The day after their arrest, Eb and Julius were taken in handcuffs to the Civilian Alien Hearing Board in the Federal Building and faced five people—the same people who’d interned their parents seven months before. Eb was asked a question he found ridiculous: “What would you say to your German cousin if he came to you for sanctuary after coming up the Ohio River in his German U-boat?”
“I’d say that a sub couldn’t come up the Ohio River,” replied Eb. “It only drafts four feet.”
After the hearing, the two brothers were taken to the Cincinnati Workhouse, which served as a jail for errant, poor children and adolescents. Guards placed Eb and Julius in small, separate cells. Each cell had a bucket for a toilet. After the doors clanged shut, other prisoners began yelling, “Nazis! Krauts! Huns!” A few days later, they were transferred to a detention center in Chicago, and then taken to Crystal City on a heavily guarded train filled with other German internees. “I was so happy to be reunited with my parents and younger brother,” said Eb. “But the conditions there were harsh. The temperature was well over a hundred degrees, and the camp was crawling with insects and scorpions. Our living space was barely tolerable. The fences were high and there were guards every fifty feet with guns. I was at a loss to understand why I was in prison for the crime of being born to German parents.”
Kuhn was still in Crystal City when the Fuhr brothers arrived. Eb, like Ingrid, didn’t know what to make of him. Perhaps he was a Nazi, as the government said. Perhaps he wasn’t. “Anyone could be called a Nazi based on rumors,” Eb recalled. “It’s impossible to convey the intense terror I felt that spring and the hopelessness.” In Crystal City, Eb and his brother Julius played on a soccer team. Kuhn’s son, Walter, played soccer as well, on a team with younger players. Eb remembered him as a shy boy who lived in the shadow of his father.
By the summer of 1943, Kuhn had been knocked off his pedestal of power. For all his pomposity, he was little more than a caricature of his former self. After so many years in the limelight—his face a page-one fixture in New York newspapers—the stark reality of exile in Crystal City must have been a shock. The stillness and silence of the desert would constantly have reminded him that the noisy glare of fame was far behind him.
• • •
In his office in Philadelphia, Harrison received reports from O’Rourke about the smoldering unrest in the German section left over from the flag controversy of the previous April. By the summer of 1943, internees in America—as well as in Japan and Europe—were considered valuable assets in the prosecution of the war. Harrison understood that the treatment of German and Japanese enemy aliens and their families in Crystal City would directly affect how Americans were treated in Germany and in Japan. Reports from the State Department documented the suffering and malnourishment that Americans suffered in Axis camps. Often the abuse of Americans was meted out in “reprisal” for reports of mistreatment of Axis prisoners in the United States. If news of the flag controversy was taken out of context in Germany, Harrison understood German reprisals against American internees would be inevitable.
A confidential memo went out from Harrison’s office to all INS employees: “It is particularly important that officers and employees fully realize that our work is an important part of our national war effort, and that a grave responsibility rests upon each of us because we constantly make the case for reciprocity in securing equally fair and humane treatment of OUR civil and military personnel held in the custody of enemy nations.”
To make that case for reciprocity, in Crystal City, Harrison treated the flag controversy with caution. The guards were not punished for losing their tempers and destroying the German flag. The threat of reprisal was too great. Besides, the guards in Crystal City were not professionally trained Border Patrol agents, as it was difficult to attract career Border Patrol agents or other employees to the isolated Crystal City camp. The closest movie theater or shopping center was 120 miles away in San Antonio.
O’Rourke’s task was to build and operate a “humane” camp in a desolate part of America with employees who had little or no training for their positions. Most of those he hired—clerks, secretaries, accountants, security guards—were native to Crystal City and the surrounding area. Life in Crystal City, as in all of Texas, was highly segregated. No “Negroes,” as the employment manual referred to African Americans, were hired; the few Mexican Americans employed at the camp were maids and stoop laborers. When Mabel B. Ellis, a social worker from New York, visited Crystal City, she filed a report to Harrison that concluded, “Because of the isolated location of Crystal City, the employees of the internment camp have relatively little more freedom than the internees behind the fence.”
But at least the employees were not caged. Employees came and went through the front gates. Guards inspected their cars, a mild nuisance that gradually became routine. For internees, such as Ingrid, the reality of internment was the constant presence of the barbed wire. “The confinement was crushing,” Ingrid said. Armed guards manned six guard towers, located on each corner of the camp. An internal security force patrolled both Japanese and German sections of the camp. The surveillance was constant. Mostly, Ingrid remembered how unimaginably hot it was that summer. At midday, temperatures regularly reached 115 degrees. She wondered how long she and her family would be there. The phrase that came to her was for the duration. Time felt suspended.
Daily life in Crystal City was highly regimented. Every morning the American flag was raised in ceremony, outside the fence. As the camp awakened, sleepy night guards relinquished their posts to daytime guards. Censors fluent in German and Japanese read the incoming mail of internees and cut out portions that related in any way to the war effort. Internees were allowed to write only two letters and one postcard per week, which were censored. Officials kept dossiers on each internee, and a small police force patrolled the camp. At the front gate, vehicles of visitors were searched, both upon entry and exit.
The roll calls seemed endless. Three times a day a whistle blew and all had to run back to their cottages and huts, form lines, show their faces, and stand still for the count in the presence of armed guards. Prisoners met visitors—friends or relatives—in a hut where surveillance officers stood watch. As for escape, everyone knew the penalty was death, and in the camp’s history—from December 12, 1942, until February 27, 1948—no one ever risked it.
As a productive distraction, O’Rourke had a large reservoir converted into a swimming pool that would provide irrigation water for the camp farm, as well as for the flowers and gardens that had sprung up in both the Japanese and German quadrants. According to camp records, Italian internee Elmo Zannoi, a civil engineer and one of six Italians in camp, designed the pool. German internee Hans Zerbe surveyed the site.
However, Johanna told her children that Mathias, also a civil engineer, designed the pool. “In fact,” recalled Ensi, “she told us the pool was his idea.” Mathias must have helped with the design, because he spent much of the summer and fall at work on the pool. Ingrid, then thirteen, and seven-year-old Lothar positioned themselves near the reservoir at the back of the camp, directly opposite the front gate, and followed the progress of the work from the water’s edge.
The first step was to dredge the existing reservoir. Lavender-colored water hyacinths choked the reservoir with their long, spongy stalks. The Germans provided most of the slow, difficult labor, using shovels and wheelbarrows to remove the mud.
One afternoon, Ingrid and Lothar watched as teams of workers brought two fifty-five-gallon drums to the banks. Armed with long-handled sticks with hooks on the ends, the men waded into the muddy water and fished out snakes, many of them deadly water moccasins. The grotesque sight of the fat bodies of the snakes writhing in the air terrified Ingrid. She and Lothar watched rapt as the men dropped the snakes into the large drums. After the job was done, the men took out hunting knives, split the snakes, gathered the skins, and spread them in the hot sun to dry. Later, the men made belts out
of these skins.
It took six months to complete the pool, a gleaming, giant oval 250 feet in diameter with a shallow end for young children. After concrete was poured into the space, the pool was filled with clean water, the water dark at the deep end. The internees had created an oasis in the drought-ridden landscape. If Egypt had the Nile, Crystal City had the swimming pool—something concrete, literally and metaphorically, that made life more bearable.
For Ingrid, the swimming pool presented an emotional conflict. The long hours she spent there, watching over Lothar and Ensi, were a glorious respite from the heat. Yet she remembered that Mathias had always planned to build a swimming pool on the top of the homestead in Strongsville. To him, a swimming pool was a symbol of American acceptance and affluence. But the pool he helped build for Crystal City was altogether different: a symbol of internment, as palpable as the flag.
The Eiserlohs lived in C Section, off Eleventh Avenue, near the German bakery. Every morning they awoke to the smell of freshly made dark German bread. Because of Johanna’s fragile medical condition, they were assigned a coveted five-hundred-square-foot bungalow with an inside toilet, a kitchen, and one bedroom, the best living quarters available in camp. Others lived in duplexes, triplexes, and tar-papered Quonset and Victory Huts with communal toilets and showers. All of the quarters had heaters, kerosene ranges, portable ovens, and square-shaped iceboxes.
At only a hundred pounds, Johanna was as thin as a fragile bird. Her limbs were stalky. Sometimes she had dizzy spells. When she took a step, Ingrid watched to see if she would fall. But in the evenings, she pinned her auburn hair to the top of her head, put on an apron, and fixed her attention on the task ahead: preparing the family meal. Before the war, Johanna had been loquacious and efficient. Over the weeks and months in Crystal City, evenings found her in her small kitchen with her husband and children around her, Johanna became that way again. She washed fresh vegetables, baked chicken and roasts in the tiny stove, and poured her children tall glasses of milk. (Every morning teams of internees delivered twenty-five hundred quarts of fresh milk from the cows on the farm to the children in camp. Blocks of ice were delivered daily as well.) This was the pact Johanna had made with the American government: in return for life behind barbed wire, she had the pleasure of her family all gathered at the same table.
Sometimes the Eiserlohs ate at the Café Vaterland, a restaurant and beer garden staffed by internees, many of them professional chefs and bakers. After dinner, Johanna and Mathias would linger at the table with other German couples. When the sun went down and the temperatures cooled, many couples walked with their children around the perimeter of the fence. The sweet smell of oranges and lemons from the camp orchards filled the air. “We felt safe on those walks,” recalled Ingrid. “It was the happiest time of the day.”
Provisions of the Third Geneva Convention governed the treatment of internees. Every aspect of daily life—the amount of food, allotted living space, payment for work—was prescribed by the convention rules, which were monitored by the International Red Cross. As a result, no one went hungry in Crystal City. Though most internees ate at home with their families, there was a mess hall as well. An average menu for a single day—breakfast: stewed prunes, bran flakes, toast with oleo (a colloquial term for margarine) and syrup, coffee/milk; lunch: beef stew, potatoes, cabbage, bread with oleo and syrup again; and dinner: spaghetti, string beans, cooked carrots, pickled beets, and, again, bread with oleo and syrup. Breakfast was served at 7:30 a.m., lunch at 11:00 a.m., and supper at 6:00 p.m. sharp.
Many of the employees, including the bachelor O’Rourke, ate regularly at the mess hall. The price was right: for $6.67 per month, employees could eat one meal a day. Many of the employees, whose civilian ration cards did not permit them to eat large quantities of meat, sugar, and coffee, complained that internees in the camp enjoyed a better life inside the fence than they had outside it. “Selling these employees on the internment program was an obstacle in itself,” wrote O’Rourke, who recorded that he felt “squeezed” between the demands of internees and those of the employees, who believed that “anything received by the internees was too good and too much.”
For food, clothing, and other necessities, the internees were issued camp tokens made of pressed paper or plastic and quarter-shaped, like casino chips. Children from six to thirteen, such as Lothar and Ingrid, received $4 in chips a month, two- to five-year-olds such as Ensi received $1.25, and adults received $5.25 a month. Internees were allowed to work only eight hours a day, at ten cents an hour, thus making no more than eighty cents a day.
The camp had two stores, one for the Germans and the other for the Japanese. Each supplied thousands of items, including soap, shoestrings, boxes of buttons, yards of gingham, candy, soft drinks, peanut butter, spaghetti sauce, beer for the Germans, and sake for the Japanese. Mathias was never out of cigarettes, with the German store carrying three popular American brands: Lucky Strike, Philip Morris, and Chesterfield. From morning till night, internees piled goods into handmade wooden carts and took them home. Both stores were well managed, and by the end of 1943, O’Rourke reported the combined gross sales of the stores was an impressive $200,000.
The heavy summer dragged on. At twilight, an immense chorus of cawing crows and shrill cicadas filled the air. Wild cats fed on baby birds that fell from nests. One day Lothar saw a newborn crow fall from its nest and ran to save it from the cats. He built a cage for the crow out of an orange crate and fed it droplets of milk. To further protect the bird, Mathias constructed a closed-in porch for the barrack. After that, Ingrid, Lothar, and the baby bird slept on the porch.
The struggle to protect the baby crow reflected the psychological impact of internment. Mangione, the writer who worked for the INS, often received letters from internees. In one letter, an internee described her efforts to save and rescue a bird. “No living thing should be locked up,” said the letter writer. “When I am free, I want to live in a house without locks, even without doors. It will be a house made up of windows and the view must not be obstructed by anything, not even mountains.”
In August, Johanna and Mathias had a scare. The driver of a sprinkler truck pulled up in front of their house to water a section of the road. Looking out of his rearview mirror to back up the truck, the driver saw a small group of young children running behind his vehicle to stand under the sprinkler, as if enjoying a waterfall. The driver yelled at the children to move, but two-year-old Ensi, her blond hair bleached white by the sun, among them, did not hear the warning. The driver backed up and Ensi fell to the ground. When the driver stopped the truck, he heard Ensi crying and found her curled underneath the truck, hands over her tiny ears. Fortunately, the wheels had missed her. The driver rushed her to the camp hospital, where she was treated and released.
CHAPTER SEVEN
“Be Patient”
One of Earl Harrison’s good intentions was to recognize the INS’s obligation to offer an American education to the children confined in the Crystal City camp, the majority of whom had been born in America. Three types of schools were established in the internment camp: the American School, called the Federal School, the Japanese School, and the German School. Each provided an elementary, junior high, and high school education. The assumption was that most students would attend the Federal School, which offered an American-style education and was fully accredited by the Texas State Board of Education. State-certified teachers were hired for the Federal School, and classes were taught in English. In the Japanese and German schools, internees taught students in their native languages. The German leaders who had instigated the flag controversy also pressed German parents to register their children in the German School. Most parents complied.
All through the summer of 1943, Mathias and Johanna, Ingrid’s parents, had debated the issue. Johanna preferred that Ingrid and Lothar be enrolled in the Federal School for an American education. After all, they were born in America, as was their younger sister, Ensi. But Mathi
as pressed for the German School. In return for having their family reunited in Crystal City, Mathias and Johanna had agreed to repatriate to Germany. Neither Ingrid nor Lothar was fluent in German, and Lothar could barely speak it at all. As a practical matter, they both needed to learn the language and the culture of Germany. Mathias had the strongest argument, but now Johanna was reluctant to repatriate, even though she had agreed to it and signed the repatriation document.
The conflict between Mathias and Johanna was indicative of what happened in Crystal City during the summer of 1943 and well into 1944. Some Germans and Japanese would remain in the camp and adapt to the tiny civilization, run by O’Rourke, while others would either be shipped off against their will or, like the Eiserlohs, be readied for voluntary repatriation in exchange for American soldiers and civilians in Europe and Japan. One practical function of the German and Japanese schools was to prepare the children of enemy aliens as trade bait.
Mathias, like other Germans, feared that if he placed his children in the American School, there would be reprisals from the German leaders in camp. For the duration of the camp’s operations, fewer than twenty-four German parents enrolled their children in the Federal School. Kazuko Shimahara, a young Japanese American internee, remembered a German girl who was briefly in Kazuko’s class at Federal Elementary School. The German American schoolmate confided to Kazuko how difficult it was for her to come to school because her German neighbors shunned her and her family.
Mathias prevailed, and on September 7, 1943, when the German School opened in a four-room facility, Lothar reported for fourth grade and Ingrid for seventh. Both struggled with the language. In addition, the school in Crystal City was structured on the German model, stricter and more rigid than an American-style education. Both Lothar and Ingrid took classes in German, arithmetic, botany, and geography. There were no classes in American literature and no music lessons—nothing to satisfy Ingrid’s creative appetites. The teachers, German internees who were mostly uneducated, working-class men, controlled the curriculum. For instance, one of Ingrid’s language teachers was an electrician. The man who taught her mathematics was a farmer.
The Train to Crystal City: FDR's Secret Prisoner Exchange Page 12