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

  A Red Cross worker walked down the aisle and delivered a Red Cross package to every passenger. Irene took her package. Then the American woman gave Irene her package. Now she had two and told the woman, “I’m in seventh heaven.”

  As the train neared Marseille, one of the Swiss authorities approached the woman and asked to speak to her. They left the compartment and moved to the back of the train. When the American woman returned to Irene, she was crying and said, “I can’t take you to America. They won’t let me.” Irene felt confused but had no choice and accepted the news.

  When the train came to a stop in Marseille, Irene saw the MS Gripsholm in the harbor. The stunning sight was more beautiful to Irene because the ship was Swedish and neutral. Next to the ship was a small Italian freighter, the Città di Alessandria.

  When she disembarked the train, Irene was placed in line with other DPs from Bergen-Belsen. The Americans formed a separate line and boarded the MS Gripsholm, where champagne and a large buffet of good food waited. Irene and a group of approximately one hundred Jews from Bergen-Belsen boarded the freighter. Once on board, Irene was told that the freighter was bound for a United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration camp near Algeria in North Africa. Irene had no idea where Algeria was on a map.

  The first night at sea the cooks on the ship served platters of hamburgers, the first hamburgers Irene had seen since she’d left Amsterdam and entered Westerbork in June 1943. She ate more than one and became sick. All she could do was lie on the deck beneath the moon stitched into the dark sky. As the sides of the freighter were licked by waves, Irene vomited the hamburgers. She scolded herself for eating too much, too fast.

  Later that night, she heard a door open and saw a waiter bring a tray of hamburgers on deck and dump them into the sea. She couldn’t believe her eyes. After so many months of hunger, the waste of food seemed criminal to Irene. The ocean kept moving beneath her. The wind whipped up and darkness covered the moon and stars. She could smell the salt from the sea. Alone on the deck, with her father dead and her mother and brother far away in Switzerland, Irene cast her mind back to her childhood in Amsterdam and cried for all she had lost. Then she fell asleep, a lonely girl at sea, as the freighter took her to North Africa.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Under Fire

  From the moment the Eiserloh family was transferred to Bregenz, they were outside the protection of the US government and the Swiss and under the authority of the German Reich. Step by step through the snow, the family made their way north on foot, headed for Idstein, Johanna’s hometown. Cold was the immediate enemy, with temperatures well below freezing. Johanna tucked Guenther, a sickly infant, inside her coat. Ensi, only four, stayed close to her mother. Ingrid and Lothar followed in their father’s footsteps.

  After a few hours’ walk, Mathias hitched a ride for the family in an open-air truck to the next railroad station. From the back of the truck, Lothar watched as they passed through villages heavily damaged by Allied bombing. Even at nine years old it was clear to Lothar that Germany had all but lost the war.

  Only two weeks before, the German winter offensive to the west of Germany in Belgium and the Ardennes Forest in France, known to the Allies as the Battle of the Bulge, was finished and Germany’s fate sealed. The battle began on December 16, 1944, when Germany opened fire with two thousand guns on American forces in the Ardennes Forest. The weather was bad and the attack came as a surprise to Allied forces. When Brigadier General Anthony McAuliffe was asked to surrender, he replied famously, “Nuts!” Meanwhile, General George S. Patton’s Third Army turned north to attack the left flank of the Germans while British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery attacked the right flank. In the battle the Germans lost one hundred thousand men and the Americans eighty-one thousand.

  The complex endgame of the war was in play. In the early days of February, as Ingrid and her family trudged through the snow in Germany, they were invisible casualties of much larger forces. Given the official secrecy of the government’s exchange program, few in America knew anything of the plight of families such as the Eiserlohs. In the face of the magnitude of the loss of American lives during the war against Japan and Germany, it is unlikely many would have cared.

  On February 4, 1945, the three Allied leaders—FDR, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin—gathered in Yalta on the Black Sea to plan the final defeat of Germany and Japan. Stalin, whose army controlled Poland and the Balkans and was advancing toward Berlin, had insisted that the meeting take place on his home turf. Only a few weeks earlier, on January 20, 1945, Roosevelt was sworn in for a historic fourth term. By then, FDR was a sick man. Determined to spare his strength, his inaugural address lasted only five minutes, the shortest in history.

  Over seven days in Yalta, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin haggled over reparations. Stalin wanted $10 billion, and both Churchill and Roosevelt held firm against his demands. By the end of the meeting, Roosevelt was physically spent but wrote to Eleanor that he was pleased with the negotiation: “Dearest Babs, We have wound up the conference—successfully I think. . . . I am a bit exhausted but really all right.”

  When Franklin returned to the White House on February 28, Eleanor was shocked by his appearance. Not even when he was stricken with polio had he ever looked so frail. The following day FDR gave an address to Congress and remained seated for the first time in his presidency. “I hope you will pardon me,” he told the combined chambers. “It makes it a lot easier for me to have to carry about ten pounds of steel around the bottom of my legs.” His eyes looked down at the podium. “It has been a long journey.” His voice faltered. “I hope you will agree that it was a fruitful one.”

  Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, Ingrid and her family continued their hazardous journey. Everywhere the Eiserlohs traveled they saw evidence—fields rutted with bomb craters, trees felled, farmhouses in pieces—of the success of the Allied campaign. Food was difficult to find. During the first few days, Mathias traded small personal items—a few cigarettes, pieces of clothing—for hard bread and thin soup. “I began to feel as if my body was shutting down,” recalled Ingrid. “I had no energy and it was hard to put one foot in front of the other.” As a teenager, she was self-conscious about her body and struggled to stay clean. On the walks, she foraged for water and used handkerchiefs to wipe the grime from her body. When they stopped to sleep at night, she slept fully clothed. Many nights, air-raid sirens sounded and the family would rush to seek shelter in bunkers.

  On and on they made their way on foot along damaged rail tracks. The trains kept no particular schedule. When the trains did pull into stations, German troops in full uniform, all headed for the Western Front, crowded onto the cars, leaving little room for civilians.

  As a child in Strongsville, Ohio, Lothar had spent hours assembling model airplanes. From the touch of glue and paint on his hands, Lothar knew the intimate details of many American fighter planes—the P-61 Black Widow, a night cruiser; the P-38 Lightning, and the Navy’s twin-engine F7F Tigercat. Day after day, he watched his listless mother, a shell of her former self, struggle with sickly Guenther. Her eyes stayed fixed on the ground. Slowly he began to comprehend the tragedy of his father’s decision to repatriate.

  At night Lothar eavesdropped on arguments between his parents. Johanna blamed Mathias for the financial pressures during the early years of the marriage, for not securing American citizenship for both of them, for not anticipating his arrest and internment and leaving the family defenseless. Lothar began to see his father through Johanna’s eyes: as unreliable. Ingrid heard the arguments as well but sided with her father. “My mother constantly criticized my father,” recalled Ingrid. “She saw herself as a victim.” To Ingrid, Mathias was blameless.

  As the journey north continued, Ingrid consigned the names of the towns they passed to memory. When the Eiserloh family arrived in Ulm, a small town situated on the Danube River, they saw their first glimpse of the near destruction of a town. Eighty-one
percent of the city had been destroyed by British bombers in December 1944. The damage was from the square in front of the Muenster, the highest church spire in the world at the time, to the west as far as the train station. The Muenster was the only thing in sight virtually untouched, because bomber crews used the church as a major landmark that could be seen from great distances. From Ulm, they caught a train west to Stuttgart and straight north to Würzburg. Finally, in the first week of March 1945, they arrived in Frankfurt am Main, which had been flattened by Allied bombs. As they pulled into the station, Ingrid looked out the window. In the center of the medieval town, she saw industrial buildings reduced to rubble. The streets had holes large enough to drop a Volkswagen into.

  When they arrived it was late evening, and everyone was filthy, hungry, and cold. While they stood on the street, a loud siren shrieked and Allied bombs fell from the sky. The Eiserloh family joined the stampede of people running for the nearest air-raid shelter. The shelter, deep in the earth, was dark, crowded, and unpleasant. Mathias and Johanna huddled with their children in a corner and tried to stay warm. Someone found powdered milk for Guenther. The hours passed slowly and no one slept except Lothar.

  Later that night, Mathias nudged Lothar and said, “Let’s go for a walk.” Outside, Mathias began a panicky search for cigarettes. Lothar loathed his father’s habit and avoided his hugs because Mathias reeked of cigarettes. His fingers, nostrils, and ears were stained yellow. That night Mathias had no money to buy cigarettes and nothing to barter, so he gathered partially smoked butts off the ground. When Mathias found one, he smoked it quickly and lowered his eyes in search of another. In the cold night, Lothar was angry with his father and frightened of Allied bombs, and exhaled his own bitterness.

  The next morning, Lothar and the family left the shelter and returned to the train station in Frankfurt. They boarded a train for Idstein, a distance of about sixty kilometers, the final leg of the trip. Idstein was Johanna’s hometown, where her parents still lived.

  The train chugged out of the station at an even pace. About eight kilometers east of Idstein, in a small town called Neuhof, the train slowed to enter a tunnel. As it snaked its way through the tunnel to the other side, the conductor blew the whistle once. Then a second blast filled the air, and suddenly the train lurched forward and picked up speed. The passengers straightened in their seats. Outside the windows snowy mountains and forests whizzed by. Something was wrong and everyone on board knew it.

  Then Ingrid heard the sound of airplanes above the train followed by blasts of machine-gun fire. Mathias moved to the end of the train and looked outside, with Ingrid following in rapid strides close behind. Eight American P-38s flew above them, each mounted with two four-barrel machine guns.

  “Attack! Attack!” yelled the conductor in German.

  Ensi watched the scene from the window seat; her mother, cradling Guenther, had the aisle seat. “Get down,” ordered Johanna. “Get down.” Ensi didn’t move. Eyes opened wide, she strained to see the action, as machine-gun bullets hit the side of the train. Ensi heard a new round of rat-a-tat each time the planes made another pass overhead.

  Johanna slapped Ensi’s face and pushed her underneath the seat. Then Johanna reached up to an overhead rack, grabbed a suitcase, and placed it on top of the seat to further protect Ensi. “Keep your face down!” screamed Johanna. “Don’t look up.”

  Mathias and Ingrid hurried back to their seats. He shoved both Ingrid and Lothar under their seats. “I’ll smack you both if you move,” Mathias said.

  The train slowed and came to a stop. As the passengers cautiously emerged from beneath the seats, the conductor ordered everyone off the train. Mathias pointed to a ten-foot embankment on one side of the train that led into a grove of trees. He grabbed Guenther from Johanna and wrapped the child in a white blanket. “Let’s go,” he ordered.

  All six of them hurried up the hill. Lothar took Ensi’s hand and set a quick pace for the others. Mathias handed Guenther to Ingrid, who clutched the baby in her arms and scuttled up the hill, right behind Lothar.

  When Ingrid looked over her shoulder, she saw her mother flat on the ground with Mathias crouched over her. Johanna had fallen, and Ingrid watched as Mathias dragged Johanna to her knees and then to her feet. Together they pushed up the hill.

  At the top of the hill, Lothar positioned himself and Ensi beneath the branches of a small pine tree. Ingrid carried Guenther to join them. Most of the trees in the forest had been cut for fuel, but the black limbs of the pine trees were visible against the gray winter sky. The children watched as Mathias inched Johanna up the hill.

  From this vantage point, they fixed their eyes on the train, stopped on the tracks, and the American planes that circled it. Mathias speculated to his wife and children that the purpose of the American mission must have been to seal the tunnel that led to Idstein.

  The conductor blew the whistle to signal that the train was leaving. The Eiserlohs hurried down the hill and reboarded the train. Once the passengers were back on board, the battle continued. The American planes swooped down over the rails and flew low to the ground, their machine guns hitting to the right of the train and to the left. German soldiers returned the fire from two antiaircraft guns attached to the train—one gun on the last car, the other just behind the locomotive.

  As Lothar and Ingrid watched from their seats, each saw a P-38 hit by German fire. The American pilot ejected from his plane with a parachute and landed in a tree, his body riddled with bullets. Then a second plane was hit and went down on the other side of the train. Ensi was on that side and watched as the plane plunged to the ground, leaving a spiraling trail of black smoke in the sky.

  None of the German soldiers were hit, and the six remaining P-38s retreated. Though the battle was over, the atmosphere inside the train was pandemonium. The conductor walked through the train to check on the passengers. None were wounded or killed, and everyone settled back into their seats, shaken and confused.

  Lothar looked at his mother, who appeared to be in a daze. When she spoke, she described her mixed emotions. She was relieved they were all alive, but remorseful for the two American pilots who were killed. “The irony of American fly boys shooting at my American-born children,” she told him. “I’ll never understand it.”

  Both Lothar and Ingrid were shaken from traveling between two distinct worlds: America and Germany. One part of them was still in Strongsville, Ohio, and Crystal City, Texas, and the other faced the reality that their lives had been saved by German soldiers firing on American pilots.

  • • •

  Two months after the Eiserloh family left Crystal City, they arrived in Idstein, a quaint town surrounded by meadows and rolling hills in a picturesque valley. They walked about a mile from the train depot and passed the town’s landmark, a craggy, twelfth-century castle called the Hexenturm (Witches’ Tower). Cobblestone streets, lined with houses that were centuries old, fed into the town square, with its fountain and a striking statue of a golden lion. When Ingrid lingered at the fountain, Johanna urged her to keep moving: “Just a little farther. It’s just around the first street and above the row houses.”

  At last they arrived at the front door of the home of Johanna’s parents. She expected a warm reunion for her and her children, who had never met their grandparents. While in Crystal City, Johanna had sent letters about their arrival, but none of the letters had arrived. That day her parents were stunned to see them. After an uncomfortable silence, Johanna’s father awkwardly explained that Johanna and her family could stay a few days, but no longer. Like everyone else in Germany, Johanna’s parents did not have enough food for themselves, much less a family of six from America that had turned up on their doorstep. For Johanna, the scene was like something from a frightening fairy tale: the cupboard was bare.

  The three-story house had four bedrooms upstairs. The German government had conscripted three of the bedrooms as housing for wounded soldiers, and Johanna’s parents occupied the f
ourth. Her father took the family to the basement, where he had a carpentry shop, and a shed for goats and pigs. He offered them a corner of the cellar as a temporary place to stay. All the pigs had been eaten, but there was a single goat. That night, Guenther had goat milk for dinner. Johanna and the rest of the family had what little was left of the stored canned goods from the summer before.

  All of the family suffered from malnutrition. At five feet three inches, Ingrid weighed only seventy-five pounds. Johanna was gaunt and still weak from childbirth. Mathias, Lothar, and Ensi were half-starved as well.

  Mathias and Johanna argued about where to go to find shelter. Mathias wanted to travel to his hometown of Plaidt, which was on the other side of the Rhine River, about sixty-four kilometers from Idstein. Mathias had inherited a small portion of his father’s land and wanted to investigate how to claim it and eventually build a home there. Johanna thought they should look for a place of their own in Idstein. She urged him to stay in Idstein and help her with the immediate problem—finding food for their family. She had always held the small, drab village of Plaidt in disdain and did not want to settle there. In the long run, she told Mathias, it would be easier for him to find work in Idstein, which was larger and had more businesses. Besides, she wanted Ingrid and Lothar to enroll in school in Idstein.

  Most of these arguments were waged in whispers, but that night the tension of many years erupted. In the presence of their wide-awake children, they yelled, screamed, and shoved each other. The quarrel lasted long into the night.