The Train to Crystal City: FDR's Secret Prisoner Exchange (27 page)

Three days later, on January 21, the ship sailed into the formidable port of Marseille, a strategic asset for both the Allies and the Axis. The Nazis had occupied Marseille in November 1942 and afterward destroyed thousands of buildings in the historic center of the city, and thousands of resident Jews were sent to death camps. Two years later, now under the control of the Victorious Allies, the city was a pile of ruins. As the
Gripsholm
entered the harbor, the ship was
caught in a net of leftover German mines. Lothar was on deck when the ship struck the first mine and took on water; then the ship hit another mine. A whistle blew; life jackets were issued; lifeboats were lowered. People panicked. Lothar hurriedly put on his life jacket and positioned himself near one of the lifeboats.
“If the ship went down,” recalled Lothar, “I wanted to be on the first lifeboat.”

Ingrid stayed close to her father, and Johanna, Ensi, and Guenther were brought on deck to prepare for evacuation. Divers were sent into the water to sweep the mines and clear the harbor. For hours, the ship was at a standstill. Finally, the mines were cleared, and the ship proceeded to the dock in Marseille, its human cargo intact.

Once inside France, the repatriates entered into the charge of the American military police (MP). Under the guard of the MP, one by one the 183 German soldiers and 856 civilians were loaded onto waiting French trains at the harbor. The German POWs boarded a train bound for Kreuzlingen, a small Swiss town located near the German border on Lake Constance. This was the agreed-upon exchange point.

The first of the civilian trains, with 540 on board, left Marseille in the early evening on January 21. The second, with 316, left at midnight. There was nothing to eat on board the train. Fortunately, before Ingrid left the ship she stopped at the mess hall and picked up cartons of cigarettes for her father and oranges and chocolates for the rest of the family. Johanna had brought a small supply of powdered milk for Guenther.

One of Lothar’s closest friends from Crystal City, Ruth Becker, later recalled a similar experience during an interview with the historian Stephen Fox about the arrival in Marseille and the subsequent train trip to Switzerland. “We were coming up from Marseille on my sister’s birthday. The French didn’t feed us anything. I don’t know what the length of time was, but it was enough to get very hungry. Mother had an orange that she must have taken from the boat, and that became my sister’s birthday present.”

Armed American MPs stood watch in each of the passenger cars. Some shared their packaged K rations with the younger children, while warning their parents that Allied air attacks had intensified and Germany would soon be defeated. By then, Allies had crossed the Siegfried Line, a 350-mile German defense system of bunkers, tunnels, and tank traps that ran along the western border of Germany and all the way to the border with Switzerland. Portions of the Siegfried Line were defended to the death.

“You’re making a big mistake,” one soldier told Mathias.

Once the train stopped in Geneva, the repatriates were delivered to the control of Swiss guards, dressed in green-gray uniforms, who were not pleased to receive the onslaught of repatriates from America in their country. When the train doors opened, Ingrid remembered hearing the barks of the Swiss authorities:
“Raus!”
It meant “Out!”

The passengers felt the blast of icy wind. Most were layered in shirts, sweaters, and coats from the camp store in Crystal City, but all were unprepared for the transfer from South Texas in January into the worst recorded winter in Europe in a hundred years. Snow covered every surface. Some of the Latin American children had never seen snow and were frightened of it. After the mild winters and blistering summer heat in Crystal City, even the Eiserlohs, who were accustomed to snow, were paralyzed. Ingrid wrapped herself in a woolen coat and stood immobilized at the station. She watched as Johanna bundled Guenther in a blanket and tucked him inside her heavy coat; Ingrid overheard her mother ask Mathias how, in such cold weather, they would keep the younger than one-month-old infant alive.

After several days in Switzerland, the Eiserlohs and other repatriates from Crystal City took a train to Swiss-controlled Kreuzlingen. Meanwhile, the American prisoners who were held by the Germans traveled to Switzerland by train from nearby Konstanz, Germany. The trains parked side by side at the station in Kreuzlingen. Over the course of two days, Swiss officials boarded both trains and were
in charge of the exchanges. The train from Konstanz brought 565 American POWs, many of them badly wounded, and other civilians in Germany. The train from Switzerland brought the group from Crystal City. The one-for-one exchange negotiated by Berlin and Washington was completed.

Bert Shepard, a young American pilot, was one of the prisoners of war exchanged that day by the Nazis. Shepard was from Hesperia, California. In May 1944, while on his thirty-fourth mission as a P-38 pilot, Shepard’s plane was downed by antiaircraft fire on his way to Berlin. Flak came up straight through the floor of the cockpit, and Shepard’s right foot was shot off. His plane crashed near Berlin, and he was taken prisoner by German troops. Ten days later, at a hospital in Ludwigslust he awoke to find that his infected leg had been amputated and that he was a prisoner of the Germans.

Shepard and other disabled POWs were moved to a hospital in Annaberg, a town south of Berlin. There they learned they were scheduled for exchange. Night after night, they rose from their beds, walked to a schedule pinned on a bulletin board, and struck matches to see if their names were still on the list.

“That list,” said Shepard, “was a magical thing.”

At the station in Kreuzlingen, Shepard was the last American POW off the train on the second day of the exchange. He saw the trains that carried German POWs and internees from Crystal City. “We got on their train,” remembered Shepard, “and they got on ours.”

The exchange was anticlimactic for the Eiserloh children. They were too young to be aware that they were headed into war, while others, including Shepard, were headed to freedom. Lothar and Ensi do not remember the side-by-side trains that Shepard described. But Ingrid recalls an incident that occurred shortly after their train arrived at the station.

Mathias needed a cigarette, so Ingrid got off the train with him to stretch her legs while he had his smoke. While they stood on the platform, two soldiers in American uniforms walked toward them,
each carrying a ration of bread. The soldiers got a whiff of Mathias’s cigarette and stopped to talk.

“Do you smoke?” Mathias asked.

“Yes,” said the soldiers.

Mathias pointed at the bread and held up two packs of cigarettes. “Trade you?”

The soldiers said yes, and Mathias traded the luxury of his cigarettes for food and began to understand the difficult future that he and his family would have in Germany.

After this encounter with the two American soldiers, Ingrid and her family, each of them carrying one suitcase, left the train station on foot and crossed the border into Germany. There was no official welcome by German authorities. Their destination was Johanna’s hometown of Idstein, about 180 miles north across Germany. While Europe had all but fallen from Hitler’s grasp, Germany continued to wage a last, desperate war on two fronts—east and west.

From the station in Kreuzlingen, the Eiserlohs took a four-hour train trip to Bergenz, a port located at the far eastern end of Lake Constance. Bergenz was the capital of an Austrian province annexed by Germany in 1938 and now part of the Third Reich. In Bergenz the Eiserlohs were processed by German authorities. All of the baggage from the
Gripsholm
, including their sea trunks, was placed in storage in a warehouse in Bergenz. Each carried only one small suitcase.

They stayed in Bergenz four days. A woman named Lulu Von Ramien, who worked as a nurse for the Red Cross, befriended Johanna. The Eiserloh family stayed with her in a castle where Von Ramien worked. Other repatriates, such as Ruth Becker, remembered staying in small, unheated houses in Bergenz. “I froze the entire week,” recalled Becker. “I was hungry as well. There was so little food.” Conditions where Ingrid and her family stayed were much better. Von Ramien helped Johanna find warm clothes for the family and served them hot soup and black bread, and Guenther had plenty of milk. She gave Ensi a doll carriage, and she placed her
brother in the carriage and wheeled him around the large rooms of the castle. A man who lived nearby gave Lothar his German stamp collection.

On the fifth day, the Eiserlohs left the castle and made their way to the train station in Bergenz. As they neared the station, Ingrid and Lothar heard the sound of air-raid sirens. “Run,” Mathias said. “Run.”

The whole family—Mathias, Ingrid, Lothar, Ensi, and Johanna, carrying Guenther—hurried into a shelter and stayed there until the all-clear sounded. Then, wrapped in warm coats, they kept walking north, into war.

On the morning of January 20, 1945, while Ingrid was still at sea on the MS
Gripsholm
, a fourteen-year-old girl, Irene Hasenberg, slept on a narrow wooden shelf in a barrack with three hundred Jews at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Irene weighed only seventy-three pounds and was infested with lice. For Irene the worst moment of the day was waking up and wondering if her mother or father was dead. On this day, her father, John, a human skeleton dressed in rags, had already gone to work. In the barrack, Irene and her brother, Werner, wakened her mother, Gertrude, who was so undernourished she had not been out of bed for months, and helped her get dressed.

For the past eleven months, Irene and her family had survived in Bergen-Belsen for only one reason. As “exchange Jews” they were more valuable to the Nazis alive than dead. That morning word came back to the barrack that an exchange transport was imminent. The Germans were expected to deliver 856 Americans for an equal number of Germans.

Now, late in the war, the Allies had won the Battle of the Bulge, and Germany was on its heels. Russian troops had crossed into Germany and at that moment were fifty miles from Berlin. Auschwitz would be liberated by Russian troops seven days later, on January 27. Bergen-Belsen, however, was still crowded with Jews from around the world. Few American citizens were left in Germany, not enough for Germany to make its
856 quota for the trade. On this morning a
Kapo
, a
Jewish prisoner who acted as a trustee, walked into Irene’s barrack and announced that anyone who had any kind of passport other than German might make it out of Bergen-Belsen in the next few days. The Hasenbergs did not have American passports, but they did have falsified passports from Ecuador. As a result, their names were hastily added to the list for this last exchange of the war.

In the massive disruption of World War II neither Irene nor Ingrid knew that each was part of the one-to-one exchange. Though they had no idea of each other’s existence, Ingrid and Irene nonetheless shared other things in common: each had lost her home, school, and friends. They were roughly the same age and looked alike, having blue eyes and being naturally thin as reeds. Irene’s hair was light brown, Ingrid’s brassy red. The exchange was intended as Germans for Americans, but these two teenagers were exceptions: a German Jew in Bergen-Belsen traded for an American in Crystal City. For Irene, the right passport made the difference between life and death, and she would later call it the first miracle of her survival. As for Ingrid, her American birth certificate spared her nothing.

As a victim of the German Holocaust, Irene’s experience was much worse that Ingrid’s internment in Crystal City. However, their exchange was both rooted in internment. Like Crystal City, which housed numerous nationalities and existed in part for exchange, Bergen-Belsen was started in 1943 specifically as an “exchange camp,” a place where Jewish prisoners were held for exchange for Germans in other countries or for cash. When Ingrid left Crystal City, she left a camp of slightly more than four thousand, with Japanese outnumbering Germans. When Irene arrived at Bergen-Belsen in February 1944, the camp housed fifteen thousand Jews—from Romania, Yugoslavia, Hungary, France, North Africa, Albania, and other countries—all living behind high barbed-wire fences with SS guards in watchtowers training their weapons on the prisoners. As Irene remembered it, the Dutch Jews were congregated in an area
called the Star Camp, while Irene and her family lived in a section designated for exchange Jews.

When Irene’s family arrived at Bergen-Belsen, the Hasenbergs were herded into their barrack by SS guards with German shepherds straining at their tight leashes and barking. “Remember, dogs that bark don’t bite,” Gertrude told Irene, in an effort to calm her daughter’s fear. But the bark of the large dogs was vicious, and Irene was not comforted.

Unlike the relaxed daily count at Crystal City, Irene took her place for the first daily
Appell
—German for “roll call”—at 4:00 a.m. A second roll call occurred at night. Prisoners were made to line up in rows in the bitter cold, and they were counted and recounted. The Nazis were obsessed with documentation, getting the count right. Once Irene stood for nine hours in snow without shoes for the daily count. She was issued a single thin blanket, a wooden bowl, and a spoon. Each day Irene was given one bowl of thin turnip soup and a two-inch piece of hard, dark bread. She ate huddled with her family in their bunk in the barrack. Even the air tasted like sawdust. Gray clumps of individuals with yellow stars pinned to their clothes wandered the camp, chronically exhausted from lack of food.

Eleven months after Irene had arrived at the camp, the situation had worsened. In the first few months of 1944, thousands more Jews, many forced to march from Auschwitz and other concentration camps, were brought to Bergen-Belsen. The camp was too crowded, and food and water were scarce. Many died of starvation, and in late 1944, a typhoid epidemic broke out in the camp and killed more prisoners. SS Captain Josef Kramer, the commandant of Bergen-Belsen, gave standing orders to SS units to shoot prisoners with typhoid for the fun of it. He was known as the Butcher of Bergen-Belsen.