The Train to Crystal City: FDR's Secret Prisoner Exchange (38 page)

The Allied nations—Britain, the United States, the Soviet Union, and France—carved up four zones of occupation in Germany. Fortunately for the Eiserloh family, Idstein was in the American zone, with its headquarters in nearby Frankfurt.

By then Germany had been battered by Allied forces. Food was almost nonexistent. The fields of farmers were destroyed and the rail system devastated. In large cities, streets pocked from American
bombs were dusty with rubble. Perhaps in response to criticism in the Harrison Report,
Eisenhower made sure German civilians were not coddled. He set the official ration for those living in the American zone at only 1,275 calories a day, much of it black bread. Like most families in Idstein, the Eiserlohs went hungry.

Johanna had not heard from Mathias since his arrest in March by the Gestapo on charges of being an American spy. She did not know if he was alive or dead. Prior to the American occupation, Johanna was taken in for questioning herself by German authorities and quickly released. She welcomed the arrival of the Americans.

On May 8, 1945, Ingrid turned fifteen, a confusing coming-of-age birthday. With her husband once again gone, Johanna was short-tempered and often critical of Ingrid for defending her father at every turn. Ingrid was an anomaly in the village, an American who spoke better English than German and was unaccustomed to the stringent rules in German schools. She shared a wooden desk with another girl, and the students rose when the teacher entered the room. More than once Ingrid’s hands were rapped with a ruler because she was disobedient. With her blue-green eyes and copper hair, which fell down her skinny back, Ingrid stood out. She was treated like a scapegoat—hated by the Germans for being an American and banished from America for reasons she did not understand.

Johanna enrolled Ensi in kindergarten, and she, too, had a difficult time adjusting to the regimented system. The first week in school Ensi, traumatized by the events of the war, wet her pants in the schoolyard. In the presence of the other students, the teacher shouted and scolded Ensi, who cried inconsolably. The teacher sent for Johanna, who came right away and was told that Ensi would not be allowed to come to school until she was toilet trained.

At ten years old, Lothar had it easier. Johanna doted on him, her nickname for him being the Little Prince. While Ingrid avoided Johanna, Lothar was eager to please his mother. In Lothar’s presence, Johanna’s mood softened and she acted as though there were no place on earth she’d rather be.

When the US Army took over Lothar’s school, one of the rooms was converted to a mess hall. Lothar and a few of his schoolmates went to the school in search of food and saw a long chow line of soldiers. One of the German boys asked the chief of the regiment for food.

“Get out of here, you little assholes,” said the chief in English.

Lothar’s German schoolmates skedaddled, but Lothar stayed behind. “Who are you calling assholes?” asked Lothar in English.

“Where did you learn English?” asked the chief.

“I’m from Strongsville, Ohio, near Cleveland.”

The chief’s jaw dropped. “I’m from Strongsville, too,” he snapped. “Do you have an older sister named Ingrid who has reddish golden hair?”

“Yes, I sure do. She’s here in Idstein.”

The unlikely coincidence assured the Eiserloh family’s survival. Lothar explained to the officer that his family had been interned in a camp in Texas and had recently been repatriated to Germany. He had papers to prove that he was an American citizen, born in Ohio. He explained that he and his family were starving and asked for help. On the spot, the chief of the regiment hired Lothar as a translator. With his small salary, Lothar was able to buy milk for Guenther, his baby brother, and provide rations for the family.

Eisenhower instituted a nonfraternization policy that forbade familiar contact between soldiers and occupied civilians, but the policy was loosely followed. In the case of Lothar, it was completely ignored. He was treated as a mascot. Within a week, Lothar had his own Army uniform, custom-made with pinstripes. Ingrid teased that he looked like Little Lord Fauntleroy.

Lothar did errands for the American GIs and made deliveries. One of his jobs was to go on regular patrol with the GIs, with one patrol at 7:00 a.m. and the other at 10:00 p.m. The soldiers drove around the countryside in half-tracks with three rubber wheels on each side and equipped with a small cannon. Lothar bounced in the backseat. “We’d see a house that was suitable for occupation,”
recalled Lothar. “My major ability was that I spoke both German and English. I would explain to the people that lived in the houses that they were being occupied.”

In late May, another group of GIs on a search mission located Mathias Eiserloh locked in a small cell in a jail not far from Idstein. When the GIs arrived, he greeted them in English. After a thorough questioning, Mathias was released and he returned to his family. A condition of his release was that he had to undergo Eisenhower’s denazification process, which required interviews about his activities during the war and a search of his file as an enemy alien in America. When the process was completed, Mathias was hired as a translator for
the Army as well. The paradox was not lost on Mathias: the government that had imprisoned him—and his family—in Crystal City, then exchanged all six of them as ransom for US citizens in Germany, was now his employer and responsible for saving his family’s life. “For the rest of his life, he talked about how the war was one long irony after another,” said Lothar. “He’d shake his head. No way to figure it all out.”

The Army moved the Eiserloh family into a small, two-room facility on the outskirts of town. Johanna, Ingrid, and Ensi didn’t see much of either Mathias or Lothar, whose days were ordered to military precision by the Americans. Food was no longer a problem, and Mathias had access to all the American cigarettes he wanted. He used them to trade on the black market for clothes, liquor, and other scarce items. Ingrid’s hollow cheeks filled out. Lothar grew taller and more muscular. Ensi and Guenther no longer cried from hunger, but Ensi did not gain weight and was lethargic. A military doctor diagnosed her with rickets, a consequence of not having been given enough milk since she’d left Crystal City. What milk the family had found on the journey from the United States had been given to Guenther, who was miraculously healthy, given his birth on the train from Crystal City and the journey into war.

One day a group of GIs asked Johanna if she knew how to make an apple pie. “Oh, yes, I do,” she replied. Soon, the GIs stocked
her tiny kitchen with flour, sugar, and Crisco. Suddenly, Johanna, with Ingrid’s help, was in the pie business. “She made pies morning, noon, and night,” recalled Lothar. “Apple pies, cherry, chocolate.”

Next she offered to do laundry for the soldiers. Lothar collected the piles of dirty uniforms and provided soap. Johanna and Ingrid did the washing on old-fashioned washboards. The wash money, plus the pie money, allowed Johanna to buy household items and clothes. She put away whatever money was left to save for passage to America—if and when the Eiserlohs would be allowed to return.

The GIs invented nicknames for Lothar based on the sound of the last four letters of his name. Sometimes he was called Sweat Tar or Road Tar, depending on their moods. He did what they told him and enjoyed himself, and for him, the occupation was a lark. Many of the GIs had German girlfriends. Sometimes Lothar would deliver what the GIs called “Frau bait”—cigarettes, food, and olive-colored US Army blankets—to the girlfriends. The blankets were particularly popular. The women used them to make shirts and skirts. When Lothar delivered the blankets to the women, his nickname was Sweet Tar.

For a boy, this window into the boisterous world of men was an education. He was a wide-eyed innocent with an unpredictable father who was fresh from a German prison cell and with few prospects for future employment. Because of his connection to the GIs, Lothar provided for the family and became his mother’s hero. The GIs were victors, infused with confidence and bright futures, and they bequeathed a healthy self-assurance to Lothar. Many were twenty or thirty years old, no longer freckled-faced boys but triumphant men who’d come into their prime during the war. Some were sensitive by nature and others vainglorious—an entire cast of characters with Lothar as a bit player, the useful kid from Ohio.

One character Lothar never forgot was a tall, strong Texan, predictably named Tex, in his forties who carried two ivory-handled pistols wherever he went. When Tex and his buddies visited local bars,
Lothar would go along and translate for them. “Let’s bring the little guy,” Tex would say.

Lothar witnessed quarrels that broke out among hotheads and observed pennies paid for songs, dollars for women. One night Tex and Lothar went into a bar and Tex saw a GI splayed drunk on a couch. Tex drew his pistols, fired—and fortunately missed his target. The drunken GI charged Tex, brought him to the ground, and delivered blow after blow. Lothar headed for the door and went home.

In contrast, Ingrid’s experience of the occupation was as unfortunate as Lothar’s was privileged. With her good looks and ability to speak English, Ingrid found herself a victim of an environment in which the German girls were friendly and compliant with American soldiers, who expected the same from her. Wherever Ingrid went, the GIs stared at the pretty American girl with the long hair. When they picked up pies and laundry, they pleaded with Ingrid to go for rides in their jeeps or walks in the forest. Unsure of herself, Ingrid played along. In the middle of town was a bar frequented by GIs, and out of curiosity and a need for the kind of attention that Lothar received, Ingrid frequented it.

“In the beginning, it was fun. I went out on dates with a few of the soldiers. I thought of them as my protectors,” recalled Ingrid. “They gave me rides in their jeeps. I asked them about what was happening in the States. I plotted my return to America. It was all pretty innocent—until it wasn’t.”

If Ingrid’s relationship with her mother had been closer or if she’d had an older sister or close friend, perhaps she wouldn’t have allowed herself to become vulnerable. Soon, one particular soldier followed her everywhere. On a sunny day in spring, while Ingrid was on a walk, she heard the sound of an approaching vehicle. The soldier pulled up in his jeep alongside her and opened the passenger door, and Ingrid got in and they went for a ride. When the soldier brought the jeep to a stop, Ingrid, sensing danger, jumped out and ran. He chased her, pulled her to the ground, and raped her. Ingrid debated reporting the soldier to his commanding officer, but didn’t
because she thought her mother might not believe her. She remembered that morning in 1942 when she had found her mother injured in bed. Johanna had never spoken of the incident. If Ingrid reported the soldier, Johanna would not want Ingrid to incur the public humiliation of a military trial. Rape was common during the occupation, and Ingrid decided to keep silent.

Eventually, she did disclose the rape to her mother and to Ensi and discussed it during interviews in my research for this book. “Ultimately, I decided it was just one more terrible event in the war,” said Ingrid. “I was just a kid back then. I didn’t want to make trouble for the soldier or for myself. I just tried to forget it. It was before the era of women’s rights. I didn’t think I had any.”

What she did instead was to convince her parents to help her find a way back to America. Mathias wrote to his sister Klara, who lived near Los Angeles, and asked if she would serve as a legal guardian for both Ingrid and Lothar, his two oldest children. Johanna encouraged her children’s return to the United States. She wanted to return herself, but Mathias decided his chances of getting a job as an engineer were better in Germany.

Klara agreed to serve as sponsor and guardian for Ingrid and Lothar,
and they filled out the necessary paperwork. As a final step, both Ingrid and Lothar had to submit to a medical examination. Lothar passed with no trouble, but the physician found that Ingrid had gonorrhea. She did not tell him about the rape and he asked no questions. Instead, he gave her an injection of penicillin and some antibiotics for the voyage.

In July 1947, Ingrid, then seventeen, and Lothar, twelve, boarded a troopship, the SS
Ernie Pyle
, and made the voyage home to the United States, leaving behind their parents and two siblings. Lothar worked in the bar, serving drinks to the soldiers on their way home. Ingrid stayed in the female quarters of the ship. After a journey of two weeks, they arrived at Ellis Island and made their way by train to California, where for a while life in America was almost as hard as the life they’d left behind in Germany.

In October 1945, as Ingrid and her family adjusted to life during the occupation in Idstein, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration closed the DP camp in Philippeville where Irene lived. By the fall there weren’t enough Jewish refugees left in the camp to justify its continued operation. The few remaining survivors, including Irene, were sent to a small hotel, where they waited for visas to America.

Many of the others returned to Europe, but Irene never considered returning to Germany or relocating in Palestine. “Our family had many relatives who had immigrated to the United States,” recalled Irene. “We never thought of going anywhere else.” Nonetheless, a voyage to America faced significant obstacles. Besides the visa problem, few Liberty ships made it to Algeria. Five months after the war in Europe ended, American soldiers were eager to get home for Christmas. Every available Liberty ship was filled with GIs, and spaces for refugees were rare.

From her mother’s letters, Irene learned details of the Kaplans, her American sponsors. Rose and Hugo Kaplan had fled Mainz in the Rhineland of Germany in the 1930s as Hitler came to power, escaping just in time. They left with few possessions and settled in the Bronx in New York, where they worked in hotels, repairing carpet sweepers. Motorized vacuum cleaners were not yet common.

In Philippeville, Irene thought about what her life would be like in America, how she would fit into the Kaplan family, and where she would go to school. She wondered how long it would be before she was reunited with her mother and her brother. The shock of being separated from them after the exchange in Switzerland and the grief over the death of her father, John, on the train out of Bergen-Belsen left Irene with a dimmed sense of reality. She focused on one task at a time:
gathering her papers, talking to the consul in Philippeville, and biding her time until she could get to America. Physically, she was stronger, her bones finally having some muscle, but the memory of starvation stayed with her, leaving her unsatisfied.