The Train to Crystal City: FDR's Secret Prisoner Exchange (36 page)

“There was no electricity and we all went hungry,” recalled Carmen. “I remember that once, to get a pound of rice, I exchanged a pair of shoes. My mother exchanged a dress for a small number of sweet potatoes.” Carmen’s father, once a relatively happy farmer in Peru, was bitter and sad. He believed that when the war ended Japanese Peruvians would be allowed to return to Peru, but the country refused to readmit them, classifying them as “illegal aliens.” “He could not understand how we could be considered illegal aliens when the Americans kidnapped us from Peru and brought us to Crystal City,” said Carmen. “We did not come to America of our own free will.”

The families from Crystal City who returned to Hiroshima and Nagasaki witnessed the worst of the devastation, among them Alice Nagao Nishimoto. Both of Alice’s parents were born in Hiroshima. The Nagaos, her father’s family, had a sake empire headquartered there. Like many of the other fathers in Crystal City, prior to his arrival in Japan Alice’s father
had believed Japan had won the war, and knew nothing about the dropping of atomic bombs on his hometown and Nagasaki.

Four months after the American atomic bomb exploded over the center of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, killing thousands and flattening the city, Alice arrived in the city with her father, mother, and her six siblings. “My father put his hands over his eyes,” recalled Alice. “All the buildings he remembered were gone—the Shima Hospital, the domed Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall—had disappeared in seconds.” As the family moved through the city, they found watches stopped at 8:15 a.m., the moment the bomb exploded. Outlines of incinerated bodies appeared on park benches. Alice didn’t understand why so many people were bald and their blackened skin covered with horrific burns. The survivors of Hiroshima, who suffered from radiation sickness, moved through the city like living ghosts.

Her father’s eldest brother, who ran the family business, survived, but his son, a physician, died of radiation poisoning. Alice and her family moved in with her uncle in the house where her father was born. Most of what the Nagao family owned was lost in the bombing. The sake factories were destroyed.

To find food, Alice’s mother, along with other women, walked far from the city into the countryside, in search of farmers. She traded her wedding band for several bags of rice. After several weeks, Alice’s family moved to a small house located near the ocean, owned by her uncle. The house lacked plumbing and electricity. Alice and her siblings scavenged for wood in the mountains behind the sea, using it for cooking as well as heating water for bathing in a large wooden tub. The nine people in the family took turns bathing. Her father, still treated as superior, went first, followed by the children, oldest to youngest. Alice’s mother was always the last to bathe.

Her mother rationed the rice as if it were gold. Soon, they only had enough for one bowl of rice a day. “We were starving,” Alice said. Eventually her father, once one of the most powerful
Japanese-born businessmen in Peru, found a job working on the line of a canned-goods factory. The major benefit of the job was that he brought some of those canned goods home for his family.

The repatriation to Japan was a tragic event in the history of the Crystal City Internment Camp. The issei fathers who immigrated to the United States considered themselves victims of circumstances. In the anti-Japanese fervor in the United States after Pearl Harbor, they were perceived as enemies, arrested, and imprisoned. Once inside the fence at Crystal City, the pro-Japan sentiment of many of them, including Sumi’s father, led them to the disastrous decisions to repatriate. That decision denied their children the opportunity to remain in the United States and live their lives as Americans. Instead, they—and their children—languished in postwar Japan. Repatriation also reflects the flaw in Roosevelt’s decision to apply the terms of the US Alien and Sedition Acts to Japanese and German immigrants to the United States in the wake of Pearl Harbor. By arresting Tokiji, a photographer in Los Angeles who offered no discernible threat to the US war effort, as a “dangerous enemy alien” and holding him without charges behind barbed wire, targeting his family for secret exchange, the US government left him little choice but to take his chances in Japan. If he was not an “enemy” of America before the war, Tokiji—and many others in Crystal City—became an adversary as a result of his experiences.

As the months went by, the American-born children from Crystal City who were trapped in Japan were taunted as spies. While walking in Sendai, Sumi was regularly pelted with large stones. She spoke English. When clothing became available, she wore American clothes—skirts and crisp shirts. Once a young man from the university stopped her on the street and spit at her shoes. The old tomboy suddenly surfaced in Sumi, she couldn’t stop herself. She gave him a swift punch in the jaw.

The ferocity and global reach of World War II, which claimed more than 50 million lives, dwarfed the fate of individuals. When the war came to an end, millions more were uprooted from home. Inevitably, strangers became connected in unusual ways by the string of time that was the war. On June 22, 1945, as Ingrid Eiserloh and her family struggled to survive in Idstein, Germany, and Irene Hasenberg lived stateless in the camp in Philippeville, President Truman asked Earl Harrison to serve as a special envoy and conduct an inspection tour of Nazi concentration camps in Europe. Though none of the three knew it at the time, that summer their lives were entwined.

Harrison was the commissioner of the INS when Ingrid and her family were interned in Crystal City, one of the camps under his control. He signed the documents for the family’s internment. When Harrison received Truman’s call in the summer of 1945, he was enjoying his life as dean of the University of Pennsylvania law school. Truman explained that conditions in the former concentration camps, now called displaced-persons camps and operated by British and American military forces, were horrific. While military leaders assured Truman that the matter was under control,
he asked Harrison to investigate the situation firsthand. Within a few days, Harrison was on his way to Germany, where Ingrid, an American, had been displaced. During the month of July, Harrison visited thirty DP camps in Germany and Austria. On July 23, 1945, only six months after Irene had left Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, Harrison arrived there.

The trip was formally instigated by the War Refugee Board, established by Roosevelt near the end of the war. In Executive Order 9417, Roosevelt defined the board’s mission as “the immediate rescue and relief of the Jews of Europe and other victims of ongoing persecution.” After Roosevelt died, John Pehle, executive director of the War Refugee Board, complained to Truman about reports of maltreatment of Jewish DPs.

In the summer of 1945, the policy of the US Army was that all DPs in the liberated camps would be treated the same. During this period, Germans, Poles, Ukrainians—Jews and non-Jews—lived alongside one another in camps. Even though the war was won, the Jews still lived in the same camps built by the Nazis—camps designed specifically for their persecution and extermination. Jewish refugees found themselves confined with former Nazis—SS men, Gestapo—and Nazi collaborators. The US Army had no system in place to identify Nazis from Jews, and no recognition that Jews were the primary targets of Nazi genocide and in need of protection. Moreover, repeated reports came of mistreatment of Jewish DPs by some military authorities, especially in Bavaria, where General George Patton’s Third Army was in charge.

Most Americans knew nothing of these events. The first news reports about the horrors of the concentration camps came from reporters accompanying America’s generals. The day after
Roosevelt’s death, three American generals—Patton, Dwight Eisenhower, and Omar Bradley—visited a subcamp of Buchenwald, where they saw piles of bodies, surrounded by torture devices. Patton’s face drained of color and he became ill. In his official report, Eisenhower wrote, “We are told that the American soldier does not know what he was fighting for. Now, at least he will know what he is fighting against.”

Three days later, Edward R. Murrow, the famed reporter, arrived in Buchenwald. Opening his radio broadcast, Murrow said in his gravelly voice, “There surged around me an evil-smelling stink, men and
boys reached out to touch me. They were in rags and the remnants of uniforms. Death already had marked many of them, but they were smiling with their eyes. I looked out over the mass of men to the green fields beyond, where well-fed Germans were plowing.” He described dead bodies so emaciated that people shot through the head did not bleed; children, with tattooed numbers, so thin their ribs showed through shirts. “I pray you to believe what I said about Buchenwald,” said Murrow. “I have reported what I saw and heard, but only part of it. For most of it I have no words. If I have offended you by this mild account of Buchenwald, I am not in the least sorry.”

On April 15, a combined British and Canadian unit of soldiers liberated Bergen-Belsen. Photos taken that day show scenes similar to those described in Murrow’s broadcast. Stacks of dead bodies were everywhere. The living looked like human skeletons in striped pajamas. Other survivors curled in fetal positions in crowded dormitories. Signs were posted in camp,
DUST SPREADS TYPHUS
, as only the month before a typhus epidemic had swept through the camp, killing seventeen thousand prisoners. Thousands more died of typhoid fever. Only one month before, in March 1945, Anne Frank and her sister, Margot, had died, and their bodies were buried in a mass grave.

At home, pressure mounted on Truman to come to the aid of Holocaust survivors. In the US House, Jewish members delivered a formal protest of the treatment of Jewish survivors to the War Department. Jewish leaders also pressed Truman and the State Department to help Jewish survivors. Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau Jr. asked Truman to establish a cabinet-level committee to set new policies for the DP camps that would protect Jews.
Truman rejected that proposal and instead decided to send Harrison to Germany to, as he put it in a letter to Harrison, “inquire into the condition and needs of displaced persons in Germany who may be stateless or non-repatriable, particularly Jews.”

Well versed in immigration issues and closely connected to
Jewish leaders, Harrison was a natural choice for the job. A month before Roosevelt died in Warm Springs, Georgia, on April 12, 1945, FDR appointed Harrison the US representative on the Intergovernmental Commission for Refugees, an organization responsible for the resettlement of millions of European refugees. This included Irene and the handful of other Jews from Bergen-Belsen who were freed as part of the January 1945 exchange between Germany and the United States, the same exchange that brought Ingrid’s family to war-devastated Germany. By the time Harrison left Philadelphia for the tour of DP camps in Europe, Irene was stranded in Philippeville because of the limited number of visas allowed to Jews who wanted to immigrate to the United States. Her brother and mother were stateless in Switzerland. The resettlement dilemma of Irene’s family was exactly the sort of problem that Harrison was sent to resolve.

Throughout his trips to the DP camps, Harrison took notes in a diary—notes filled with facts and figures, the names of people he saw, and carefully perceived details. For instance, when Harrison and his small delegation arrived in Bergen-Belsen on July 23, he saw Jews still dying of starvation, as available food was scarce. Most lived on a limited-calorie mix of watery soup, bread, and coffee. In his handwritten diary, Harrison described the bread as “black, wet and unappetizing” and noted of the food, “Need variety. Chocolate. Fruit.”

Allied officials in charge said that since the camp had been liberated, thirty thousand Jews had died, most from starvation. One Army chaplain, an American rabbi, reported to Harrison that he personally had attended twenty-three thousand burials in the camp.

Harrison toured the facility with Josef Rosensaft, the elected leader of the Central Committee of Liberated Jews in Bergen-Belsen. Harrison noted that Rosensaft, the son of a scrap-metal dealer in Poland, was only thirty-three years old but looked much older as he weighed only seventy-eight pounds. Rosensaft and his wife, Hadassah, a physician, took Harrison to the Allied hospital, which had not been stocked with supplies and had nothing to treat the victims of malnutrition, typhus,
and tuberculosis. The US military officers had allowed the hospital to continue to be staffed by German physicians—the same doctors who were there before liberation. “This is very objectionable to Jewish refugees,” Rosensaft told Harrison.

Clothing was limited. Many of the refugees had no shoes and wore their old prison clothes or were issued old German SS uniforms. “It is questionable which clothing they hate the more,” Harrison wrote. In a dormitory, he found people still stacked in cots and living in crowded conditions. “One loft, about 80 by 20, 85 people,” he noted. Everywhere he noted small details of inhumanity: “Jews living in horse stalls, sick and well together.”

He asked Rosensaft what the refugees most wanted. As Rosensaft and his wife talked, Harrison entered the answers in the diary:

1. Peace and quiet—live out remaining years.

2. Can’t go back: anti-S [Semitism] parents killed, land soaked with Jewish blood.

3. People outside Europe too quiet about what has happened—nobody seems concerned.

Solution:
Make effort to have doors of P [Palestine] and other countries open so we can find homes and be with relatives. Don’t leave us in this bloody region.

Most offensive was the Allied policy of lumping the Jews by nationality—in other words, as Germans—which failed to take into consideration that they were the primary targets of Hitler’s genocide. They were still treated as prisoners, not as free people. As Harrison noted in his diary, “Authorities won’t recognize that Jews are in camp because they are Jews—seem to think they must have committed some offense.”