The Train to Crystal City: FDR's Secret Prisoner Exchange (25 page)

The prom became a standoff between O’Rourke and the Japanese leaders, and the teenagers were caught in the middle. The issei leaders kept the prom from being successful by intimidating the parents of most of the Japanese American students and disrupting the event. As Fujii threatened, Japanese teachers staged a strike at the Japanese School, closing it for several days after the prom. But O’Rourke won the cultural battle. If the dispute over the prom proved anything, it was that the students in the American high school were primarily Americans. Many stayed home from the prom out of respect for their parents, not out of loyalty to Japan.

Yae, in one of her letters the morning after the disastrous prom, felt sorry for O’Rourke: “You know Mr. O’Rourke waza-waza sponsored the prom himself so the grads could enjoy themselves for one nite. I feel perfectly horrible. My eyes are all swollen from last night. Gee, more trouble!” In the margin of the letter, the censor who reviewed the letter translated the phrase
waza-waza
as “specifically.”

•  •  •

From the safety of their desks in the Internal Security Division, the censors monitored the travails and dramas of camp life. The
mail instructions from O’Rourke were complex. Internees were allowed to send only two letters and one postal card (on approved stationery) per week. Domestic letters could not exceed thirty-five lines; international letters couldn’t exceed twenty-four. Letters had to be legible, and any extremely small written script was cause for rejection. Telegrams were relayed to Western Union with the words
internee telegram
in the body of the messages.

In May 1944, a married Japanese woman began writing love letters to a Japanese American writer and artist in Denver. Before the war, they had shared interests in music, poetry, and art, eventually falling in love. To evade the censors, the woman wrote her feelings in minuscule letters hidden underneath the stamps of the letters. Despite her efforts, the censors found her out.

In one chatty dispatch on approved stationery, the woman described mundane details of her daily life in camp: “The climate here is bad. Both children have taken cold. I feel badly, too, and am in bed. I am not able to play music, either, and have really become thin recently.” But underneath the stamp was this message: “Beginning today, I am going to try the tactics of fasting. I am weeping as I look at the clear, bright moon. The birds are crying, too. My home is just like hell. I shall not write for four or five days. If you become angry and do not care about me, I shall die. I hate everything, and am beating my pillow in anger.” The censors discovered the message, and charged with “violation of censorship,” the woman lost her mailing privileges for thirty days.

Eventually, she wrote again to her lover and told him that she needed to end their relationship. She was older than he was, trapped in marriage, and behind barbed wire in Crystal City. Her suitor wrote back, “If you cannot come out, I cannot go on living. I shall not let anyone know where or how I shall die. I do not need any other woman but you. I do not like young women. I do not want any other person to call my wife except you. Whether I walk, stand, or sit, I am thinking of nothing but you. Please come as soon as you can.”

While O’Rourke
managed quarrels and monitored mail in Crystal City, Harrison waged larger, tougher battles in Washington. By 1944, Harrison had been INS commissioner for two years and had reorganized the service following its transfer from the Department of Labor to the Department of Justice. In addition to running Crystal City and other internment camps, Harrison dealt with Congress on refugee matters. Although the country was still anti-immigrant and isolationist, Harrison urged Congress to lower racial barriers to allow more Jews from Europe to immigrate to the United States. In a report to Biddle, the attorney general, Harrison confided that “practically the only disappointing experience” of his job was the lamentably slow progress to reform discriminatory exclusion laws that kept European Jews from finding refuge in the United States. As early as 1939, Harrison and his wife, Carol, had sheltered Jewish families in their home in Rose Valley. “My mother always took people in,” remembered Bart Harrison, his son. “Our house was the house of last resort.”

When in 1943 Congress repealed the Chinese Exclusion Act, passed in 1882 to keep Chinese from immigrating to America, Harrison told the
Washington Post
that the repeal was a “commendable one,” but pressed Congress to go further: “The old theory of inferior peoples should be declared as something no longer worthy of America.” Harrison also pressed for bills to lift barriers that had been designed to keep Filipinos, East Indians, and other Eastern peoples, including Jews, out of the United States.

The debate over immigration was grounded in the realities of World War II. The Chinese Exclusion Act was repealed because China was America’s ally. Harrison’s argument was that existing immigration laws against Europeans were comparable to the racial laws of Nazi Germany.
“The only other country in the world that observes such racial discrimination in matters relating to immigrants is Nazi Germany, and we will agree that that is not very desirable company,” he told Biddle and the press.

Congress refused to act on the additional bills.
On July 20, 1944,
Harrison resigned in protest. In a story in the
New York Times
, Roosevelt praised Harrison for his reform of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, “notwithstanding the wartime additions to the work of the service, such as the civilian internment program.” The
Washington Post
said in an editorial on July 24,
“Hats off today to Harrison, who resigned that position in protest of our immigration laws, which he compares to the racial laws of Nazi Germany.”

The “Jewish question” was now impossible for Roosevelt to ignore. At the beginning of the war, Roosevelt concluded that America could save the Jews of Europe by quickly defeating Hitler and his troops. But he worried about anti-Semitism in America and finally took on the issue directly. In speeches during 1943, Roosevelt said that any American who condoned anti-Semitism was “playing Hitler’s game.” However, immigration restrictions stayed in place.

Biddle named Ugo Carusi, an Italian American who served as Biddle’s assistant, to succeed Harrison. In Crystal City, O’Rourke sent out notices to the camp about Harrison’s resignation.
A Japanese internee, Tsurukichi Toriu, drew a portrait of Harrison based on a photograph, and O’Rourke sent it to Harrison. In an accompanying note Toriu told Harrison that while indefinite internment was difficult to accept, he wanted Harrison to accept the gift as a symbol of “enduring friendship” from the Japanese internees in Crystal City, who appreciated his “noble, indefatigable spirit.” The gesture indicates that at least some of the internees understood that their treatment could have been far worse.

•  •  •

Those behind the barbed wire at Crystal City had few ways to escape the furnace-like heat. In the middle of the day, temperatures climbed to 120 degrees Fahrenheit. The living quarters all had thin roofs and walls, built without insulation. When children touched the metal parts of their beds, their hands were scorched. When men went into the orchards and family gardens to water, dust flew up from the ground. At night, parents hosed down the roofs of barracks and washed the floors with water.

In August 1944 the hospital reported eight births. However, statistics also show five cases of “threatened abortions” and many other maladies that summer. A forty-seven-year-old Japanese man died of tuberculosis. A German woman stated that her severely depressed husband had lost his mind and needed shock therapy. Nothing could be done for him. On average, the hospital treated sixty patients a day for malaise.

One place alone offered relief from the heat: the swimming pool. The size of a football field, it was large enough on the deep end for three diving platforms. The pool was a refuge, a place where fear, boredom, and anger were washed away. The water shimmered; people were energized. When birds flew over the heads of the swimmers, some thought of it as a kind of blessing. The Germans, Japanese, Italians, and Latin Americans from many different countries all spoke in their own languages. The Germans and the Japanese had separate bathhouses. Like the image from a crystal, the pool reflected many histories and perspectives.

All that changed on the afternoon of August 15, 1944. Ty Nakamura, a student at the American School, was a lifeguard that day. Two Japanese Peruvian girls, thirteen-year-old Sachiko Taname and eleven-year-old Aiko Oykawa, played in the shallow end of the pool. The girls were best friends and lived with their families in a triplex near where Ty lived with his family. Often, Ty heard them singing Glenn Miller’s “Chattanooga Choo Choo” in the showers. The song told the story of a famous train and the last line was “Won’t you choo-choo me home?” The girls loved the song.

Aiko and Sachiko strayed into the deep end. A safety cable and ropes divided the shallow and deep ends. Before the two girls reached the cable, they slipped on a deep shelf and plunged under the water in the murky floor of the pool.

Alice Nishimoto, another Japanese Peruvian girl, was in the pool that day with four of her friends. Like Aiko and Sachiko, they, too, inched their way from the shallow to the deep end of the pool, but they held on to the cable. While in the deep end, gripping the ropes,
Alice and her friends watched lifeguards bring the lifeless bodies of the two drowned girls up from the bottom of the pool and carry them out of the water.

Others saw it as well. “I was swimming with my friends,” Bessie Masuda recalled in an oral history. “We actually saw the girls drowning at the deep end of the pool. We all grabbed hands and we tried to reach them and to save them, but the floor beneath us was too slippery. It was so sad that we couldn’t help them.”

Frantically, Ty and other lifeguards searched for the girls in the dark waters. Soon, they found them and rushed their bodies to the shore. Dr. Martin, the medical officer, and O’Rourke huddled over the girls. Both applied artificial respiration in an attempt to revive them, to no avail.

A group of teenagers formed a circle around the men and the girls. Suddenly, someone shouted from the circle, “Hot rice! Get hot rice!”

Soon, Japanese women from all over the camp brought pot after pot of hot rice, which was poured on the bodies of the girls in an effort to keep them warm. Toni Takeuchi, one of Sumi’s closest friends, remembers her mother making many pots of hot rice in her small kitchen. Toni’s mother didn’t yet know that Dr. Martin had already pronounced Aiko and Sachiko dead, the official cause of death on his report being “drowning by submersion.” Toni’s sister worked as a nurse in the hospital, and when the bodies of the girls were brought in, they were wrapped in soggy blankets covered with rice, which left a sticky trail on the floor.

That night, one of the mothers of the girls attempted suicide. The other mother could not be consoled and was put on a suicide watch.

A few days later, a large Buddhist funeral was held for both of the girls. By then, more than forty Buddhist priests were in camp. The priests, dressed in flowing robes, led the chants and solemn rites of the ceremony. Virtually all of the more than six hundred Japanese Peruvians in camp attended the funeral. Never before had there been such an elaborate funeral in Crystal City. Many said how
sad it was that the young girls, civilians who were guilty of no crime against the United States, had died behind barbed wire. The funeral offered no consolation to the parents of the girls, for their resting place was an internment camp, far from their home country of Peru.

Witnesses at the pool on the day the girls died reported that O’Rourke wept over their bodies. Given the quarrelsome atmosphere in the camp, the resignation of Harrison, and the deaths of the girls, it had been a difficult summer.

As good-bye ceremonies went, this one was the most complicated of Ingrid Eiserloh’s young life. On this cold winter day in Crystal City, the trees beyond the fence line were bare. Early in the morning, Ingrid gathered in the dining hall at the internment camp with 428 others—German nationals, American-born children like herself, and a large contingent of German families from Latin America. Ingrid ate a hearty serving of eggs, fried sausage, and warm tortillas. It was her last meal in Crystal City.

After breakfast, the group walked outside and convened in front of a stage, where O’Rourke stood at the podium. He publicly recognized the German men who had built roads, cabins, and other buildings in the camp and singled out Mathias for his work on the swimming pool. Ingrid, just four months shy of her fifteenth birthday, stood proud and straight next to her father. She remembered the hot summer days in camp when she slid into the swimming pool and took high dives into the deep end.

Eighteen months before, she had been sent to Crystal City against her will. The confinement had been agonizing, yet the Eiserloh family had been reunited and found a measure of safety and security. “We were back together again there,” recalled Ingrid many years later. “Some of the worry was taken off my parents. We had food
and clothes. We were with other people who shared our isolation and the stigma of internment.”

Near the end of the ceremony, German American children who attended the American School sang “God Bless America.” The rest of the German population, a few with arms outstretched in the Nazi salute, then sang the German national anthem, “Deutschlandlied.” The singing of both patriotic anthems would have been irrational and completely out of place in most settings. But on this day in Crystal City, the singing of both was necessary and expressed the conflicted emotions and allegiances of the 429 internees who were preparing to leave the camp.

Ingrid glanced at her white lapel tag, which branded her with a new government identity—no longer was she a “voluntary internee” at Crystal City, even though, from Ingrid’s perspective, there had never been anything voluntary about her internment. Now she was an official “repatriate”—an equally ironic label for an American teenager bound for war-torn Germany with her family. Technically, the word
repatriate
means “to restore or return to the country of birth, citizenship, or origin.” But Ingrid, Lothar, Ensi, and the other American-born “repatriates” in the group that day were citizens of the United States. Yet, according to their government, if the German parents were repatriates, so were their children. In an Orwellian use of rhetoric, the word
repatriate
was designed to reassign the official status of American children of selected ethnicities, when in fact the term forced American-born children to become displaced persons. They were, in effect, without a country.