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

by Jan Jarboe Russell

  His instructions were specific. He asked O’Rourke to request the Army to send pilot crews armed with 16 mm cameras to Crystal City to shoot film from the air, “preferably at about a forty-five degree angle in midmorning or midafternoon, when the shadows are long, to add to our collection of pictures.”

  The opening shot of the film was of the flag flying high over the entrance of the camp. Then came footage of the camp and the fence from the perspective of the guards in the watchtowers. The camera slowly panned to the front office, where O’Rourke held charge, followed by long shots of guards on horseback, patrolling the fence. The final shot in the opening sequence was of guards examining all cars entering and exiting the front gate. Security was the focus, the scenes establishing that this was an internment camp for civilian enemy aliens and their wives and children. Scene after scene showed that great care was taken to avoid infiltration of the camp by outsiders or any escape.

  “Here is a party of women and children arriving in Crystal City,” says Bern Barnard, a detention officer who narrated the film, over grainy shots of Japanese women, neatly dressed in hats, gloves, and crisp cotton dresses, and their children. Lines of other internees are there to greet them, and a band plays patriotic music. In a cheerful voice, Barnard then describes how Japanese internees, the majority of them wives and children born in America and who were American citizens, “lived, worked, and played” under “traditional American standards of decent and humane treatment” alongside German and German-American internees.

  The carefully chosen shots confirmed the film’s assertion: a shot of a family being taken to their living quarters and receiving articles of clothing supplied by the camp management; houses with close-ups of serene Japanese gardeners making the desert bloom with flower and vegetable gardens; German housewives in tiny kitchens preparing food with the family gathered around a table.

  “It was important that normal conditions prevail in the camp, and to that end detainees are expected to do most of the work in connection with the operation of the camp,” said the narrator. Then came a series of shots of internees at work in the carpentry shop making tables and benches; women in the sewing project making mattresses; internees receiving treatment at the hospital and the dental clinic; shots of the shoe shop, the beauty parlor, and the barbershop. The point was to prove that the internees—not workers hired by American taxpayers—did most of the work in camp.

  For propaganda purposes, what had been a secret camp was now portrayed as a benign, even pleasant, experience for internees. The film obscured the reality of the prisoner exchange program—the trading of Germans, Japanese, and Americans as well—and the psychological trauma of internment. Moreover, the film presented Japanese and Germans in ethnically stereotyped ways that suggest that these people were happy, free agents in camp, instead of people held by their government against their will without being charged with or convicted of any crime.

  In one peculiar sequence, the camera closes in on a large vegetable. “Those are radishes,” says Barnard. “The Japanese boil and serve them as vegetables.” Beefy Japanese men in loincloths are shown practicing sumo. “Here are cheering wrestlers, who are jostling and attacking each other while dressed in primitive sumo-style clothing.”

  The Germans are portrayed as caricatures of Nazis. The camera captured a shot of a German classroom with students standing stiffly next to their desks until their teacher enters and gives them permission to be seated. Another shot showed German students doing gymnastics under the strict tutelage of an instructor. “This is a German recreation center where Germans enjoy music furnished by their own orchestra,” Barnard said. The film ends with a view of the American flag being slowly raised to the top of the pole.

  Compared to the concentration camps in Germany where millions of Jews died or to the prisoner-of-war camps in Japan in which 140,000 Allied prisoners of war and civilians lived in appalling conditions, the Crystal City camp was undeniably far more humane. However, the film exaggerated the positives in Crystal City, concealing the harsh reality of isolation and confinement. Despite the favorable comparisons with German and Japanese camps, the film could not erase one stark truth: the internees at Crystal City were not free to leave, and there is no such thing as a happy internment camp.

  However, the Crystal City film was not an outright fraud as was the infamous 1944 propaganda film made about the Theresienstadt “ghetto camp” that served as a transit center for Czechoslovakian Jews. In that film, Theresienstadt appears as a model Jewish settlement, described as a “spa town” where elderly Jews went to “retire.” In the making of that film, Nazi propagandists built fake shops and cafés, designed to portray the concentration camp as a luxurious cultural center with its own orchestra, children’s opera company, and vast library. The entire film was a charade. Over Theresienstadt’s three-and-a-half-year history, more than 140,000 Jews were confined there in appalling conditions. Of that number, 90,000 were deported to concentration camps and certain death. A total of 33,000 died there, many of them due to malnutrition and sadistic treatment.

  In April 1945, members of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, made up entirely of Japanese American soldiers, liberated five thousand survivors from the Dachau concentration camp in southern Germany. Members of the 442nd fought in Italy, France, and Germany, and it became the most decorated unit of World War II. Many of the members of the fabled unit had parents and siblings in internment camps, including Crystal City. Yet in Crystal City, letters from members of the 442nd to their parents were censored. News of their accomplishments on the battlefields was officially suppressed. When the soldiers visited their parents in Crystal City, surveillance officers monitored all visits.

  Ella Ohta, one of Sumi’s closest friends, had a brother, Kenneth Hiroshi, who served in the 442nd. When Kenneth came to visit his family in the summer of 1944, he was stationed at Camp Shelby in Mississippi. He only had a one-day pass. “They wouldn’t even let him come into the camp,” remembered Ella. “We had to go through the gate to see him. The guards watched us closely. It was humiliating.”

  In May 1945, word spread in the German section of camp that Germany was at work on a “miracle weapon” that would win the war for Germany. On the Japanese side of the camp, Sumi’s father and other issei elders continued to believe that Japan would fight until the death of every last soldier and would ultimately prevail.

  That spring, families in folding chairs sat under the vast night sky, watching western movies projected on the big wall of Harrison Hall, as shooting stars flared overhead. Mountain lions roamed the sagebrush. At the Café Vaterland, Germans nervously gathered under a plaque that read COME WHAT MUST COME, TOMORROW IS ALSO A DAY, TODAY IS TODAY!

  Then suddenly the war in Europe was over. On May 2, the Soviets accepted the unconditional surrender of the Berlin garrison, and the official German surrender occurred on May 8. On May 2, V-E Day, celebrations of the war’s official end took place all over the United States—in Chicago, Los Angeles, and especially in New York’s Times Square. Celebrations also took place in nearby San Antonio and in Dallas and Houston, but reactions in Crystal City were muted.

  In an abundance of caution about potential negative reactions from internees loyal to Germany and Japan, O’Rourke made no official announcement. He wanted to keep peace in camp. However, the news flew quietly from person to person, bungalow to bungalow. In the German section, many refused to believe it was true. Eb and his friends were hopeful that after V-E Day, they would be released. Day after day, they waited for news that they would be paroled or—even better—that the camp in Crystal City would close, but there was silence. Their status did not change, and O’Rourke stayed mute.

  On the evening of May 31, 1945, thirty-six Japanese Americans marched into Harrison Hall to the strains of “Pomp and Circumstance” and were given certificates of graduation by O’Rourke. These graduates were O’Rourke’s greatest satisfaction. Two of them—Higo Harada and Harry Kawaguchi—were accepted at the University
of Texas at Austin. Their graduation from the accredited Texas high school in the Crystal City Internment Camp was their ticket to the other side of the fence. O’Rourke and Tate wrote letters of recommendation for them. Both had decided on their majors: Higo was premed and Harry would study engineering.

  Meanwhile, the war in the Pacific continued. On August 6, 1945, a twelve-man crew of Americans on a Boeing B-29 called the Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The blast obliterated everything within four square miles. About eighty thousand people were immediately killed and seventy thousand more wounded. Still, the Japanese did not surrender. Three days later, a second bomb, which killed forty thousand, was dropped on Nagasaki.

  The following day, Emperor Hirohito surrendered. On August 15, Hirohito gave a short address in Tokyo, and for the first time the people of Japan heard the voice of their emperor on the radio. He urged the people to accept what he called the “unacceptable.” He spoke in an indirect way of surrender—never using the word explicitly—which created confusion in Japan. The military was opposed to surrender, which they thought was dishonorable. Finally, on September 2, General Douglas MacArthur formally accepted the surrender on the deck of the USS Missouri, in Tokyo Bay.

  In Crystal City, news continued to travel not by radio but by word of mouth, one internee to another. “I was in Crystal City when the United States dropped the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I could hear grown men crying all over the camp, including my father,” said Yae Kanogawa. “Many of them didn’t believe Japan had lost the war. They thought it was just propaganda. They couldn’t accept it. All of us kids in camp knew it was true and we were glad the war was over.”

  Everyone puzzled over what they heard, as different people in camp heard different versions of the event. Carmen Higa Mochizuki, one of the hundreds of Japanese Peruvians in camp, was a student in the Japanese School in Crystal City, trying to learn to speak Japanese. Her teacher announced in class that “the war was over” but did not say who won. Carmen’s father insisted that Japan had won the war, not the United States. Her brother, who had previously been a journalist in Peru, knew that Japan had in fact lost. The father and son quarreled for days and then stopped speaking to each other. “That’s what I remember about the end of the war,” said Carmen. “The big silence in our home and at school. No one was allowed to talk about it.”

  Ella Ohta was playing softball when someone ran onto the field and shouted, “The war is over! Japan has surrendered.” The game stopped. Everyone on the field seemed stunned. Unlike many in camp, Ella’s parents believed it to be true, and Ella felt relief.

  From his bungalow in camp, Isamu Taniguchi tended trees and plants. He believed the news; indeed, it came as a revelation to him. “It was like watching the world come to an end,” Taniguchi later wrote. “The radiation from atomic bombs, which started from flash and sound over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, shines in every corner of our skulls, flying over our heads with the humming sound, pressing us to act in repentance.”

  A few months earlier, as the war was drawing to a close, the War Relocation Authority announced its intention to close all internment camps by the end of 1945. Following the defeat of the Japanese, the INS began releasing inmates in internment camps who were considered nonthreatening, including many of the recent graduates of Crystal City’s Federal High School. Others hoped to be freed soon. But on September 8, 1945, Truman issued a proclamation, No. 2355, which authorized the secretary of state to order the repatriation of all alien enemies. Also included was “any person who appears to be so clearly dangerous as to make his repatriation desirable.” The issue of US born spouses and children was left unresolved, as was the issue of where the thousands of enemy aliens from Latin America and other foreign countries would be shipped. One by one other internment camps closed—Fort Lincoln in March 1945, Fort Stanton in November 1945—and those classified by the government as “dangerous deportees” were sent to Crystal City to await repatriation. Rather than close, Crystal City absorbed internees from other camps.

  “After V-E Day and certainly after the Japanese surrendered, I thought we’d be released,” said Eb. “But the war ended and nothing changed.” Over the next few days, it became clear that most of those remaining in Crystal City—American as well as foreign-born—would likely be what the US government called “repatriated” internees, even though many were born in America, not Axis countries, and therefore could not by definition be repatriated. The fact that the US government used the word repatriation without irony implied that the Germans and Japanese interned in Crystal City, immigrants and native-born, were never fully considered Americans. A new wave of fear swept over the camp: the fear of involuntary transport to Germany or Japan.

  The mood in Sumi’s bungalow was sour. Only the day before, on August 14, 1945, she had turned seventeen. Her mother had made her a marble cake. Like Yae, Sumi had heard the sound of men crying all over camp and the disbelief of both women and men. “My father always said Japan would never surrender,” Sumi said. He couldn’t believe that Hirohito, whose official photograph had hung in the family’s apartment in Los Angeles, would ever acknowledge defeat. Now, he told Sumi and her mother, Nobu, to prepare for their return to Japan.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Shipped to Japan

  During the fall of 1945, Sumi hoped that somehow the end of the war would mean that she could return to Los Angeles, where she had been born. As the days in Crystal City crept by with uncertainty, inside bungalow T-37-B Tokiji made plans to leave for Japan. In a letter to O’Rourke on September 17, 1945, Tokiji asked that the cameras the FBI had seized from his apartment on East First Street be returned to him. “The photographic business is the only profession I know,” he wrote, and explained he intended to revive his career in Japan, even though by then he was sixty-eight years old. “I can earn my bread and butter by that profession alone.” In the kitchen of the triplex, fifty-six-year-old Nobu went about her business with glacial calm as she, too, made plans to return to Japan.

  It was midterm of Sumi’s junior year. Her grades were good and she was the yell leader in a cheering squad at the Federal High School, and a popular member of a group of girls that nicknamed themselves the Big Six, which was her safe haven. Her friends understood her reluctance to leave Crystal City and her inability to defy her father.

  On the morning of December 4, 1945, six hundred Japanese and Japanese Americans from Hawaii boarded special trains at the small station in Crystal City to return to the Hawaiian islands. Sumi said good-bye to some of her Hawaiian friends, who were happy to be going home. The following day Sumi, along with many others, would also board trains, but for Japan, not their home.

  Never in the history of the small town of Crystal City had there been such a busy and chaotic scene as at the train station that morning. Trains lined the track for as far as the eye could see. Six hundred Japanese Peruvians, many who did not speak Japanese, and eighteen hundred Japanese and Japanese Americans, including Sumi, shuffled on board the trains, as if sleepwalking in a nightmare. Like Tokiji, many of the men on the trains believed that going back to Japan was better than the betrayal and humiliation of internment. Their children had no choice.

  Though Sumi had long known this day was coming, it seemed inexplicable that she was once again on a train—leaving Crystal City with spasms of regret—and not bound for Los Angeles. Having avoided being exchanged on September 2, 1943, on the Gripsholm in New York harbor, Sumi was devastated to have been given yet another confusing government label: no longer internee but repatriate. Even though she wasn’t yet on a ship to Japan, she felt an undertow of anxiety.

  She wore a T-shirt that day, stuffed her fists in her pants pockets, and sat speechless on the hard seat beside Nobu. Whistles blew and the trains pulled out of the tiny station and headed west. She thought of all she’d seen and heard in Crystal City: the Popeye statue in town, the way some people said howdy and others adios, the wild cats that roamed the camp, the red ants, the hard work
of fathers and mothers to build the camp, school graduations and weddings, sunsets and starry nights, come and gone.

  INS regulations insisted that all trains be staffed with escorts. Sumi was disappointed that the escort in her car was a high school teacher who had given Sumi a difficult time. Just the week before, the teacher had asked her students, including Sumi, how many of them were repatriating to Japan. Sumi raised her hand. The teacher told Sumi since she was going back to Japan, it must mean she was disloyal to America. Sumi was outraged; nothing could have been further from the truth.

  The first night on the train seemed endless. She stayed awake, listening to the rumbling of the train and the snores of her fellow passengers. Since Pearl Harbor, Sumi had come a long way—from Los Angeles, to Heart Mountain Relocation Camp in Wyoming, to Ellis Island, and finally to Crystal City. With each move, Nobu reminded Sumi to practice gaman—the spirit of enduring what had to be endured. Now she was on a train to Seattle, Washington, where she would board a ship for Japan. She had an American birth certificate and her parents held a repatriation order to Japan. How would she survive in Japan? This was the context of her next lessons in gaman. Her status reflected so much that she had experienced: betrayal by her government, divided loyalties, incarceration, and now repatriation.