The Train to Crystal City: FDR's Secret Prisoner Exchange (46 page)
Read The Train to Crystal City: FDR's Secret Prisoner Exchange Online
Authors: Jan Jarboe Russell
Tags: #History, #Nonfiction, #Prison Camps, #Retail, #WWII
When the Eiserloh family was reunited in the Crystal City Internment Camp in November 1943, camp officials took this family photograph. Six-year-old Lothar is on the left, Johanna next to him, then two-year-old Ensi, Ingrid standing behind, and Mathias on the right. A few months earlier, Ingrid, twelve years old, had permed her long red hair. “We were all trying to be brave and smile for the camera,” she said of this photo. “In fact, we were devastated.”
These German internees are seated at a table in the beer garden. They built the garden and were allowed to purchase one beer a day with camp scrip. The beer was made at the camp, and the one-beer-a-day rule was often violated.
Students of the German School lined up with their teacher in front of the school, located just inside the front gate.
This portrait of Sumi’s family—the Utsushigawas—was taken in Los Angeles prior to her father’s arrest at their apartment building in Little Tokyo. Her father, Tokiji, a photographer, and her mother, Nobu, seated to the right. Sumi, in the white dress with a white bow in her hair, stands between her two older sisters, Haruko and Yoshiko.
The Federal High School in Crystal City operated like most American schools. It had regular classrooms, a spacious auditorium, athletic fields, and cheering squads. In 1944, Sumi, shown here with her friends, was one of the yell and song leaders.
Japanese women—
issei
, or first-generation American immigrants—at work in the Sewing Project, a building that had seven power and foot-pedal sewing machines in operation from eight o’clock in the morning until ten o’clock at night. The women made clothes, mattress covers, curtains, uniforms for nurses and doctors, and unlikely items, such as typewriter covers.
Here is Sumi as “A Good Scout!” in February 1944, standing on the grounds of the Japanese school. Both boys and girls participated in Japanese scouting programs at Crystal City.
In the summer of 1945, Earl Harrison (
the tall man, sixth from the left
) arrived in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp as President Truman’s special envoy. Harrison appears with members of his delegation: Maurice Elgin of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Center (
extreme left
) and Dr. Joseph Schwartz (
fourth from left
), European director of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Center. On Harrison’s right is Dr. Hadassah Bimko, survivor of Bergen-Belsen.
On December 8, 1945, a large group of Japanese and Japanese Americans from Crystal City boarded the SS
Matsonia
at the port of Seattle and sailed on rough waters to Japan, arriving on Christmas Day to a country devastated by war. “All of us teenagers from Crystal City experienced shock and disappointment,” recalled Sumi Utsushigawa, who was among the American-born internees sent to Japan.
Alan Taniguchi, with his father, Isamu Taniguchi, an internee in Crystal City, in November 1985 at the dedication in Crystal City of a stone monument that memorialized the Japanese experience in what was described on the marker as a “World War II Concentration Camp.” The monument was designed by Alan Taniguchi, a renowned Texas architect, and paid for largely by donations from former internees.
This book would not have been possible without the generosity of many people, especially the many survivors of the Crystal City Internment Camp who gave of their time and memories and whose names are listed in the bibliography. Their passion for sharing their stories—and the stories of their parents—motivated me every step along the way.
In particular, I am grateful for Ingrid, Ensi, and Lothar Eiserloh and deeply regret that Ingrid died near the end of the research. She wanted so much for the story to be told. I owe an enormous debt to Irene Hasenberg Butter, who shared her experience as a survivor of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp as well as her own memories of the January 1945 exchange. Grateful appreciation as well to Sumi Utsushigawa Shimatsu not only for her family’s story, but for introducing me to many of her friends who are former internees in Crystal City.
Although the seeds for this book were planted years ago, I want to acknowledge that the inspiration in 2011 for pursuing it came from Evan Taniguchi, the son of Alan Taniguchi; Richard Santos, a historian who died in February 2013; the persistence of two friends, Sherry Kafka Wagner and Therese McDevitt, who shared initial research; and the ongoing counsel of Dr. Kay Schanzer.
