The Train to Crystal City: FDR's Secret Prisoner Exchange

by Jan Jarboe Russell

  That year, 1941, Christmas came and went. Her mother sent no Weihnachtskarten—Christmas cards—and the house seemed silent and sullen. As an escape Ingrid went outside into the woods and sang arias to the trees, as if the high, crystal notes could chase away the oppressive gloom. When confined to the house, she felt claustrophobic and hummed softly to console herself.

  Day by day, Ingrid sensed her father’s growing anxiety. When he came home from work, usually after dark, he threw himself into a kitchen chair and grumbled about the coworkers he thought might be his enemies. “Perhaps the FBI was interviewing them?” he wondered aloud. “Who knows what they might say?”

  During family dinners he called them anonymous accusers. “What’s fair about that?”

  Obsessed by fear and worry, he talked too fast and was incapable of staying on a single subject for more than a few minutes. Before Pearl Harbor, Mathias smoked two packs of cigarettes a day. Now he was never without a cigarette. Ingrid’s mother, Johanna, complained that Mathias was up to four packs a day. When, wondered Ingrid, would her father next draw a clean, easy breath? And when would she have to stop holding her breath in his presence to protect her voice?

  January 8, 1942, was a Thursday and a cold winter’s day. Ice had formed on the surface of the creek behind the Eiserloh house. Ingrid and her six-year-old brother, Lothar, were away at school. Their baby sister, Ensi, only one year old, was quiet in the crib.

  Two FBI agents pulled up in large black cars and parked in front of the house. They walked to the front door and knocked. Johanna opened the door, Mathias by her side.

  The agents walked in and presented their identification. They were dressed in dark suits and hats, like characters in a movie. Both carried guns. They asked for permission to make a search of the premises. Mathias said yes. He was eager to comply but the agents didn’t need his permission. They had an authorized search warrant, signed by the attorney general of the United States, Francis Biddle.

  Mathias fumbled through his pocket and finally produced from his wallet his alien registration card, which he carried with him everywhere. He pointed to the number on the card—4772829—in a desperate attempt to prove his legitimacy. Though born in Germany, he explained to the agents that he was a legal resident of the United States. His papers were in order. Johanna produced hers as well, along with both of their passports. Johanna explained that all three of her children were American-born. Didn’t that count for anything?

  Over the next few hours, the agents moved from room to room, looking for dynamite, shortwave radios, cameras, and any other suspicious items, which they did not find. They confiscated ordinary letters and photographs from relatives in Germany. Paintings of German landscapes were taken from the walls. Other items seized that night were a black leather book with names and addresses of other German legal aliens who lived near them in Strongsville; twelve hardcover books in German that Mathias had recently purchased during a book sale at the German consulate in Cleveland to raise money for winter relief; and a list of shortwave German radio programs from the month of January 1941.

  The agents opened drawers and inspected closets. They examined bank records from the Cleveland Trust Co. and noted the small amount of money in Eisleroh’s account, a mere $700. Among the postcards they took was one Ingrid had written to her father during a recent trip to Chicago to visit relatives. The card was written in English, Ingrid’s first language, but she also knew German. “I forgot my promise to write this in Deutsche,” she wrote, each letter neatly formed, “but I’m tired of writing now and won’t start all over.”

  Finally the agents snapped handcuffs on Mathias’s wrists and placed him in what they called “custodial detention,” which meant that he could be held in prison indefinitely. The word arrest was not used. No one read Mathias Eiserloh his rights because as a legal resident alien from Germany, an ally of Japan’s and Italy’s in the war against the United States, Eislerloh had no rights under US laws. He was not allowed a lawyer. No charges were filed, and he would never be convicted of any crime. Yet from that moment on, Eiserloh was officially branded a “dangerous enemy alien.”

  The agents instructed Johanna to pack a small bag for her husband. Eager to comply, she gathered a toothbrush, a shirt, a pair of pants, and pajamas and placed the items a small bag. “He won’t be gone long,” the agents told Johanna. This was the standard line designed to soothe anxious wives and used by FBI agents all over the country during arrests of Germans, Japanese, and Italians.

  When Ingrid returned home from school, she found Ensi safe in her crib but both of her parents vanished. She walked outside to the garage and saw her uncle, Mathias’s brother-in-law, spread-limbed on the floor. He was drunk, and Ingrid shook him by the shoulders to wake him. Once on his feet, her uncle told Ingrid that FBI agents had arrested her father. He described how humiliated Mathias looked in handcuffs, eyes downcast as he slipped into the backseat of the black car. Johanna had taken the family car and driven to the jail in Cleveland to find out how long Mathias would be gone.

  Ingrid left the garage, collapsed on the cold ground, and stared into the sky. Her father had vanished. She filled her lungs, and then out came an unwilled, painful roar to the sky. The high wail of her voice was so raw it made the hair on the back of Ingrid’s neck rise. Her legs came up to her chest and she rolled back and forth like a wounded animal. Then there was silence.

  Like the moment captured by the artist Edvard Munch in his iconic painting The Scream almost fifty years before, Ingrid’s shriek was a life-changing moment. Munch’s painting expressed a moment from his walk in 1892 in which the sky turned bloodred and the expressionist artist sensed “an infinite scream passing through nature.” For many years after her father was snatched, Ingrid felt a similar massive disorder in her environment and in the depths of herself. The particulars of her life at home—the chicken coop, the woodburning stove, the dogs, the daily bus ride to school—all seemed blurred, no longer certain. That day, lying in the woods, Ingrid’s shriek left her silent and spent. “My God,” she thought to herself. “What will happen to us?”

  After that day, Ingrid no longer sang to the trees or hummed during her household chores. Life as she had known it was finished. By the time that she next saw her father—two long years later in what seemed the other side of the world in Crystal City, Texas—Ingrid’s golden voice, along with a great many other things, had been lost.

  • • •

  On the morning of December 7, 1941, Sumi Utsushigawa, a thirteen-year-old American girl, rested her elbows on the windowsill of her second-story apartment on East First Street in Little Tokyo, the commercial and cultural enclave for Japanese in Los Angeles. In the neighborhood, filled with Shinto shrines, judo and kendo schools, and many Japanese restaurants, the culture of Japan was everywhere. The weather was in the high seventies and sunny, and the light streamed through the windows into the apartment. It was the kind of shiny California winter day, set among green hedges and eucalyptus trees, that seems improbable anywhere else.

  Below Sumi’s apartment window was a traffic jam. Cars filled with angry white American men lined the street. Horns honked. Radios blared. Voices shouted. The surprise attack on Pearl Harbor unleashed panic and alarm at the possibility of additional attacks on American soil. After the worst naval disaster in American history, the Japanese might strike anywhere next. Fear of the “yellow peril,” racism toward anyone of Japanese ancestry, swept the country. The white men who crowded into Little Tokyo that day carried guns, ammunition, and baseball bats. They were on patrol to see if any of the Japanese in Little Tokyo had the temerity to celebrate their countrymen’s attack on Pearl Harbor. A few of these men carried posters with an enraged message: JAP HUNTING LICENSE, GOOD FOR DURATION OF HUNTING SEASON, OPEN SEASON NOW. NO LIMIT.

  Crossing First Street, a Japanese businessman hurried toward Sumi’s building. He wore a dark suit, white shirt, and a broad-brimmed hat and carried a Christmas package tucked under one arm. Two small c
hildren walked by his side, each clutching one of his hands. The man’s gaze was lowered and his children’s faces were blank.

  Sumi’s mother, Nobu, shouted at Sumi to stay away from the window and to stay indoors. “It’s very dangerous,” her mother told her in Japanese. Her mother need not have worried; Sumi had no desire to leave the apartment. The sight below had the dark, unreal quality of a Martian invasion, something impossible to believe.

  Meanwhile, Nobu and Sumi’s father, Tom Utsushigawa, a photographer who owned the apartment building at 244½ East First Street, moved quickly through the two-story building. They went door-to-door—to the beautiful Japanese dancer on the first floor, next door to the somber Japanese lawyer. They pounded on doors and in feverish Japanese shouted to tenants to remove portraits of the Japanese emperor and the royal family from the walls of their apartments. Inside, the residents were just learning the news from Hawaii. “Quickly,” Tom warned. “Protect yourselves.” Suddenly, being Japanese in America was dangerous.

  None of it made any sense to Sumi. She found herself on the other side of an invisible line that she had not drawn. While her parents were issei, immigrants born in Japan, Sumi was a nisei, born in America. In every way, she fit the stereotype of the nisei, the second-generation Japanese who worked hard to become “100 percent American.” Unlike her mother, Nobu, who wore her long sheet of black hair in a chignon at the back of her neck and took small, delicate steps through the apartment, Sumi wore her hair in bedraggled pigtails and had the gait of an awkward pony. She talked in California slang: “What you guys this and what you guys that?”

  She had been born on August 14, 1928, in Los Angeles. That was the year Walt Disney debuted Mickey Mouse, the madcap cartoon character that became Sumi’s childhood hero. Her teenager’s closet was filled with Mickey Mouse T-shirts, caps, and sweaters. Her friends gave her Mickey Mouse pins for birthday presents. She said the Pledge of Allegiance at Central Junior High School, located only six blocks from her apartment. She celebrated the Fourth of July. A young American teenager, she had, until this day at least, been naturally optimistic. Now Sumi tried to make sense of the uncomfortable reality that her own country—America—was at war with the homeland of her parents.

  Within two hours of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, FBI agents had swarmed through the narrow streets of Little Tokyo and placed Japanese leaders in handcuffs, leading them away from their friends and families. A physician who lived in Sumi’s building was among the first arrested. His wife, known as Battleship Mama, had entertained members of the Japanese navy in their tidy apartment, decorated with furniture from Japan. When young Japanese seamen, far from home, visited Los Angeles, she invited them to her home and performed the tea service, stirring green tea into exquisite small cups. These events for sailors were an innocent act by a traditional Japanese woman well schooled in hospitality. But what once seemed a courteous, sympathetic tie to her homeland was now perceived as subversive, reason enough for her husband’s arrest.

  Over the next few days, the Japanese bank branches in Little Tokyo closed. Suddenly, Sumi’s parents were penniless because the US Treasury had frozen all bank accounts of anyone born in Japan. The vegetable markets along Central Avenue were shut down. Even Fusetsu-do, a Japanese sweetshop, where Sumi and her friends bought fortune cookies, was padlocked. Rumors flew through the streets. People were picked up by the FBI for having feudal dolls or playing Japanese music. Families buried ancient Japanese swords, jade jewelry, and other family heirlooms on the banks of the Los Angles River.

  The day after the attack, the Los Angeles Times declared California “a zone of danger” and said it was the duty of alert citizens “to cooperate with the military authorities against spies, saboteurs and 5th columnists.” The term 5th columnist, which originated during the Spanish Civil War, was used to describe domestic disloyalty, and applied to anyone suspected of sympathizing with enemies. By the early 1940s, it was shorthand for sedition. The Rafu Shimpo, a Los Angeles Japanese newspaper founded in 1903, closed that day; however, on the next day, the newspaper resumed publication, publishing two pages in English only. The inside pages, usually in Japanese, were now blank. The government officially censored news printed in the Japanese language. In an editorial in English, the newspaper called upon Japanese Americans to fully support the war effort. “The treacherous infamy of Japan’s attack upon the United States has united the minds of all Americans, regardless of race, color or creed,” wrote the editors. “Fellow Americans, give us a chance to do our share to make this world a better place to live in!”

  The next day Sumi was frightened as she walked to Central Junior High School. She worried that the angry white men might return to her neighborhood and take out their rage against her and her friends.

  Her school was a melting pot of blacks, Caucasians, Japanese, Chinese, the children of immigrants from all over the world. Sumi’s best friends were whites, blacks, and other Asians. She had never felt uncomfortable at Central Junior High School. Many students had parents who were from some place other than America.

  On this day, inside the halls of the school, the white girls shot her lethal looks and turned their backs. Sumi willed herself to take it in stride. After all, she was an American citizen, born in Los Angeles. On the walk home, a group of Filipino boys spit at her shoes, wrestled her to the ground, and pinched her ears. “Dirty Jap,” they said. On the same day as Pearl Harbor, Japanese forces had also attacked Hong Kong, Wake Island, Guam, Malaya, and the Philippines. In retaliation, the Filipino boys struck back at Sumi, who covered her face and picked herself up from the ground. Her first thought was “Why are they calling me a Jap?” Then it dawned on her: in their eyes—and in the eyes of other Americans—she was one.

  Japan was the country of her parents, a series of tiny islands, far from the grid of Los Angeles’s crowded streets and the sparkling coastline of Southern California. Sumi understood her parents were torn between their mother country, Japan, and the country they had chosen as their own. They were born in Japan, but by law were not allowed to become US citizens. In 1924, concerned about the competitive threat of Japanese workers in the California agricultural industry, the United States passed the Asian Exclusion Act, making it illegal for Japanese immigrants to be citizens.

  Sumi’s father’s first name was Tokiji. His memories of Japan weren’t happy. He was born on April 25, 1877, in Miyagi-ken, Japan, to a farmer. His mother abandoned the family when he was only three years old. His father, unable to bear the sound of his son’s cries for his mother, soon left him on the doorstep of a Buddhist temple. The punitive monks fed him scraps and beat him with sticks when he disobeyed. When Tokiji was sixteen, he set his sights on a better future and came to the United States. He brought only what he could carry, a knapsack with a change of clothes.

  His first job was as a janitor for the famed Belasco Theater, a historic twelve-hundred-seat playhouse with a huge gilded dome at 337 South Main. He worked for Edward Belasco, the manager of the theater, who gave Tokiji a nickname that was easier for Belasco to pronounce: Tom. Belasco considered Tom a hard worker who was much smarter than the usual janitor, someone who might have other uses. One day Belasco gave Tom a box camera. Soon, Tom mastered the art of taking and developing photos and Belasco put him to work as the theater’s publicity photographer. In those days, the Belasco was popular among Hollywood actors, and many of the plays and musicals performed on its stage later became movies. Tom photographed Lionel Barrymore, Joan Bennett, Tallulah Bankhead, and other famous actors of the day. Some of the photos appeared in the Los Angeles Times.

  By the early 1900s, Tom was well established in Los Angeles and wrote to his father to help him find a wife. His father made the necessary arrangements with Nobu’s father, as was the custom in Japan. After a series of letters back and forth with his father, Tom went back to Japan, met Nobu for the first time, and was married. He returned to Los Angeles alone to prepare for his wife’s arrival. In a few months, he sent money bac
k to bring Nobu to America. She arrived at Terminal Island, an isolated beach located across from San Pedro, a suburb south of Los Angeles that served as the immigration point for first-generation Japanese in California.

  In Nobu’s first glimpse of America, women were tanning themselves on the beach to the sound of the surf. Nobu, whose skin was pale white, wanted to fit in, so she placed a white towel on the sand and warmed herself with the rays of the sun.

  In a few hours, Tom arrived on the beach with a bouquet of flowers and a box of candy. He’d expected Nobu to have beautiful white skin, so highly prized among Japanese men. Instead, her face and arms were bright red. Disappointed and angry, Tom threw the flowers and the candy into the sea. Nobu picked herself up off the beach and followed Tom. Thus began her marriage.

  Tom also expected his wife to be subservient, but Nobu was independent-minded and found ways to successfully navigate her new world. Once settled in Little Tokyo among the safety of other Japanese immigrants, Tom, already successful as a photographer for Belasco, bought the building. But it was Nobu who swept the floors, arranged for repairs, collected rent, and resolved disputes among tenants. She kept the books. When Tom decided to open a photography studio of his own in their apartment, Nobu recruited clients and made appointments. During photo shoots of families, Nobu shyly dangled puppets and other toys in front of children to make them smile.

  Although Little Tokyo had seven other Japanese photographers, Tom was the pioneer and the most in demand. He was short—only five feet three inches tall—but he was strong and carried himself with the demeanor of a dandy. His suits were handmade specifically for him by the tailors in Little Tokyo, who used the finest wool for suits and Japanese silks for shirts. Nobu packed away her Japanese robes and soon began to wear American-style A-line skirts and dresses with sleek lines and square shoulders. On a shelf in her closet was a row of hats with broad brims and sturdy shoes with square heels. Their apartment was filled with fine antique porcelain objects, Oriental rugs from Japan, and expensive furniture. They owned a 1930 black Hupmobile, a flashy, four-cylinder roadster that sold for about $80 and was advertised as “the best car in America for the smallest amount of money.”