The War Outside

by Monica Hesse

  It doesn’t matter because I do not have a brother after all. I do know it would have been a brother. I know that much. It got far enough along that I know it would have been a brother. I don’t want to talk any more about that.

  It doesn’t matter because my mother is a ghost again. I don’t want to talk any more about that.

  It doesn’t matter because nobody has rebooked us on another ship to Germany. I don’t know if that will happen, or if the prisoner exchanges are over.

  But while I’m waiting to find out, I review a lot of things in my mind, and most of them have to do with Haruko, and the things we said and did to each other on that last day.

  Frederick Kruse is in my house. Frederick Kruse, the man I have been thinking about in one way or another since I first heard about him in my father’s letters almost a year ago. Only now he looks smaller than I could ever imagine a human man looking. Shriveled, like his life has been sucked out of him through his eye sockets.

  Which it was. The second he saw Heidi on the deck of the pool. The one piece of humanity I was always sure about in Mr. Kruse was how much he loved his daughter.

  He’s sitting between my father and Mr. Mueller now, slumped in a way that makes me think it is only the back of the chair helping him stay upright. If it weren’t for that, he would be on the floor.

  “Mr. Kruse,” I say automatically, as my heart finds an even deeper level of hurt, thinking of Heidi. “I’m so sorry for your loss.”

  My father glances up at me and his eyes dart to the door. He wants me to leave. “I didn’t mean to disturb you,” I mumble, backing toward the exit.

  I do leave. I walk out the door. But I don’t go anywhere. I don’t know where else to go. The swimming pool is closed. I’m not a student at the federal school anymore. Haruko does not want to see me. She is going to leave and go back to her home.

  So when I go, I go only as far as the front door, and then I lean against the bowed wooden sides of the house. I sink down lower, until I am sitting in dirt.

  And while I am there, I can still hear everything that is happening inside. Because our walls are so thin, and because the outsides bow, and because curves amplify sound. My father taught me that on the farm.

  So I can hear the soft thumps of mugs on the table. Mr. Kruse crying.

  “The lifeguard is going to be replaced,” my father is saying. “I don’t think you’ll see him working here for a while. People were too angry. You could see. The camp doesn’t want to deal with that. He’ll just be quietly reassigned, somewhere outside of camp.”

  “Both of them,” the blond man agrees. “Both the lifeguard and that blond kid who tried to defend him. We’re not going to be seeing them ever again. So there’s nothing we can do about him, unfortunately.”

  The last sentence changes things. Until that sentence, I had thought my father and the blond man were trying to console Mr. Kruse by telling him he need not worry about encountering the people he associates with his daughter’s death. But that’s not what Mr. Mueller was doing. He was trying to figure out how to punish the men he thinks are responsible.

  “Nothing you can do about them,” my father says. “Best to put them out of your mind entirely.”

  Then all three of them are quiet, and I am filled with the smallest measure of relief. Thank God there is still reason in my father. Even if his brain is poisoned, thank God there is reason, too. Don’t they see how terrible it would be, for them and for everyone in the camp, if something happened to a guard? It would solve nothing. It would mean punishment or restrictions on all of us. And then riots, probably, by the people who are already furious about the deaths of Heidi and Ruriko.

  “What about the doctor?” Mr. Mueller asks now.

  “The doctor?” Mr. Kruse says, his voice bleary.

  “It was the lady doctor, the Jap lady doctor, who was supposed to be saving Heidi—” he says.

  “Both of them were supposed to be saving both of them,” my father interrupts. “Not just her.”

  “But she was the one who was supposed to be in charge of things,” Mr. Mueller insists. “She was giving the orders, and she was the one who said to stop trying.”

  “She was,” Mr. Kruse agrees. His voice is wobbly. He is the saddest man I have ever heard. “She stopped too soon. We have to do something about her.”

  “It was her fault,” Mr. Mueller says.

  This is crazy. What I am listening to is such pure, undiluted crazy. It is not Dr. Tanaka’s fault that Heidi is gone. Only a man whose mind was warped by grief could think this.

  “She walks home alone at night,” Mr. Mueller is saying. “She works nights and then walks home alone.”

  “Or we could get kerosene,” Mr. Kruse said. “It might take a few days to get enough, but then all it would take would be a match.”

  “I don’t know that this is a good idea,” my father says. “I think we should talk more when we’re a little more calm.”

  “Calm?” Mr. Kruse’s voice breaks. “Let’s see how calm you would be if someone took—if someone took away your little girl.”

  “Frederick, I can’t even imagine how much your family is hurting.”

  “Jakob, you can’t expect us to do nothing,” Mr. Mueller says.

  As I perch lower in the dirt, my heart races.

  I need to do something. I need to tell Haruko what these men are talking about.

  But would she believe me, right now, minutes after we’ve just said we never want to see each other again? Or would she think I was inventing something to hurt her? Am I inventing something? Do they even mean what they’re saying?

  “We should act quickly,” Mr. Mueller is saying. “Next week.”

  Mr. Mercer, I decide. I can tell Mr. Mercer that Haruko’s family is in danger.

  I’m standing to do this when I realize that I don’t have any proof. I have something I overheard, a discussion between three men. And if I repeat it, at least two of them will swear that I misunderstood and the discussion never happened. I would like to think my father would back me up, but I don’t know. I wish I did know. I can’t be sure of what my father will swear to anymore.

  So not that. Something else. I need to do something that will get Frederick Kruse far away from the Tanaka family. Something I can prove.

  I can prove he has been building illegal alcohol distilleries. That one of them already exploded, that he is a danger to the camp. I can prove that because there are the pieces to build another one in the supply shed by the spinach fields.

  Except that Frederick Kruse has never been in the supply shed by the spinach fields. He doesn’t have a job outside the fence. There is nothing to connect Mr. Kruse to the distillery.

  The door opens. Mr. Kruse and Mr. Mueller are leaving. My father stands behind them, seeing them off.

  He looks down at where I am still crouching in the dust, and his face reddens. He knows what I’ve overheard.

  “Are they going to do it?” I ask. He doesn’t say anything. “Vati, are they?”

  “I don’t know what he is capable of doing right now, Margot.”

  “You have to stop him. We have to report him. They’ll send him away.”

  My father leans his forehead against the door frame and rolls it back and forth. “Would they send all of them away?” he asks. “Come inside and pack.”

  All of them. I didn’t even think of that. Frederick Kruse has spent months gathering a trail of followers, and they will still be here even if he’s gone, and I can’t report them all.

  “I’ll be inside in a minute.”

  I need to tell Haruko to run, but there is nowhere for her family to run, because we are all prisoners within a fence. I need to tell them to hide, but we are counted twice a day. I need to tell them to go backward in time and never come here, but none of us had a choice.

  I need to do something that will make Haruko safe. I need to do it soon and it needs to be permanent.

  I need to even though that same thing will make her
hate me forever.

  Are these my real reasons? Are these reasons or just excuses? Am I doing this because I want to protect her? Am I doing this because I am devastated she is leaving? Am I doing this because I want to stay in the United States, and because Haruko said terrible things to me? Am I doing this because I don’t know what else to do?

  There isn’t enough time for me to think about my reasons.

  There are no good choices here, here where I’m surrounded only by spinach fields and the wide expanse of my defeated heart.

  I did love her. I think she loved me, too.

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  A NOTE ON HISTORICAL ACCURACY

  On the first weekend that I visited the town of Crystal City, Texas, it was late September in the middle of a heat wave, and the local high school was having a football game. I walked through an overflow parking lot to a section of land where the grass grew hip-high, and realized I was standing on the site of what used to be the Crystal City (Family) Internment Camp’s swimming pool. A little farther away was the site of Federal High School, and beyond that, on what now appeared to be practice fields, was the entrance to the camp through which 4,751 prisoners of Japanese, German, and Italian descent were held captive in its five years of operation.

  Much of it was grown over. A flyer said there were eight placards scattered throughout the former site of the camp, but after several hours of exploring I could find only six: museum-quality signs depicting photographs of women and children getting off trains, submitting themselves for imprisonment in a place most of them had never been, for a duration nobody could begin to predict. The other two placards must have been victims of my bad map-reading, or been removed for repair, or otherwise gone missing. I asked one woman, a mother of a student, if she knew where the other signs were, and she said, surprised, that she hadn’t even known we were standing on the site of a former internment camp.

  This book is for those two missing placards. For all the kinds of stories that get lost. For all the things that get overgrown by weeds, or overgrown by layers of history.

  During World War II, in one of the darkest periods of American history, approximately 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry were forcibly removed from their homes and incarcerated at camps around the country. Two-thirds of them were American citizens. US government officials used panic, fear, and xenophobia to justify their actions, claiming they were necessary for the safety of the country.

  The vast majority of prisoners were sent to camps run by the War Relocation Authority. Their only crime: They were West Coast residents, and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had issued an executive order giving the military permission to “relocate” all residents of Japanese ancestry away from the West Coast. These camps often provided poor nutrition, cramped living quarters, and shabby barracks that left residents exposed to harsh weather conditions. Children in the camps attended schools praising American freedoms—all while behind barbed wire and under armed guard.

  Crystal City was a different, less well-known kind of camp. It was the only camp to house both Japanese and German families. It was not built for the mass-evacuated West Coast Japanese Americans, but for so-called “enemy aliens,” of both Japanese and German ancestry, who the US government had accused of being spies. Crystal City was run not by the WRA but by the Department of Justice’s Immigration and Naturalization Services division. The INS, in an effort to broadcast to the world that it was treating its incarcerated “enemies” fairly, and that it was following international protocols, offered its prisoners better living conditions and morale-boosting activities. Prisoners there could take classes in accounting, or plant gardens, or go swimming. But they were all still behind barbed wire. They all still lived in a place where floodlights swept their windows and guards monitored their movement. They were there on flimsy or nonexistent charges and none of them could leave.

  I spent several days at the National Archives in Washington, DC, gathering carts of materials from Record Group 85, the files pertaining to Immigration and Naturalization Services during World War II. The Crystal City records contained camp maps, diagrams of living quarters, correspondence about the swimming pool’s construction, logs of which movies were being shown for movie night. There were official reports illustrating both the deep and the banal ways imprisonment was felt and cultures clashed: Japanese representatives engaged in an ongoing and unsuccessful campaign to request kettles be provided so that they could boil water for tea. Management responded that there was nothing a kettle could do that a saucepan couldn’t, and since they had already provided the latter, the request was denied.

  Some of the most moving files in the National Archives were the school records: mimeographed copies of the Federal High School student newspaper, which reported on sporting events and favorite teachers—a testament to how hard students worked to have a normal high school experience in the most abnormal of circumstances. There were also piles of correspondence between camp staff and the schools from which their imprisoned students had come. One letter was written by a schoolteacher in California about a prized pupil who, the teacher worried, would fall behind because she wouldn’t be able to properly keep up her science studies. The teacher had written to supply physics experiments that the girl, Eva, could complete on her own, using a hairbrush, a flashlight, a fountain pen, and a piece of sealing wax. “I am very happy Eva is being permitted in this way to complete her course,” the teacher wrote. “She is a very deserving and earnest student.”

  Some Japanese American students described the camp as a happy place where, for the first time in their lives, they were not in the minority population. A German student described it feeling like “summer camp.” Real lives were lived inside that fence, with all the love, hate, hope, boredom, and pettiness that real life entails.

  Some things in this book that are real:

  The 442nd Regimental Combat Team, an all–Japanese American unit that fought in Europe, and that won seven Distinguished Unit Citations. If those soldiers fighting for the United States had any leave, they could have spent it as Ken did—visiting family members at camps around the country, imprisoned by the same government that the soldiers were fighting to protect.

  V-mail existed. Soldiers trying to skirt their secrecy instructions did, indeed, sometimes try to reveal their whereabouts by writing their letters in code. Sometimes they were successful, sometimes they weren’t.

  The “repatriation” of German and Japanese prisoners happened, even the ones who were not actually German or Japanese, but American-born. Hundreds of Americans of German and Japanese ancestry were sent across the ocean in Swedish ocean liners, commissioned expressly for that purpose. I didn’t follow faithfully the timetable of deployments in this book (in real life the final Japanese exchange happened in 1943) but the prisoner exchanges did occur.

  The Manzanar riot really happened, resulting in the death of two inmates.

  The horrifying drowning of two Crystal City girls happened, in 1944, and grief-stricken citizens sent letters pleading that the pool bottom be painted a lighter color and that other safety precautions be undertaken in order to prevent such a tragedy from happening again. In real life, both of the girls were Japanese. I couldn’t find detailed first-person accounts of what the reactions were like at the scene; I tried to envision the horror and sadness and anger of such a moment. There were no recorded riots or escape attempts in Crystal City’s history.

  The Popeye statue is real: It is still standing in Crystal City today, marking the place as the unofficial spinach capital of the world. The tofu factory—also real, and re
ceived with great joy by prisoners who were tired of having people with an American palate in charge of their diet and menu. There really was a female detainee doctor, a detail that I never would have thought to make up for a fictional character, but which added such unexpected depth to my understanding of women of the time. Homemade distilleries were real: One did explode, and the inmates did, in fact, tell guards they had been trying to make marmalade, which the guards believed, or pretended to. Cardboard money tokens, field trips outside the fence, crickets in the latrine, Nazi parades with swastikas—all real. The idea for the character of Frederick Kruse is loosely based on Fritz Kuhn, the leader of the German-American Bund, who headlined the thousands-strong Nazi rally in Madison Square Garden. Nationwide, the Bund officially dissolved in 1941. Kuhn was later sent to Crystal City, where he was elected leader of the German detainee association.

  When I first started my research, I expected this would be a book just about the experiences of a German American internee—something that many Americans today don’t realize existed at all, and that I only became aware of while researching a previous book, Girl in the Blue Coat. A few books helped with my early research: The Prison Called Hohenasperg by Arthur D. Jacobs; America’s Invisible Gulag by Stephen Fox; Shattered Lives, Shattered Dreams by Russell W. Estlack; Undue Process by Arnold Krammer; We Were Not the Enemy by Heidi Donald; and Nazis and Good Neighbors by Max Paul Friedman. The documentary Children of Internment was also deeply helpful.

  It became clear, though, that telling a story set in Crystal City would require many characters representing the people most affected by American internment in the war: the Japanese immigrant community—Nikkei—including first-generation Issei and their second-generation Nisei children. Colorado’s Japanese Americans from 1886 to the Present by Bill Hosokawa was a wonderful starting point in helping me understand the Japanese community in World War II Denver. The locations and institutions that I cite, like the California Street church and the Rafu Shimpo newspaper, a California newspaper with more national distribution, were all real. City Girls: The Nisei Social World in Los Angeles 1920–1950 by Valerie J. Matsumoto is a fascinating and meticulous examination of what it meant to be a Japanese American teenager at the time. Letters from the 442nd by Minoru Masuda is a moving collection of correspondence written by a Japanese American medic in the 442nd division.