The Train to Crystal City: FDR's Secret Prisoner Exchange (33 page)

Every tennis and volleyball court and baseball diamond was crowded with players. American-style sports of all kinds—football,
basketball, baseball—dominated the spring. Tate, the former football coach at Crystal City High School and now the superintendent of all the schools at the camp, organized two football teams at the Federal High School. The players on the two teams, all Japanese Americans, had nicknames. On the first team, “Porky” Akiyama played right tackle, and “Spider” Kumamoto was a tight end. On the second team, “Killer” Yonekura played left halfback, and “Stogie” Kanogawa, Yae’s brother whose given name was Shoji, played fullback. Since no other Texas high school football team could enter the secret internment camp in Crystal City, Tate had no alternative but to create two teams within the camp.

When they tired of playing each other, the Japanese American players sought out the intramural German football team for scrimmage games and ran into two brick walls: the Fuhr brothers, Eb and his older brother Julius. By the spring of 1945, the Fuhr brothers had been in Crystal City for more than two years, and both were tall and strong. They had grown up in a mixed neighborhood in Cincinnati’s West End and were accustomed to other ethnicities. Half of their high school was black. In high school, Eb had no real ambition other than to replace the great Ernie Lombardi as catcher for the Cincinnati Reds. He loved Lombardi. To escape the monotony in Crystal City, Eb played every kind of sport he could find: baseball, football, Ping-Pong, it made no difference to him. He and his brother were the only potential all-American football players in camp. Both were quick and nervy with their moves, impossible to outplay. “We thought we were fast,” remembered Stogie Kanogawa. “But the Germans were in better shape, especially the Fuhr brothers, and really determined.”

Like many others in camp that spring, Eb had a broken heart. His girlfriend, Millie Kesserlring, had been repatriated to Germany in January 1945, along with Ingrid’s family and about 400 others. In the three months since her departure, Eb had received no word from her and presumed the relationship was at an end. Their breakup triggered memories of an earlier loss. When Eb was in high school in
Cincinnati, he had a steady girlfriend, a serious enough one that he had given her one of his lettered football sweaters. After his arrest, he left without telling his girlfriend good-bye and lamented the sudden loss of the relationship. When he arrived in Crystal City, he found many attractive girls, but Eb was determined not to repeat the loss of another girlfriend to the whims of the war.

“However, there was Millie Kesserlring from Albany, New York, rather well put together,” recalled Eb. “Every evening we would walk the inside perimeter of the fence. She hated jazz. I loved Glenn Miller and Artie Shaw. Nonetheless, we really liked each other.” Then Millie and her family left camp, bound for Germany, and Eb was again without a girlfriend.

In April, not long after FDR’s death, Eb injured one of his fingers on an ice run. The wound became infected, and soon his hand swelled to the size of a small balloon. Eb, a tough, athletic young man, ignored the injury, but the pain increased and he reluctantly paid a visit to the camp hospital. When Dr. Martin took out a scalpel and drained the finger, Eb fainted onto the floor and had to be admitted to the hospital. His nurse, Barbara Minner, had lost her boyfriend in camp to the same repatriation that had separated Eb and Millie. That night Eb was the only patient in the ward, and about 8:00 p.m. Barbara brought Eb two freshly picked plums. Over the plums, they consoled each other about lost loves in Germany, and the following morning, Eb asked her to the movies.

The romance was on. Barbara liked jazz and loved to dance, especially the jitterbug. “It developed into a very intense love, which in the close facilities of the camp was quite restrictive,” Eb recalled. Barbara’s father was a German journalist who, prior to the war, had been employed by the German News Agency in New York City. When her father was arrested along with the German diplomatic corps, he refused repatriation because his wife was born in New York City, as were his two daughters. Barbara’s mother didn’t approve of Eb. Unlike the blond hair of many Germans, Eb’s hair was dark and his face had sharp features. “She thought me too swarthy—possibly
having some Latin blood or whatever,” Eb said. Nonetheless, that spring the romance thrived.

Later in April, someone in Eb’s circle of friends somehow slipped a radio into camp. Each night the radio was tuned to a station in San Antonio, which brought them nonstop news of the war in a way none of the boys had ever before heard. They learned that the Soviets had taken Berlin and that Mussolini was dead. On April 30 when Hitler and Eva Braun committed suicide in their bunker, Eb and his friends heard the news on the radio. All night the crackling voice on the radio kept repeating the news: Hitler was dead. Hunched over the small radio, Eb and his friends knew Germany’s surrender was imminent and hoped it meant they would soon be free.

Adding to the sense of unreality in the camp was that since early January official-looking men from Philadelphia and Washington wearing business suits had been in and out of camp, carrying cameras, typewriters, and other equipment. Eb and the other internees realized that the men were at work on a motion picture about the Crystal City Internment Camp.

Mangione, Harrison’s special assistant, had first suggested the idea of a film in 1943. Two years passed and nothing came of it. Then on January 19, 1945, O’Rourke received a letter from his friend Nick Collaer, the officer in charge of Crystal City and now acting assistant commissioner of the INS. With the war coming to a close Collaer told O’Rourke the time was right to make a film that placed Crystal City in the best possible light. “I believe that we can safely say that Crystal City is considered to be one of the best, if not the best, internment camp ever operated by any country and, because of the children of various races, there is a wealth of excellent pictorial material there,” wrote Collaer in his letter from headquarters in Philadelphia.

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.