the piece with her fingers. The guard cut a chunk for himself, and slice by slice they devoured the watermelon. She had often shared this kind of moment with her father. She closed her eyes and remembered details of Mathias’s face—his blue eyes, electric to Ingrid, the determined line of his mouth, the lines that creased his forehead. Soon, she told herself, everything would be all right.

•  •  •

As Johanna and the children made their way to Crystal City by rail, Mathias waited behind barbed wire at the nearby Kenedy Alien Detention Center, the all-male camp more than one hundred miles from Crystal City.
The camp at Kenedy was at its peak of operation. More than 2,000 aliens, some arrested in the United States and others in Latin America, had passed in and out of its gates: 1,168 German, 705 Japanese, 72 Italians, and 62 men from Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, Russia, and Sweden.

Turnover at Kenedy was frequent because, like Mathias, many of the internees had agreed before their arrival to repatriate to their country of origin in return for being reunited with their families. Mathias’s decision to repatriate was comparable to Johanna’s decision to “voluntarily” join him behind bars in Crystal City. Though leery of having himself, his wife, and their three children exchanged for American soldiers and civilians behind enemy lines in Germany, Mathias knew that if he did not agree to repatriate, he would likely not be reunited with his family in Crystal City. He saw no other way to keep his family together.

Johanna had also filed a petition for repatriation, and a letter attached to it provided insight into her perspective: “I am not in favor of Hitler or Nazism. I was a democrat like my father. I consider myself a full-fledged American. I really don’t consider myself a German. I have applied for repatriation because I want to get my husband out of camp. I can’t go on this way.”

Mathias was not the only German prisoner of war in Kenedy eager to reunite with his family in Crystal City. Shortly after he arrived, a group of Germans from Latin America were put on a first-preference list to be transferred to Crystal City. Mathias and eleven other Germans, desperate to join their families, felt a sense of agency, despite the dire circumstances at the Kenedy camp. In a letter to Ennis, director of the Alien Enemy Control Unit of the Department of Justice, they wrote in protest of what they viewed as preferential treatment of the Germans from Latin America: “We beg you instantly to give our cases first and speedy preference and notify us definitely when this misery of our beloved ones will find an end.”

Two weeks later, Harrison, the commissioner of the INS, filed an official change-of-status report for Eiserloh with Ennis. As of July 10, 1943, Harrison wrote, Eiserloh’s status changed from internment as a prisoner of war at Kenedy to internment at Crystal City.

The reunion took place shortly after 1:00 p.m. on Saturday, July 10, 1943. Mathias and six other German men left the camp in Kenedy before dawn, boarding an olive-green Army bus, accompanied
by armed guards, and traveled the sixty miles to San Antonio. Given the small number of mothers and children to be transported to Crystal City, and the difficulty of making transfers from San Antonio directly to Crystal City, O’Rourke arranged for the families to meet first in San Antonio.

Before the train from Cleveland pulled into the station on North Medina Street, west of downtown San Antonio, the INS guards ordered the shades pulled down on the windows in the passenger car that carried Ingrid and her family. San Antonio was a military town with six active Army and Air Force bases. During World War II, American troops stood shoulder to shoulder in the busy train station, a venerable old building with ornate stained-glass windows and a shiny copper-domed roof. A statue of an Indian, also copper, atop the roof was a well-known landmark in the city. O’Rourke’s orders were to transport the wives and children as quickly and discreetly as possible. Anti-German sentiment was widespread. In train stations around the country, internees in transit had been heckled.

When the train came to a stop, Ingrid picked up Ensi, and Johanna held Lothar’s hand. Johanna climbed down the metal steps of the train one by one into the blazing heat. No shade was in sight. With Ingrid trailing behind, she followed the guards to a large parking lot, where the Army bus was parked.

One by one, seven men, one of them Mathias, stepped off the bus. Ingrid ran to him, arms wide open and feet flying; Lothar was right behind her, followed by Johanna, who carried Ensi. Ingrid thought her father looked strained and tired and he was thinner, but he stood square-shouldered and smiled at her. “He’s alive!” Ingrid told her mother. “Gee, he looks good.” Johanna and all three children encircled him, and Ingrid cried when her father hugged her.

The wives and children boarded the Army bus with the men. Ingrid noticed a farmers’ market on the edge of downtown San Antonio and, beyond it, the city’s modest skyline. Mathias looked at Johanna and the children as if he could not believe his eyes. Ensi had been a baby in a crib when he left Strongsville; now she walked
on her own two feet. Lothar was much taller, Ingrid looked like a teenager, and Johanna was thinner than he’d ever seen her. At first, conversation was awkward, but as the miles passed, they settled into being together again. Within an hour’s time, everyone was talking at once—in English and in German.

In late afternoon the bus finally arrived in Crystal City, and the small town was such a contrast to Cleveland and San Antonio. Ingrid saw a wood-plank sidewalk in front of a hardware store and a small building labeled City Hall. In front of it she saw the iconic statue of Popeye. Men walked the street in cowboy boots and wore ten-gallon cowboy hats. Signs were in English and Spanish: bar and
cantina
, store and
tienda.
To Ingrid, Crystal City didn’t seem like a real town at all but a western-movie set.

At the entrance of the camp, inside the barbed-wire fence, an American flag flew. “I remember looking up at the guard towers and seeing the men holding machine guns,” Lothar later recalled. “It was all so confusing.”

Ingrid saw a group of Germans and their children lined up inside to greet the new arrivals.
Three hundred and seventy-five Germans lived in the camp, and 145 Japanese. A full German orchestra, complete with strings, trumpets, trombones, and drums, played Beethoven and Brahms, Ingrid’s first time hearing live German music since her father’s arrest.

Inside the gate, the bus traveled a few feet on Airport Drive, a paved road, and stopped in front of a community hall. The German School was adjacent to the hall, and on the other side of Airport Drive Ingrid saw warehouses and other buildings. Beyond them stood a row of neat wooden shacks, some surrounded by flowerbeds planted by the internees. She and the others filed slowly down the steps of the bus, sapped by the heat. O’Rourke walked over from a building near the community hall and made a brief speech to welcome the people to the camp. His voice was friendly but firm. He explained that over the next few days they would learn the rules and procedures of the camp. For now, he said, the important thing
was to settle in. Unlike regular Border Patrol guards, who wore long-sleeved khaki shirts, pants, ties, and tan-colored Stetson hats, O’Rourke wore a lightweight, tan-colored suit.

“Is he the big cheese?” Ingrid remembered asking her father.

“Yes,” Mathias replied. “He’s the boss here.”

The Eiserloh family was taken to temporary barracks with communal toilets and showers. Clothing—pajamas, socks, underwear, and a change of clothing for the next day—had been provided by workers from the commissary. Ingrid looked out the window of her barracks and saw a general store, a blacksmith, a laundry, and a bakery. Near the fence was a grove of orange trees. Ingrid and all the other children were taken to the camp hospital, where
Dr. Symmes F. Oliver, a fifty-year-old career clinician who wore a stiff white coat, explained the hazards of daily life in the camp. Oliver wasn’t in the best of health himself, due to bouts of depression and alcoholism. The job as medical director of Crystal City, funded by the Public Health Service, had been a godsend to him. He suggested the children stay indoors during the hottest part of the day, and when they were outside, he warned them to watch for rattlesnakes, scorpions, black widow spiders, tarantulas, and even mountain lions. A few months before, Oliver explained, 131 German nationals had arrived from Costa Rica, 55 of them with whooping cough. He supervised a quarantine of the whole group, and he did not want to repeat the health crisis. Ingrid and the others rolled up their sleeves and took the vaccine shot not only for whooping cough, but also for diphtheria and tetanus.