THE TRAIN TO CRYSTAL CITY

Nonfiction

Dreaming of home

THE TRAIN TO CRYSTAL CITY: 
FDR's Secret Prisoner Exchange Program and America's 
Only Family Internment Camp During World War II
By Jan Jarboe Russell 
393 pp. Scribner 

Reviewed by Madison Bush

Life may be like a box of chocolates, but to some American political figures, immigration is like a bowl of skittles; if three of the skittles in the bowl are poisonous, rather than risk taking a handful, we should throw the whole bowl away. Or deport them. Or detain them.  The Train to Crystal City is a non-fiction account of the last time the United States’ policy followed that mindset. During World War II, the U.S. government approved the arrest, incarceration, and internment of Japanese, German, and Italian “enemy aliens,” and their families. This book is a timely read, a reminder that fear and ignorance, even during wartime, should not excuse denying people equal protection under the law. 

Not everyone will have heard of Crystal City, Texas. Even Texas-native Jan Jarboe Russell didn’t discover the place—located in the south Texas desert, a two-hour drive from San Antonio, Texas and a one-hour drive from the border with Mexico—until a chance conversation during the course of her undergraduate studies, forty years ago. However, to descendants of the “dangerous enemy aliens” and their families imprisoned at the Crystal City Enemy Detention Facility during World War II, the place is as infamous as Manzanar. Crystal City was one of nine detention camps administered by Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS), under the Department of Justice. The camp opened in 1942 to hold Japanese, German, and Italian “enemy aliens” and their families from across the United States (and even from some Latin American countries). While the adult detainees were mostly immigrants, in many cases, their children were American-born and thus U.S. citizens. 

Russell covers the before, during, and after of the Crystal City detention camp. At every step she looks into the background and motivations for the main players behind the detention policies, as well as the background of the families suffering from those policies. On the government side, we meet President Franklin Delano Roosevelt himself, J. Edgar Hoover (FBI Director), Earl Harrison (Commissioner of the INS) and Francis Biddle (Attorney General). Meanwhile, the detainees’ stories are told mostly through the eyes of Sumi Utsushigawa and Ingrid Eiserloh, two women detained at Crystal City as children. Russell interviewed both of them in preparation for this work

Russell does not gloss over the horrors the immigrant families faced leading up to and following the arrests of their fathers, brothers, and main breadwinners. Mathias, Ingrid’s father, came to the United States in 1923 and worked as a civil engineer, settling in Strongsville, Ohio with his family. He was arrested in January of 1942, following the attack on Pearl Harbor. Ingrid arrived at Crystal City in 1943, eighteen months after her father’s arrest. In the meantime, her mother was raped and they lost their home. Sumi Utsushigawa, Los Angeles-born, Japanese-American daughter of Tokiji “Tom” and Nobu Utsushigawa, arrived at Crystal City a few months after Ingrid, having been forcibly removed from her home in Los Angeles, and transported from Pomona Assembly Camp, to Heart Mountain, and finally to Crystal City. 

The middle, internment years inflicted less immediate damage than the trauma of the arrests, but imprisonment scars all the same. Tension runs through all the stories of Crystal City; tension between Joseph O’Rourke, the officer in charge, and the detainees, tension between the German detainees and the Japanese detainees, and especially tension between the children and their parents. The book explores the latter conflict deeply, examining the stark contrasts between the already Americanized first and second-generation children—American citizens who love this country—and their parents, who cling to traditional customs, and grow to resent the United States. In a classic example, the children trigger an international incident by requesting a prom at the Crystal City Federal High School. While O’Rourke approves the plans wholeheartedly, the German and Japanese parents quickly end any thought of such a frivolous American custom.

Neither Sumi nor Ingrid, nor their families, remained at Crystal City until the camp’s closure in 1948.  Instead, their parents agreed to a prisoner-exchange program, which returned the Japanese and German families from Crystal City to their home countries in exchange for American, and Jewish, prisoners of war. To Johanna and Mathias, Ingrid’s parents, Germany promised a respite from the horrors of the past few years. But to Ingrid, America was her home. Unfortunately for all of them, Crystal City had been heaven compared to living in war-torn Germany. Once the war ended, Germans could not find food and they could barely find shelter. Sumi’s situation in Japan wasn’t any different. The families had their freedom, but they suffered and starved, while their children dreamed of home, back in the United States. 

Despite the horrors described within, The Train to Crystal City leaves us with a taste of hope. Sumi and Ingrid both returned to the United States, making their way across respective oceans in 1947, to settle in California with friends and family. Their lives were not happy, exactly, but they did come home. And through Russell’s efforts, their stories have finally been told. In our modern era, in the face of fear, we forget that the “others” are scared too. As Irene Hasenberg Butter, a Holocaust survivor, said in her interview with Russell, “Enemies are people whose stories you haven’t yet heard and whose faces you haven’t yet seen.” Read this book for a lesson in humanity. 

Madison Bush grew up in Richmond, Virginia. She started reviewing for the Internet Review of Books in high school. After studying history at Princeton University and working as a paralegal in Baltimore, Maryland, she returned to Virginia and now studies law at the University of Virginia School of Law.