The Train to Crystal City: FDR's Secret Prisoner Exchange (39 page)

Most days she went to the ocean and took swimming lessons from a woman from Holland who had been in Bergen-Belsen with Irene and her family. The woman had a son, a little older than Irene, who was by then fifteen. She and the young man met every day at the beach, and as they talked and swam, their relationship grew into a romance, Irene’s first. “We could relate to each other,” recalled Irene. “We were both in Bergen-Belsen together. We talked a little about the camp—the last time I talked about it directly for many years.”

Though she was in an oceanside paradise, her mind was still fixed on the horrors of the concentration camp. Moreover, paradise was empty of her family and her friends, except for this young man. They spent the days together, walking in the hills, swimming in the ocean, reading books, and taking meals. When he pressed Irene to marry him, Irene felt conflicted. She wasn’t ready to marry anyone, but she also wasn’t sure what awaited her in America. Weeks passed and the quandary persisted.

Finally, in November, three months after the public release of the Harrison Report and the subsequent relaxation on the release of American visas, Irene’s visa arrived and she made her choice: she would go to America.

In late December 1945, a few seats opened on a Liberty ship bound for the United States. Twelve Jewish refugees from Bergen-Belsen, including Irene, were given passage on the ship, and one of the older refugees, Margaret Sussman, took Irene under her wing. Months earlier Margaret’s husband and son had left Philippeville on a small all-male Liberty boat bound for the United States, but Margaret had worried about making the voyage on such a small boat and stayed behind. “Well, you and I will travel together,” Margaret told Irene.

On the first Saturday afternoon in December, Irene, Margaret, and ten others left their hotel in taxis and drove through to the port of Bougie. A large truck packed with their luggage followed behind. As the caravan neared Bougie, the taxi that carried Irene and Margaret collided with the truck in the first mishap of the trip. The luggage spilled out of the truck, and Irene and Margaret were jostled but unharmed.

The Liberty ship took two weeks for the voyage, and the sea was rough. Many nights Margaret and Irene couldn’t go to their shared cabin. As a safety measure, the ship’s officers asked all the passengers to sit in the dining room. The pitching of the sea rattled the silverware from the drawers as people weaved and bobbed through the dining room.

Both Margaret and Irene were seasick, but Margaret found the strength to tend to Irene, bringing her tea and making sure she got fresh air. The two became close. “She became an adoptive mother to me,” said Irene. “I hadn’t seen my mother in a long time. I don’t think I could have made the journey without Margaret.”

On Christmas Eve 1945, the Liberty ship arrived in Baltimore. The weather was freezing and the harbor was frozen solid. The ship could not dock. The crew on board and the small cluster of refugees had no choice but to spend the night on board. The kitchen staff prepared a turkey dinner with dressing, vegetables, and dessert. The following morning, on Christmas, Irene and Margaret waited on the deck of the ship as small motorboats, equipped with ice cutters, arrived along both sides of the ship. One by one, the passengers were lowered into the boats and taken to the dock.

As no one was at the harbor to greet them, Margaret and Irene made their own way to the train station in Baltimore. From there, they boarded a train to New York and arrived at Grand Central Station, where Peter Sussman, Margaret’s son, and the Kaplans waited for them.

With a great rush of relief, Irene joined the mass of strangers in the brightly lit station. Everywhere people were smiling; soldiers
danced with reunited sweethearts. V
ICTORY
signs left over from V-E Day celebrations still plastered the walls of platforms. The station was resplendent, with marble floors, a gigantic four-sided golden clock, and an American flag unfurled from the second-story balcony. A Salvation Army band played, and people threw pennies and nickels into donation buckets.

In the Kaplans’ one-bedroom apartment in the Bronx, Irene slept on the couch in the living room with the Kaplans’ only daughter, Lottie, who was a few years older than Irene. The Kaplans earned a modest living but provided Irene with food, clothing, and shoes and enrolled her in school. “They were very good to me,” recalled Irene. “Parents couldn’t have been better.”

Shortly after Irene arrived, Rose and Hugo asked her not to talk about the war or her experiences in the concentration camp. “Now you must start a new life. You are in America. The past is behind you,” they told her, as Irene remembered it. “You mustn’t speak about it. You have to forget.”

Irene was confused. The pressure to talk about the brutality of the years in camp weighed on her. It wasn’t only the Kaplans who asked her to keep silent and to forget. Every Friday night, Irene and the Kaplans had dinner with other cousins in New York whose relatives had died in the Holocaust. One of Irene’s mother’s cousins had had two sisters in the Westerbork camp with Irene and her family. The sisters died in camp. “I thought they would want to hear what happened to their sisters,” recalled Irene. “But they couldn’t bear to listen. They all wanted to forget.”

At the time, Irene resented the imposed silence. Later in her life, however, she wondered how much she would have been able to express if given the chance. Much of what had happened was unspeakable. “At the time I was at the point that I could have remembered all the terrible things that happened,” recalled Irene in an interview. “Or I could get on with rebuilding my life. I don’t think it would have been possible to do the two simultaneously.”

Within a few weeks after her arrival, the Kaplans enrolled Irene in Walton High
School in the Bronx. Having missed school for so many years, Irene was an eager student. She found part-time jobs and worked hard. “I began to tell myself that if I’d survived Bergen-Belsen, I could survive anything,” said Irene. “I tried to focus not on what I’d lost, but what I had to gain. It was a struggle.”

In those early months, what Irene wanted most was to reunite with what was left of her family. A group of relatives pooled resources to pay for the travel of her mother and brother to America. Werner was the first to arrive, in June 1946 on a ship that docked in Hoboken. The following month, Gertrude arrived on an airplane. She was still physically weak and chose to travel by airplane rather than risk seasickness on a long voyage by ship.

That summer after the war, New York was crowded with returning soldiers and immigrants, creating a housing shortage. Irene’s mother tried to find an apartment but couldn’t, so she rented furnished rooms in Manhattan for Irene and herself. Her brother lived with a cousin. It took three years for them to find an apartment to share, where they lived together for many years.

During those years, they rarely talked directly about all they had lost during the war. They focused on survival. Both Irene and Werner had jobs and both attended Queens College. When their experiences in Germany came up in conversation, it was often in an indirect way.
For instance, at the sight of turnips, all three grimaced. They all knew why: they remembered the turnip soup in Bergen-Belsen.

Every January 23, the anniversary of Irene’s father death on the train, they made a point of spending the day together. When they no longer shared an apartment, they called each other on that day. They never discussed John’s death or mentioned why they called. Their shared loss went unsaid, but never unremembered.

In January 1946, Sumi faced challenges in Sendai similar to those of Ingrid in Idstein and Irene in Philippeville: the reality of hunger and the desperation of navigating a world in constant violent rotation. Everywhere Sumi looked in Sendai, she saw scenes of struggle and defeat: shrines, temples, buildings, obliterated by American firebombs; the train station in rubble; farmers with hungry eyes and downcast expressions wandering through muddy fields, empty of rice.

The American occupation of Japan, which began on August 30, 1945, in Tokyo, was well under way in Sendai. A large American flag hung outside the military government headquarters established by troops from the Eighth Army. Through official news agencies, Japanese officials warned the population to avoid “unpleasant confrontations” and to act prudently, decorously, and with cooperation, “thereby displaying the true essence of the Yamato race.” The people complied and the occupation went smoothly. Civilians and soldiers surrendered weapons. English instruction, which had been discouraged during the four years of war, was once again part of the curriculum in the Sendai schools. Japanese boys and men lined the sides of grim streets and bowed politely when American soldiers in jeeps passed by.

Everyone in her uncle’s house, including Sumi, was hungry. The house was crowded with people and there was little rice. Sumi was skinny as a stick and could count her bony ribs with her fingers. One day she walked to the American military base in the center of town and applied for a job. Only seventeen years old, Sumi told an employment officer that she was an American. “I came to get a job,” she told him.

“Can you type?” asked the officer. Sumi replied that she could and sat down at a desk in front of a typewriter and keyed a few
paragraphs to prove her skills. She was hired on the spot and told the officer that she had two American-born sisters who could also type and interpret.

As Lothar helped save his family in Idstein by working for the American military, Sumi did the same. Her salary of fifteen hundred yen a month—about $100—helped her family survive. After she was hired, her two older sisters, Yoshiko and Haruko, got jobs at the base as well. They ate their meals at the mess hall and brought home food for their parents. “Three squares a day,” Sumi recalled.

To relieve the food shortage in Sendai, the American military government brought in truckloads of cornmeal, rolled oats, and canned goods. At the headquarters, onions, potatoes, and meat were laid in store. On the streets, American GIs handed out chocolate bars, chewing gum, and candy to the local children. One day during an inspection of a delivery of a large supply of grain, Sumi noticed that the grain had been diluted with grass. She reported this fraud, the grain was sent back, and Sumi felt extraordinary pride: her work had impact.

One of the best parts of Sumi’s job was that it allowed her to stay in touch with friends from Crystal City who’d been on the ship with her from Seattle and who were now working for the Americans at Haneda Air Base and in many other parts of Japan. The Japanese word
furusato
means “homeland,” and Sumi and her compatriots embraced that concept, but without the emotional ties to Japan it suggests. That spring of 1946, Sumi and her friends from Crystal City began to plot their return to the United States. In letters and cables, they functioned as a community in exile—expatriates bound together by Crystal City.

For instance, Mas Okabe and his brother found jobs as typists at the Army Air Force base at Atsugi Airport, near Tokyo. General Douglas MacArthur had first set foot on Japanese soil there when he’d arrived to accept the emperor’s formal surrender. Like Sumi, Mas and his brother were hired because they spoke both English and a small amount of Japanese. They sent money back to their parents. “It felt good to know they weren’t starving,” recalled Mas. “All of us kids from
Crystal City kept up with each other in Japan. We watched out for each other. I think it’s how we got through what was a difficult time.” After a few months, Mas and his brother transferred to Haneda Air Base.

In Hiroshima, both Min Tajii and his father found work at the British headquarters located in the ruins of Kure, a former Japanese naval base. Like the others from Crystal City, Min was born in America, the son of a Japanese farmer in the Imperial Valley of California. At the camp in Crystal City, he was a pitcher for the baseball team. When he arrived in Hiroshima in January, Min realized it would be up to him to find a way to feed his parents and younger brother. His father was all but immobilized by the shock of Japan’s defeat and the destruction of Hiroshima.

Not only British, but also soldiers from Australia and India occupied Hiroshima. Since he was hungry, Min applied for a job in the kitchen, run by an Australian sergeant. Min struck a deal: his father got a job as a cook, and Min’s job was to interpret between the sergeant and his father. “You tell me what you want cooked,” said Min. “My dad will cook it. I’ll be your interpreter cook.”

At the end of his shifts, Min took home large loaves of bread for his mother and other members of the family. He traded ration jars of jam and corned beef in cans for white rice. Like the others from Crystal City, Min saved his salary and planned his return to the United States.

Sumi worked at the military headquarters in Sendai for more than a year. During that time, both of her sisters married nisei soldiers, second-generation Japanese Americans, one brother-in-law headquartered in Sendai and the other in Tokyo. Finally, in the summer of 1947, Sumi spoke to her father and told him she wanted to return to America.

Sumi expected an argument, but Tokiji sat quietly with a serious expression. A space opened up between them, some immutable calm. Sumi explained that she wanted to finish high school in Los Angeles. Tokiji nodded yes. The
ship fare to California was about $300, and to her surprise Tokiji agreed to pay it.

In July 1947, Sumi left Japan on a troop ship, the SS
Marine Linx
, and entered the United States in Honolulu. Mas Okabe and Tosh Yonekura, another Crystal City internee, were also on the ship. When US customs officials checked her documents, they noted that she had traveled from an internment camp in Crystal City to Japan, which raised suspicions that she might be a danger to the United States. The officials threatened to detain her at Angel Island, a military prison, and send her back to Japan. After several hours, the situation was resolved and Sumi was released. Friends from Crystal City greeted Sumi, Mas, and Tosh in Honolulu.